Book Review: How the West Was Lost

I am not a tough grader of books because producing a sensible piece of work is very very difficult but found that the author here could have done better with her categories. The title of the book is so far removed from its content because it concentrates on some of the real economic policies blunders of successive US administrations but to add examples from Uk once in a while does not constitute what is known as "The West". I have no doubt about the author's credentials at all but would be cautious when the solutions proposed involved protectionism and closing up into a north American alliance.

Also startling for me is the neo-Malthusian argument that the world is running out of energy, land and food on account of growing populations. Now, this is an argument that is not only set against the grain of history but also requires far more sophistication to pull off than merely stating that it requires 9 kilogrammes of grain to produce an equivalent weight of beef and therefore that the world is doomed. On the same path is the argument made without evidence that conflict around resources such as water will shortly be normal without evidence for it.

In conclusion, I agree that david Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage has been questioned several times but just because China is a "Volume Maximizer" is not evidence that comparative advantage is obsolete. As it is, the simple mathematics of comparative advantage show that no country could hold an absolute advantage in every product imaginable. More recently China's labour costs have been rising and this alone means that Ms Moyo may need to update her arguments. Similarly, the fact that the US is close to being self sufficient in energy undercuts the argument that reliance upon energy imports harms its economy.  

Finally, I find that the book is a very good polemical work but ignores countries that have managed economies very well. In the entire publication, i am surprised that Canada was hardly mentioned except towards the end in the suggestion that the US should go into a North American alliance with its neighbor. In the end, the book puts up a lot of information on the misallocation of resources in the US but does not provide evidence to me that the US, leave alone the West, is really lost.