Big is not therefore ugly

As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had tried to make a virtue of all-embracing incoherence. John Kay of Oxford and the LSE, in The Truth about Markets (Penguin/Allen Lane 2003), offered a brilliant analysis of why rampant capitalism does not need to be replaced — as anti-globalisers’ placards proclaimed at Seattle — by ‘something nicer’, but why it only delivers widespread benefits where it flourishes in well-ordered civic societies. Now Martin Wolf joins the fray with a closely argued case as to why we need more globalisation, not less, and why ‘the affluent young of the west’ are so wrong-headed in their wish to protect the poor of the world from the processes that delivered their own prosperity.

As the Financial Times’s chief economic commentator, Wolf is both magisterial and readable: compressing complex arguments into 1,000-word columns, he never over-simplifies, but never strays from his central thrust.

At book length, he is tougher going; the general reader looking for dinner-party debating points (on which both Monbiot and Kay scored highly) may struggle to assimilate passages such as this extract from Wolf’s lengthy analysis of whether economic inequality has risen or fallen since free markets took off at the beginning of the 1980s:

Moreover, it is also perfectly possible for inequality to have risen in every single country in the world … while global inequality has fallen. Unless the increase in inequality among individuals within countries offsets the reduction in population-weighted inequality among countries, not only inequality among (population-weighted) countries, but also inequality among individuals will have declined.