An excellent empirical venture into markets, failed and successful public policy, and fragile country contexts. It puts evidence first and attempts (often successfully) to take a balanced, neural view. To it’s great credit, it includes a comprehensive annex with short literature reviews and contextual facts.

But of course, there is no such thing as apolitical economics. From an ideological standpoint, I often felt markets were given undue credit when I interpreted the presented data as evidence for the failures of the global market economy. Also, I had to grit my teeth at the characterization of Allende’s socialist programme’a effects; the chapter on Chile sometimes disguised opinion as fact. But in general, such pro-market bias was far less prevalent throughout than one would expect from an The Economist writer. 

The biggest thing keeping me from living this book is that there is a slight lack of coherency and synthesis. The red line that should bind the chapters together into a holistic argument remained somewhat flimsy. Especially the chapters on Chile and Estonia felt out of place in the whole book; the Extremeness of the other case studies was much more apparent. The concluding chapter did not go deep enough and failed to go truly beyond raising questions and commit to a central argument. Nevertheless, a great deal can be learned from this study.