num_pages: 464
description: A Fareed Zakaria GPS Book of the Week From one of the most important economic thinkers of our time a brilliant and far-seeing analysis of the current populist backlash against globalization.Raghuram Rajan distinguished University of Chicago professor former IMF chief economist head of India's central bank and author of the 2010 FT-Goldman-Sachs Book of the Year Fault Lines has an unparalleled vantage point onto the social and economic consequences of globalization and their ultimate effect on our politics. In The Third Pillar he offers up a magnificent big-picture framework for understanding how these three forces--the state markets and our communities--interact why things begin to break down and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane.The third pillar of the title is the community we live in. Economists all too often understand their field as the relationship between markets and the state and they leave squishy social issues for other people. That's not just myopic Rajan argues; it's dangerous. All economics is actually socioeconomics - all markets are embedded in a web of human relations values and norms. As he shows throughout history technological phase shifts have ripped the market out of those old webs and led to violent backlashes and to what we now call populism. Eventually a new equilibrium is reached but it can be ugly and messy especially if done wrong.Right now we're doing it wrong. As markets scale up the state scales up with it concentrating economic and political power in flourishing central hubs and leaving the periphery to decompose figuratively and even literally. Instead Rajan offers a way to rethink the relationship between the market and civil society and argues for a return to strengthening and empowering local communities as an antidote to growing despair and unrest. Rajan is not a doctrinaire conservative so his ultimate argument that decision-making has to be devolved to the grass roots or our democracy will continue to wither is sure to be provocative. But even setting aside its solutions The Third Pillar is a masterpiece of explication a book that will be a classic of its kind for its offering of a wise authoritative and humane explanation of the forces that have wrought such a sea change in our lives.
language: English
title: The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
publisher: Penguin Press