Book Club -The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Order by Branko Milanovic

Note:   Registration opens one month in advance.

ABSTRACT

From the essential chronicler of the world economy, a portrait of the Great Powers in transition.

The world’s two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution—a dramatic shakeup of each country’s political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.

In The Great Global Transformation, acclaimed economist Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow—and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to the breaking point.

A worthy successor to Capitalism, Alone and his other landmark works, Milanovic’s new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms “national market liberalism,” in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic’s indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway.

About the Author

Award winning author Branko Milanović is a Serbian-American economist and university professor. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality, in individual countries and globally, having published seven books on the topic. He was a recipient of the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge in 2018. Since January 2014, he has been a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study. He previously served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Belgrade.