The Fate of the West by Bill Emmott

This book’s full title is The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea. Bill Emmott has his own site here. Click the 2050 index for an interesting overview.

He talks a lot of the problems of the west. People have lost faith in government. Europe is a mess. They have economic problems but also immigration problems and terrorism. It would seem to have a lot to do with new immigrants that UK voted to separate from the EU. He says that no rich country has revived or re-energized from economic or political torpor by a revision to authoritarian rule. Those that have achieved revival had done so through some new combination of openness and a restoration of equality.

He still has hope for the future of the west. I must admit I have hope but we are going through some tough times. You can see we have a problem with trust and there is a lot of polarization. Even in Canada we have people who intensely hate people of other political parties. It is not good that people have a hard time accepting an election when their political party is not the winner. I am hoping we will muddle through our problems somehow.

There is an interesting review on Kirkus Reviews. There is a review on Publishers Weekly. G. John Ikenberry reviews this book on Foreign Affairs. He also reviews The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce. In closing he says “But, like Luce, Emmott doesn’t shed much light on the specifics of what would amount to a wholesale rethinking of the Western social contract”.

John Andrews interviews Bill Emmott on Project Syndicate . Financial News columnist David Wighton, and Christoph Winder from Der Standard joints in. Populism and the Fate of the West is debated on YouTube. The Speakers were Bill Emmott, Former Economist Editor-in-chief; Edward Luce, US columnist, Financial Times Joris Luyendijk, Investigative Journalist; and the Chair by Rowan Conway.

Bill Emmott is interviewed at Cambridge Union. This was not as interesting as the other interviews. They talked mostly of journalism. Bill Emmott and Kishore Mahbubani are interviewed at Ideas in Abu Dhabi. Kishore Mahbubani is Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, where he also served as the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from 2004 to 2017. His book is “Has the West Lost It”.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.