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The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
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About The Third Pillar: How Markets And The State Leave
Product Description Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year AwardFrom 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. Review A Fareed Zakaria GPS Book of the Week “Compelling . . . urges economists to recognize a blind spot. The places where people grow up, live and work are not simply agglomerations of economic activity. They shape people’s identities . . . Having been insufficiently mindful of this over the past few decades, business and government leaders may have little option but to brace themselves for frustrated communities demanding change.” — The Economist “An important and timely new book . . . The Third Pillar represents a new departure into grand social history, which in its breadth often echoes big-picture theorists such as Barrington Moore and Francis Fukuyama and their attempts to tease apart the long-term tensions between capitalism and democracy.” — Financial Times “ The Third Pillar is an important contribution to understanding why, a decade after the crisis, the world’s politics and economics remain so brittle.” — Sunday Times “Insightful and impressive . . . Mr. Rajan, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is a high priest of financial economics and central banking. His decision to champion county craft fairs and garbage collection is all the more compelling because it is unexpected. . . . And as local governments get to work, they could certainly use the help of more thinkers of Mr. Rajan’s caliber.” — Edward Glaeser, The Wall Street Journal “The Third Pillar is a must read for everyone seeking a way to preserve democracy as we’ve known it. In Rajan’s brilliant new perspective, successful democracies require balance between competitive markets, honest governments, and health
