How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead - Book Review

Dr. Dambisa Moyo is an international economist and a New York Times best-selling author. Her best-selling book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa was published in 2009. In the same year, she was honored by the World Economic Forum as one of its Young Global Leaders.

Today, Moyo is back with a meticulous analysis of the recent disasters in financial markets, their causes and effects. Having estranged trading partners and co-functioning in the dissolution of our own prosperity, we in the West desperately need Moyo's sophisticated strategies for bringing the political seesaw back to our benefit.

The blame being on a bunch of short-sighted policy decisions, the survival of the United States is now said to depend on whether it maintains its controversial openness to the international economy or isolates itself under the umbrella of protectionist policies that will allow the nation some space to amend its permeating structural issues.

In How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead, Dambisa Moyo addresses the core issues the present-day US economy and how quickly power will shift over the 21st century.

What will be the implications of reaching the peak of China’s rise to global power? When will this happen? In what ways does America’s swiftly increasing population of the unskilled and unemployed jeopardize the nation’s wealth and stability?

Is the West already lost? Answering this question, Dambisa Moyo reveals the policy purblindness of our culture, which has pushed it into a cycle of economic meltdown and also shows the decisive policy actions that must be undertaken in order to avoid the seemingly inevitable end. 

The United States has gone so far as to forfeit all economic, military and political global supremacy.

Capital, labor and technology, the pillars for economic growth, have been severely mismanaged spiraling into the certainty of decline.

• Via incompetent distribution of capital, the government policies have been in support of subsidized home ownership, building a culture of debt and diverting capital from productive business investment.
• Bad allocation of labor neglected future pension costs, failed to train enough people in useful lines of work such as engineering, and prompted them to pursue shiny overpaying sports careers or elusive stardom.
• Cutting edge technology has been continually betrayed to Chinese companies, and traded in return for inexpensive goods, as opposed to protected and improved.

Clearly, something has to be done now. It's already too late make up for the mistakes that has been committed, but we can fight the fires.

According to Dambisa Moyo's approach the United States might as well default on its loans causing more pain to the Chinese that to itself.

The author offers different solutions while presenting the problems in an entertaining way making the reader's eyes shine with anticipation.