What Went Wrong with Capitalism

“Invigorating.” –GEORGE F. WILL, The Washington Post

“Trenchant and timely.” –The Wall Street Journal (The Best Books of 2024: Politics)

“Eye-opening … a convincing case.” –BRET STEPHENS, The New York Times

“Very interesting…. the best book I read this summer.” –NICOLAI TANGEN, CEO of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, cited in The Financial Times

“The political book of the year. genuinely revelatory. deeply arresting.”–LEWIS GOODALL, former BBC Newsnight editor

“Superbly written and cogently argued.”–Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal

“Brilliant new book.”–Matthew Lynn, The Telegraph

“Fascinating.”–Oren Cass, Republican party adviser, from his Substack, Understanding America

“A capstone [conservative] course. But the novelty … derives from Sharma’s ability to draw on leftist or progressive accounts of neoliberalism to fortify his own revisionist account of the last half century.”–James Livingston, PhD, Rutgers University historian in Project Syndicate

“An important perspective on capitalism … This book will reshape how you think about the world and is bound to provoke people on both the left and the right.”–Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University

“Sharma stands apart because he is not ideologically driven… . The result is a fresh and accessible contribution to the debates about our economic system that should be read and considered by all sides.”–Robert Rubin, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and chairman of Citigroup

“Timely and consequential … His message to policymakers: Try capitalism, the real kind.”–Kevin Warsh, former member of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors

“A plea for government sanity, for true competition, and against crony capitalism, it is exactly the message our world needs to hear. I am not sure there will be a more correct book this year.”–Tyler Cowen, economist and coauthor of the economics blog Marginal Revolution

“A blunt broadside against the welfare state of nance. It will make the right kind of enemies.”–James Grant, founder, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer

“Brilliant and incomparable … Sharma has brought us a characteristically original and provocative book that tells us how to understand the ways that capitalism is falling badly short.”–Michael Beschloss, presidential historian

“Stimulating … Surprising … His prescriptions create some surprising bedfellows in the fight against the concentration of economic and political power and for a new round of creative destruction.”–Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Obama adviser, CEO of New America

Ruchir Sharma is chairman of Rockefeller International and founder and chief investment officer of Breakout Capital, an investment firm focused on emerging markets. He moved to Rockefeller in 2022 after a twenty-five-year career at Morgan Stanley, where he was head of emerging markets and chief global strategist. Based in New York, he is a contributing editor at the Financial Times and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of four books, the international bestseller Breakout Nations, the New York Times bestseller The Rise and Fall of Nations, Democracy on the Road, and The 10 Rules of Successful Nations.