The advantage with Ruchir Sharma is that he is your friendly next-door market guy, and so he would not be seen as a socialist party-pooper with a title of the book like . He makes a good beginning by narrating the sob story of the Indian middle class how he grew up in the maximum security prison of socialism of the pre-1991 India, and how he escaped the welfare state gulag and escaped to the free market Singapore and then to the capitalist paradise, the United States. And this book is a guided tour of the back-alleys of capitalism, especially in the financial sector, a far cry from the poor, from the inequality debate et al.
In India, as there were once fanatical socialist evangelists, there are now cringing market fundamentalists who cannot see the Titanic of capitalism moving towards the iceberg. They refuse to see the iceberg. And what is the iceberg? The expanded role of the state in the market economies, the bailout packages which Central banks work out to save the private companies caught in a market squall.
Sharma sums it up all in non-threatening prose. He writes towards the end: “It makes intuitive and moral sense that when a nation’s government accounts for more than half of all spending in the economy or takes more than half of an individual’s income in taxes, that nation is getting less free.” And this is the state of affairs not so much in the developing and emerging market economies but in advanced economies like the United States, the European Union and.
