The future of capitalism- Paul Collier

Description

Something has gone profoundly wrong with capitalism. In country after country — including Kenya — the gap between the prosperous and the left-behind is widening. Trust in institutions is collapsing. Social cohesion is fracturing along geographic, educational, and economic lines. And the political responses — from the populist left and right — are making everything worse. In The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties, Oxford economist and Oxford professor Paul Collier delivers the most serious, the most honest, and the most constructive analysis of capitalism’s crisis ever written — refusing both the left’s solution of socialist redistribution and the right’s faith in unregulated markets, and charting an entirely different path forward.

This is not a polemical book. It is a thinking book — the kind that changes how you understand the economic world you live in.

The Central Argument: Capitalism, Collier argues, has delivered extraordinary prosperity — but it has broken the ethical foundations that make it sustainable. The relationships between firms and workers, between cities and provinces, between the educated and the less educated, and between the state and its citizens have all been corroded by a combination of utilitarian ethics, identity politics, and the unchecked logic of markets operating without moral constraint. The result is the new anxieties — the anger, the division, and the despair that is reshaping politics across the developed and developing world alike.

What This Book Covers:

Diagnosing the Crisis:

• Why the world is splitting into the thriving metropolis and the struggling province — and what that geographic divide means for democratic stability
• The three fractures driving capitalism’s crisis — the divergence between the metropolitan educated class and everyone else, between thriving cities and declining regions, and between prosperous nations and the world’s poorest
• Why standard economic solutions — more redistribution, more growth, more globalisation — are failing to address the real problem
• How the collapse of social trust — in institutions, in elites, in the future — is the defining challenge of our era

The Ethical Foundation:

• Why capitalism needs an ethical framework — not as a constraint on markets but as the foundation that makes markets work for everyone
• Collier’s case for a return to pragmatic ethics — what actually works for actual communities — rather than the utilitarian calculus that has dominated economic policy thinking
• The importance of reciprocal obligations — between citizens and the state, between firms and workers, between the prosperous and the left-behind — and why those obligations have been systematically eroded
• Why identity politics — both progressive and nationalist — is a symptom of capitalism’s failure rather than a solution to it

Restoring the Family:

• Why the collapse of stable family structures is both a consequence and a cause of capitalism’s crisis — and what economic and social policy can do about it
• The relationship between economic precarity and family instability — and why addressing one without the other produces incomplete solutions
• How policy can support rather than undermine the family as the primary unit of social formation and economic resilience

Restoring the Firm:

• How the shareholder-value model of the corporation has broken the relationship between firms and their workers, communities, and broader stakeholders
• What a more ethical model of the firm looks like — and how it produces better long-term economic outcomes as well as better social ones
• The role of employee ownership, profit sharing, and genuine corporate social responsibility in restoring the firm as a community rather than just a wealth-extraction vehicle

Restoring the State:

• What the state can and cannot do effectively — and why both the left’s expansion of the state and the right’s shrinking of it are incomplete answers
• How to rebuild the social democratic institutions that provide genuine security and opportunity without creating the dependency traps that undermine individual agency
• The specific policy interventions — in education, housing, urban development, and taxation — that could address regional divergence and restore social cohesion

Restoring the World:

• The international dimension of capitalism’s crisis — what wealthy nations owe to the world’s poorest, and why current frameworks are failing
• How to think about trade, migration, and development in ways that serve both the host country and the countries of origin
• Why international cooperation — rather than nationalist withdrawal — is the only framework capable of addressing the global dimensions of capitalism’s failures

Who This Book Is For:

• Kenyan economists, policy professionals, civil servants, and development practitioners who want the most intellectually serious current framework for thinking about capitalism’s future
• University students studying economics, political science, development studies, and public policy
• Business leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors who want to understand the systemic forces shaping the economic environment in which they operate
• Journalists, commentators, and public intellectuals engaging with Kenya’s economic and political debates
• Every Kenyan citizen who has ever looked at the widening gap between Nairobi’s gleaming towers and the struggling periphery — and wanted to understand what is really driving it and what can be done
• Readers of The Politics Book (DK) and 100+ Management Models who want to situate their understanding of business and politics within the broader framework of capitalism’s evolution

Why Kenyan Readers Need This Book: Kenya sits at the intersection of every tension Collier describes — a thriving metropolitan economy in Nairobi, struggling provincial regions, widening inequality, eroding public trust, and enormous pressure from both global capital and local political forces. The Future of Capitalism does not offer a Kenyan-specific analysis — but it provides the intellectual framework that every Kenyan economist, policy maker, business leader, and engaged citizen needs to make sense of what is happening to their country’s economy and what might be done about it.

At Ksh 100, this is the most intellectually challenging and the most practically important economics book in your catalogue.

Book Details:

• 📖 Author: Paul Collier — Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Oxford University
• 📄 Format: PDF eBook (instant download via WhatsApp or email)
• 💰 Price: Ksh 100 only
• 🚀 Delivery: Instant after M-Pesa payment confirmation

👉 Order now on cliffmatt.co.ke — Pay via M-Pesa, receive your PDF instantly.