The Republican Party very recently surged to an unexpectedly strong victory in the US elections, propelled in large part by places that felt themselves to be ‘left behind’ within the world’s largest economy, and even—in a shock to cities like New York—by communities within some of the most prosperous US locales. The political earthquake—and its implications not only for the US, but for international trade and the global economy—makes Paul Collier’s sweeping new book even more resonant than it would have been otherwise.

The book’s title and premise appear appealingly specific, and the structure of the book is straightforward: a short section diagnosing the problem of left behind communities, and a longer section offering potential pathways to what the author calls ‘spiralling up’. In fact, ‘Left Behind’ is ambitious—perhaps too ambitious—in scope. It is a catalogue of case studies, presenting favourable and unfavourable examples of topics as diverse as political leadership, grassroots-level community improvement, urbanisation, the so-called ‘resource curse’, and sovereign institutional capacity, from a dizzying array of countries: Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Rwanda, Tanzania and the UK are just some of the many countries from which illustrative examples are taken.

One difficulty with this breadth of examples is that some of the lessons to be learned are specific to a given country’s particular historical, political and/or cultural factors, and therefore are likely difficult—if not impossible—to implement elsewhere. This is evident, for example, in the leadership lessons from Julius Nyerere’s presidency of Tanzania and Lee Kuan Yew’s premiership of Singapore, described in the chapter titled simply ‘Leadership’. Similarly, exhorting some Nordic, Baltic and East Asian (Singapore again!) countries as places where ‘state and community have fused’ ignores the reality that these countries are so small that their particular successes may be impossible to scale up in bigger countries. Collier asserts that ‘If people all share the same identity and norms, the rules that enforce the glue of stateless communities can be scaled up from tiny populations to large ones’. This is potentially a heroic assumption—and also leaves unstated the implications for countries where it may prove impossible, absent a fortuitous combination of circumstance and leadership, for this shared identity to be forged.

The wide scope is noticeable even in the treatment of what constitutes a ‘left behind’ place. The opening statement is: ‘This book is about places that once felt prosperous but have now fallen behind’. And indeed the opening chapters focus on familiar developed-world cases, such as Pittsburgh and South Yorkshire, that have become iconic examples of the concept. However, the chapter on sovereign capabilities (taxation and security are described as ‘the bedrock of the state’, without which attempts to reverse the downward spiral of left behind-ness are doomed to fail) asserts that ‘There is an irreducible core of functions to be done by government—both at the national level for entire countries that have been left behind, and at the local level for left-behind regions—without which no society can thrive’. By stretching the idea of ‘left behind’ so far that it ends up including chronically poor countries (ie, those nations who have been left behind in the context of sustained global economic growth), many of the book’s arguments are diluted. In addition, it is debatable whether some of the example countries—Afghanistan, Mali, Mozambique, for instance—ever truly ‘felt prosperous’. (In the past 32 years, per capita GDP in Mozambique peaked at $690 (in 2014), albeit up from $284 in 1991—but still, hardly a level of national income one associates with feelings of prosperity.)

In this way, much of the book feels inconsistent with the purported topic set out in the opening. Additionally, the title phrase is conceptualised still differently at other points. In a chapter titled ‘The morality of common purpose’, the ‘main theme of this book’ is described as ‘the places left behind because of a shock outside their control’.

The tone of the book is one of anger. Readers, analysts and policy makers may well empathise with left-behind communities and feel anger about the policy choices—and policy failures—that created or worsened their plight. But the shrill language detracts from the book’s message. The ‘economic doctrine’ of the Chicago school is described as ‘dangerous nonsense’ that created ‘a canonical catastrophe’ in the UK—the country that is criticized most harshly. Describing ‘policy mistakes that began around 1980’ in the US and UK, collier writes: ‘America turned into a devolved plutocracy; Britain turned into a centralized bureaucracy. Each initiated a downward spiral: the plutocracy plundered; the bureaucracy blundered’. The glibness of phrasing detracts from the seriousness of the arguments.   

And ‘Left Behind’ offers many worthy arguments: most notably, the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to reducing income inequality, and avoiding an over-reliance on orthodox economic approaches. Collier’s critique of economic modelling is tremendously insightful: ‘Instead of single-discipline models that give precise answers that are badly wrong, we need integrated models that confess to imprecision but are roughly right’. The treatment of topics such as the seeds of societal polarisation and formal vs informal power is also astute. Ultimately, though, ‘Left Behind’ may be most useful as an introduction to the subject of place-based inequality, and an inspiration for further reading.