A commanding survey of the world economy from 1950 to the present, from the author of the acclaimed The Boom and the Bubble. Originally published as NLR I/229, this is now a Verso book:

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Order it from the Verso website, or from Amazon US or UK.

For years, the discipline of economics has been moving steadily away from the real world towards formalized axioms and mathematical models with only a precarious bearing on actuality. Commentators seek to fill the gap as best they can, but in the absence of real background scholarship, journalism is vulnerable to the myopias of fashion and immediacy. The deeper enigmas of post-war development remain in either case largely untouched.

Bringing together the strengths of both the economist and the historian, Robert Brenner rises to this challenge. In this work, a revised and newly introduced edition of his acclaimed New Left Review special report, he charts the turbulent post-war history of the global system and unearths the mechanisms of over-production and over-competition which lie behind its long-term crisis since the early 1970s, thereby demonstrating the thoroughly systematic factors behind wage repression, high unemployment and unequal development, and raising disturbing and far-reaching questions about its future trajectory.

A brilliant economic overview of the world’s current economic state — The Nation

Here, at last—something good out of the left — Wall Street Journal

Praise for The Boom and the Bubble:

The best financial history of the period yet — Jeff Madrick, New York Times

Its implications are portentous — Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly

Robert Brenner’s recent work is a solidly argued and empirically impeccable restatement of the centrality of overproduction in capitalism — Walden Bello, The Nation

Brenner offers a more scholarly analysis of the recent decade than most commentators who tend to overpraise or dismiss recent techno-logical innovations . . . something of a thriller with a to-be-continued ending — James Flanigan, Los Angeles Times