In his passionate and polemical book, the renowned economist Paul Collier outlines highly original and morally sound ways to combat the new stratification of society – economic, social and cultural – but he does so not with the ardour of the “new old” ideologists, but with pragmatic sobriety. He also writes about how different forms of this stratification manifested themselves in his own life: a young man from the working-class city of Sheffield went to Oxford, and he spent half of his professional life not in Britain, but in Africa. In this book, he also acknowledges some of the “mistakes and omissions” of his professional workshop.

Developing both his own recipes and the ideas of some of the world’s most prominent social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself, and for us to shed the intellectual baggage of the 20th century.