Book Bits: 29 November 2025

● Capitalism: A Global History
Sven Beckert
Review via The New Yorker
Beckert identifies “two diametrically opposed stories”: capitalism either deserves credit for the rise in living standards and longevity or stands condemned as an “insatiable demon.” His book addresses “a deep frustration that so many of the stories we tell about capitalism are incomplete and sometimes just plain wrong.” He invites readers to study capitalism “with a sense of wonder, surprise, and astonishment—not because it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but because of its world-shaping power, and because understanding it is crucial to navigating our shared future.”
In the course of the next eleven hundred pages, this sales pitch starts to seem a little disingenuous. By the time Beckert arrives at our “neoliberal” era, he has given himself over to open lamentation: everything has been ruthlessly priced, “even human reproduction.”

● Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest
William Easterly
Review via The Hudson Institute
William Easterly’s Violent Saviors is a libertarian tract on global economic development and political economy. But as its subtitle—The West’s Conquest of the Rest—demonstrates, this is a magical moment and angle for such a polemic. Easterly presents Violent Saviors as an economic history, but it is equally a work of intellectual history. Violent Saviors tells the story of bad ideas running amok, and the good ideas that warred with the bad.

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