09.10.2025

Who is in control?

Chris Gray reviews Paul Collier Left behind: a new economics for neglected places Penguin 2025, pp304, £10.99

This book offers an internationalist approach to our current crisis, and readers may find the information it provides useful.

Let us start with education. Paul Collier offers Estonia’s arrangements as a model:

Estonia’s system focuses on professional pre-school for the early years, where children learn to specialise: while Britain spends much less than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development average on pre-school, Estonia spends much more. It delays primary school entry until seven. Once there, specialisation is prohibited until the age of 19, classes are usually mixed-ability and unstreamed, and there is an emphasis on activities that cut across subject boundaries. Far from being centrally controlled, the power of decisions over the curriculum is devolved to teachers and headmasters, with virtually no national testing, exclusion or inspections.

While British education has become more traditional, Estonia is continuously pioneering innovations, such as integrating virtual reality into classes. British schools are trapped in competition over their rank in national league tables; Estonia has no league tables and teachers are encouraged to visit other schools, learn from them and collaborate (pp82-83).

As the author says, these two approaches cannot both be right. But how to compare them? The OECD has a test - the Programme for International Student Assessment - at the end of secondary school. “Estonian schools get the best PISA score in Europe and beyond, beating North America, Japan and South Korea” (p83).

It is important to get the emphasis right, since a blind faith in ‘market forces’ is a sure-fire recipe for social collapse. This is the Achilles heel of messrs Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and others of that ilk:

While prices are the essence of the market forces invoked by Friedman, they cannot possibly coordinate the decisions among politicians, civil society, financiers, firms and households necessary to achieve renewal. Investors are more realistic than Friedman. They shift their money to the places that did not suffer collapse … Collapse creates adverse expectations, which then become self-fulfilling (p19).

Such pessimistic expectations make one ask why Collier does not explicitly address what other savants have seen as ‘stagflation’: ie, a combination of inflation and stagnation. If the word accurately states the current condition of the global economy, then the prevalent pessimism threatens to become more widespread, as the anarchic responses of the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, members of the Israeli governing coalition and other like-minded individuals produce further shocks.

Provocative

Paul Collier’s comments are wide-ranging and provocative. One of his targets is the fixation with gross domestic product (GDP), enthroned by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) as an expression of the best obtainable income distribution, if it cannot benefit from an alteration in that distribution towards the affluent end of the social spectrum. Collier writes: “Diane Coyle is a rare wise voice who argues with devastating logic that, since Pareto efficiency is indifferent as to whether poor people end up losing from a policy that increases GDP for others, it is unethical to use it as a criterion” (note, p44). He appears to be referring to Diane Coyle’s book, GDP: a brief but affectionate history (Princeton, 2014).

Still on the subject of income distribution, pockets of deprivation that can be found in economies rich by GDP standards cannot be ignored either. This applies not only in the UK, but across the globe. For example,

Colombia is one of the most successful emerging market economies in Latin America. But Barranquilla, capital of the Atlantic Caribbean Region, is all too conscious that it has seen better days. It once felt modestly prosperous, but has now fallen behind the other parts of the country that are booming … This springs from the silting up of the estuary on which it is situated (pp57-58).

“Meanwhile the capital, Bogotá, does well via mining and oil extraction,” he adds (p60). The income distribution picture also needs to be offset by that of life chances:

Compare a student at Oxford - or Harvard - living on a modest scholarship against a youth of the same age who dropped out of school and is working long hours at Starbucks. The Gini coefficient will record the student as poorer than the guy who is serving him his coffee. But who envies whom? The student is on course to rise high in a community-of-success; the drop-out is heading for a community-of-humiliation (p69).

He goes on to suggest reasons for the marked inequality of life chances and incomes in the UK. Chief among the conclusions is that “Britain has spectacularly failed to invest in the vocational skills of its youth” (p79). This passage leads into the section on Estonian education mentioned above.

Fossil fuels

Collier concedes that continued ruthless consumption of fossil fuels will gravely threaten the environment, but refuses to conclude that

… all unexploited fuel should be left in the ground. This might sound quite sensible … but in fact it would be grossly unfair. Leaving unexploited resources untapped inflicts the largest burden on those least able to bear them. The question that climate activists should be asking is whose carbon fuels, like oil and coal, should be left in the ground? Should it be those of the rich, or those of the poor? Once posed, the question virtually answers itself: the list should be headed by the rich carbon emitters like America’s oil, Germany’s coal and the gas of Qatar. To the extent that oil and gas still need to be used, they should come from those poorer, reserve-rich countries that are able to use them well (p180).

This begs the question of who controls the process: the extracting firms or the local governments? Surely the right way is to judge the situation of each individual state on its merits, and explain clearly to citizens just what each policy would involve, so that they can effectively decide. This means that we need a detailed ‘post-capitalist plan’ for the utilisation of such commodities - but he does not say that.

China also gets a mention - principally praise for Deng Xiaoping’s turn away from the excesses of the Mao era and the chairman’s personality cult which it fathered (see pp99-101). The original Basque cooperative, Mondragon, is also commended - and here we come upon a further weakness in the overall analysis, since, for all its success, its achievement has been merely to turn itself into a rival to the all-conquering multinational companies. Don’t get me wrong: the Mondragon experience has much to teach (see p138). But Collier’s fault is that, for all his robust and far-reaching analysis, he remains trapped in a capitalist mindset.

I hope I have written enough to prompt you, the reader, to engage with Collier’s book. But it would be wrong of me to ignore other valuable traditions, which our rulers do not endorse - I mean the sequence, Paris Commune, Russia 1917, Spain, Venezuela. Each of these historical moments marked an advance, and, in the words of Marx and Engels, drew attention to “the line of march”.

And we are still unable to dispense entirely with the state. As Paul Collier notes, in the immediate future we still need it - to collect taxes and help to deliver security. We must also demand that the states we live in evolve a common international plan to deal with the crisis, and ourselves advance proposals to that end. We have to rebuild a worthwhile, sustainable human community from the ground (even the seabed!) up.