As someone who teaches regularly on global
economic interconnection, trying to find meaningful, book-length treatments of
contemporary markets that are written for a broad audience is important to me.
Even when there is a lot to be critiqued in a work, the efforts are valuable.
Among the more popular examples of such a work is Fareed Zakaria’s
Post-American World, which discussed the "rise of the rest" relative to the developed economies, and even made a brief cameo as a debate point in the 2012
presidential campaign.
I am
pleased to report that Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations is a worthy successor
to Zakaria’s snapshot of the state of the global economy. Despite some notable
flaws, Sharma’s work is ambitious and informed. It has much to critique precisely
because it is so ambitious. Sharma’s major conclusions are spot on,
though I still have unanswered questions.