Warnings about economic rationalisation reached fever pitch back when the Howard government in Australia started selling every public asset it could strip mine. Then – as now – it was touted as the saviour of economies worldwide, but it benefited shareholders, consumers and multinational corporations, not middle-class workers. All that has changed is the speed with which the manufacturing industries that have closed across the Western world as companies cherrypick the cheapest labour, much in Asia.
According to Rubin, a Canadian economist, the election of Trump happened because of the voiceless masses who’ve dropped rapidly out of the middle class due to globalisation, as the political and financial elites had forgot them.
The Expendables talks about Trump aplenty, particularly his current trade war with China, which Rubin positions as a way to reassert American manufacturing power. In fact, even while he mentions some of Trump’s more outrageous behaviour and claims, you wonder if he’s not secretly a Trump apologist.
The economics of today’s world – from the appalling US health system to the ballooning gulf between rich and poor – has its roots in the mass sell-offs of the ‘small government’ era of the market-favouring ’80s, and there seems no end to it in sight. Rubin’s book, however well researched, is merely a stepping stone in an ongoing story.

Reviewed by Drew Turney