"It does a better job of bringing together all the key issues facing today’s global economy than any other book I’ve read. Plender, a Financial Times columnist, is forensically aware of capitalism’s faults but he also notes the extraordinary spread of prosperity that it has underpinned over recent decades. And, for all of its faults, he employs Winston Churchill’s assessment of democracy: “It is the worst form of economic management, except for all those other forms that have been tried.” The book is such a delight to read because Plender is as likely to quote Dickens, Goethe and Blake as Greenspan, Carney and Schäuble. His analysis of capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses is rooted in how markets and commerce have been seen throughout history and in great works of literature. At the heart of the book is an attempt to understand why, despite the prosperity it has delivered and its superiority to all other forms of economic organisation, most of us struggle to accept capitalism, let alone admire it."

"Plender is neither dogmatic nor prescriptive; if you like to read something that furnishes ideas for debate, then this book is for you. If anything what he wants to see is a capitalism that is more self-aware. It should be aware, for example, that growing wealth inequality in developed economies is being attended (and perhaps exacerbated) by the rise of new digital industries with no real connection either to their customers or to their shareholders, the Facebook model of capitalism which sees markets as merely convenient places to cash in. He would also like to revert to something like the morality that links reward to effort in a proportional way. But for that, we probably have to await a yet bigger, badder and more humbling meltdown than anything yet seen. Meanwhile, his view is an adaptation of Winston Churchill on democracy. Capitalism is a nasty, unjust, avaricious system. It’s just that it’s better than the other systems."