How Good We Can Be: Ending the Mercenary Society and Building a Great Country - Softcover

A magnificent survey of a post-Thatcherite wasteland of financial

gluttony, where shareholder value is worshipped above all else, public

goods are squandered and inequality widens. Crucially, Hutton offers some

richly innovative alternatives. His analysis burns with reasonable anger

and brilliant hope

(Ian McEwan)

Will Hutton finds his clearest voice yet. The cities of London and Westminster should read and find a long lost humility. Everyone else may find hope (Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty)

Sweeps you off your feet with its hard-headed optimism, a vision of capitalism working for the many (Avner Offer, Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at Oxford, and Fellow of All Souls College)

Policymakers are searching for a big idea to wake the economy from its slumber, to shake it from its stagnation. We are in luck. Will Hutton has found one (Andy Haldane, Chief Economist of the Bank of England)

We are living through a crisis of capitalism. It is clear after the twentieth century that without capitalism there is no economic dynamism and top down state control does not work: but equally without careful design of capitalist markets and institutions it quickly degrades into rent seeking, profiteering, short cuts and exploitation that can overwhelm it. We know that open societies and economies in the long run are more innovative and prosperous, but openness is impossible without a basic commitment to proportional, fair reward. A business and financial elite that is so over-rewarded in its closed silos cannot drive innovation. The task is huge. The little consensus for change that existed has evaporated: the active element in our national discourse is of the nasty party, appealing to every worst instinct in the name of 'Common Sense'. But it is not yet dominant. It is time for the best in Britain to reassert itself. In How Good Can We Be, Will Hutton's brilliant, eye-opening arguments will show us how, with pride, purpose and openness, the country can be rebuilt.