Dire straits

Richard Davies's book is divided into three parts - survival, failure, future - each of which subdivides into three case studies about specific places

An adage in the legal profession holds that hard cases make bad law. The premise of Richard Davies’s Extreme Economies is that, at least with respect to economics, this notion is mistaken and strange outlier cases like the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh or the severe urban decline of Glasgow can teach us valuable general lessons about the world we live in.

Davies, a former economics editor of The Economist who’s also done stints as an adviser at the Bank of England and to the chancellor of the Exchequer, brings that magazine’s signature virtues to bear. His book is divided into