John Rapley

Every leader comes to power promising growth: think back to the campaigns of Boris, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Trump. Yet real-term income hasn't improved in the UK since 2008. Across the West, growth has stagnated for well over a decade, leading to cost of living crises, political instability and rising social tensions. Is real economic growth still possible? And with the climate emergency accelerating beyond repair, should we still be pushing for it? In Icarus Economics, acclaimed economist John Rapley argues that the problem of growth is inherently tied up with the climate crisis. We often assume that poor countries will bear the brunt of climate change, pandemics, and other exogenous shocks, but this book argues the opposite: western societies have more wealth and capital to lose and are less inherently resilient. In this book, he shows us how rich countries can grow their own economies by helping poor countries to decarbonise - and in the process, mitigate the effects of climate change.

What can the fall of Rome teach us about the decline of the West today? A historian and a political economist, both experts in their field, investigate Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence. In Why Empires Fall, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley use this Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it. In this exceptional, transformative intervention, Heather and Rapley explore the uncanny parallels - and productive differences - between the two cases, moving beyond the familiar tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to learn new lessons from ancient history. From 399 to 1999, the life cycles of empires, they argue, sow the seeds of their inevitable destruction. The era of western global domination has reached its end - so what comes next?