PositiveThe Financial TimesLuce is better on diagnosis than on cure. His solutions are sketchily outlined and squeezed into the last few pages of his book. But he is right to emphasise the importance of a radical skills programme for the left behind ... As the FT’s Washington columnist, Luce is at his best writing about America, on which his knowledge is voluminous. He is, I fear, gullible about China’s supposed economic miracle. One can never trust the statistics of a dictatorship. In the 1960s, some believed that America was in danger of being overtaken economically by the Soviet Union ... His writing has a vigour and sweep all too absent in the deadly prose of social scientists; and he has identified a fundamental question facing democracies, even if he has not given more than hints on how it is to be answered.
