What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoğlu review – how to fix the system

The Nobel-winning economist takes aim at elites for no longer meeting the needs of the masses In 2009, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an essay with the portentous title The Education of a Libertarian, in which he announced: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Since the 1920s, he wrote, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” had rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron. To be fair, Thiel...

By Steven Poole