l A Wider Audience
In the last decade or so, Paul has written a number of books aimed at a wider audience, including The Bottom Billion (Collier 2007b), which provides an overview of his work in political economy, emphasising the importance of effective policy to deal with poverty in fragile States.
This book won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross, Corine, and Estoril Global Issues book prizes. Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (Collier 2009) draws on Paul's work on the causes of civil war, while The Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature (Collier 2010) focuses on the challenges of creating institutions for the international management of natural resources. Two later books represent a decisive rejection of neoclassical economics as an overarching theory of human society (while retaining a role for neoclassical economics in the analysis of specific markets or institutions). Exodus (Collier 2013) makes a case for immigration controls, while The Future of Capitalism (Collier 2018), inspired partly by Colin Mayer's book Prosperity (Mayer 2018), argues for the cultivation of social norms and social institutions that limit the tendency of free markets to generate inequality. To the extent that these norms are based on loyalty to geographically defined communities, The Future of Capitalism espouses a form of patriotism similar to that advocated by George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Orwell 1982).[219] To the extent that inequality has a geographical dimension (with fragile cities in otherwise non-fragile States), the book highlights the importance of economic geography and urban planning.Much of Paul's most recent academic work connects to the themes in The Future ofCapitalism. His work in political economy explores the consequences for economic development of the evolution of the culture in which social norms are embedded.
He argues that there is no reason to expect cultural evolution to be socially optimal: there is no invisible cultural hand, and equilibria embodying the predatory cultures of Gordon Gekko or Mobutu Sese Seko are to be expected (see Collier 2017a). Here, there is a suggestion that cultural development traps can be observed in industrialised countries as well as in the global South. A theory of cultural development traps has not yet been elaborated in detail, but the model of class formation and identity choice in Collier (2020), which builds on Akerlof (2017), may provide a starting point. Paul's work with Tony Venables on economic geography employs the tools of neoclassical economic theory to motivate the case for urban planning and redistribution (see Collier and Venables 2018). Larger, relatively productive cities generate bigger economic rents, but the share of rents accruing to land in these cities is relatively low (and the share accruing to skilled labour is relatively high). Land values understate the rents that have accrued to the most prosperous cities: much of the rent appears in the form of high white-collar wages. Taxing this rent in order to fund urban development in fragile cities is not only egalitarian but also economically efficient. Later papers explore the policy consequences of this conceptual framework and its implications for development economics (see Collier and Venables 2016, 2017; Collier 2017b).Although Paul's five-year stint at the World Bank was his only sustained period away from Oxford, he has continued to engage with policy making. For example, he led the preparation of the natural resource management and corporate tax avoidance sections of the 2013 G8 meeting in the UK, and the design of the Compact for Africa (an initiative to attract international businesses to the continent) at the 2017 G20 meeting in Germany. He currently co-directs the Commission on State Fragility, with Tim Besley. In 2008, he was awarded a CBE for services to scholarship and development, and in 2014, he received a knighthood for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa.
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