## books-rithmire

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### Review metadata
- JUNE 2026
- Page: 68
- Review author: Meg Rithmire
- Book reviewed: The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder
- Author of book: Eswar S. Prasad
- Publisher: Hachette, New York, NY, 2026
- Length and price: 368 pp., $32

### Core thesis
- The global economic order has imploded because it could not adapt to its own contradictions and deficiencies.
- The system was premised on tenets such as: democracy is self-correcting; markets allocate resources and impose discipline; rules ensure fair play.
- These tenets failed to address outcomes that left prosperity, security, and fair distribution of power wanting.
- Prasad’s diagnosis: failures in political institutions, climate and technology governance, and market discipline create a set of negative feedback loops—the “doom loop”—in which “The feedback loop between economics, domestic politics, and geopolitics is spiraling out of control and becoming destructive on every front, turning into a doom loop.”

### Diagnosis of causes (findings)
- China’s successes demand rethinking which political institutions work best.
- Climate and technology challenges reflect hubris and irresponsibility of dominant countries.
- Market forces generate more debt and fragility rather than discipline.
- Popular explanations that blame outside forces (rise of China, populist leaders, technology-driven information concentration) and prescribe “better democracy, freer markets, and more rules” are insufficient.
- Novel policy tools and technologies (central bank digital currencies, artificial intelligence, great-power competition, and industrial policy) are viewed by Prasad as problems, not solutions.

### Implications and outlook
- Repairing existing institutions is not enough; the global order requires reinvention and new institutions.
- A stable world “depends on new and better institutions.”
- The scale of the challenge is large: the reader “will understand what failed, why it failed, and the scale of the challenge ahead.”

### Policy recommendations (prescriptions)
- International financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank must apply their rules more fairly and embark on reform.
- Middle powers must choose long-term responsibility over quick fixes.
- Chief executives must put social responsibilities above short-term profits and pressure politicians to pursue equitable policies and build bridges with other countries.
- Voters must elect visionary leaders who are “committed to long-term improvements in people’s lives and capable of managing the difficult transition away from economic, political, and legal systems that have outlived their usefulness.”

### Audience and assessment
- The book offers a frank, if frustrating, answer to what comes next: structural reinvention rather than incremental fixes.
- A future leader who reads this book “will understand what failed, why it failed, and the scale of the challenge ahead.”
- Review author: meg rithmire is a professor at Harvard Business School.

*From F&D, June 2026; book review by Meg Rithmire.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2026/06/books-rithmire.pdf_