FINBARR LIVESEY is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He has consulted for a number of national governments and presented to multinational corporations on new models of industrial policy. Livesey studied public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a director of GeoPartners, a consultancy based in Boston. He also assisted in setting up the Open Economies Project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

This brilliantly original book dismantles the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions made by companies and governments throughout the world, to show that our shared narrative of the global economy is deeply flawed. If left unexamined, they will lead corporations and countries astray, with dire consequences for us all.

For the past fifty years or so, the global economy has been run on three big assumptions: that globalization will continue to spread, that trade is the engine of growth and development, and that economic power is moving from the West to the East. More recently, it has also been taken as a given that our interconnectedness—both physical and digital—will increase without limit. But what if all these ideas are wrong? What if everything is about to change? What if it has already begun to change but we just haven't noticed?

Increased automation, the advent of additive manufacturing (3D printing, for example), and changes in shipping and environmental pressures, among other factors, are coming together to create a fast-changing global economic landscape in which the rules are being rewritten—at once a challenge and an opportunity for companies and countries alike.