Each day I commute with Melbourne’s wage slaves on a privatised transport system that is invariably overcrowded due to cancelled or delayed trains. Dark thoughts whirl as I read Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, a tale of ambition multiplied by ambition. In recent weeks, I have edited countless business stories, many of them half-year reports boasting profits of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, some increased by more than 100 per cent. Meanwhile, in the Third World, the raison d’être of the World Bank, children die for the want of mosquito nets worth two dollars. So what has James Wolfensohn achieved at the World Bank, and what has the World Bank achieved? According to Mallaby, there has been a real decline in world poverty. But one of the greatest achievements is the housing, feeding and clothing of thousands of the world’s neediest economists.
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