The instruments no longer read the weather.
Across the Global South, the tools economists trust, GDP, interest rates, credit ratings, have quietly stopped describing the economies they measure. Growth is recorded while households fall behind. Interest rates are raised against inflation that was never domestic. Credit ratings determine the very creditworthiness they claim only to observe. The dials still move. They have stopped telling the truth.Written from between London and Port Louis, this book asks why, and what a new set of tools would look like. It argues that the conditions the Global South has lived with for decades, imported inflation, currency dependence, the export of its most capable people, are now arriving in the economies that once seemed immune, and that artificial intelligence is accelerating all of it. What began as a set of local questions turns out to describe a shared future.
It offers no false comfort and claims no finished answers. It sets out, plainly, the frameworks that might let us measure what actually matters: whether an economy serves the people who live inside it.