A New Statesman best book of the year New York Times Editors' Choice pick A Financial Times best economics book of 2019 An accessible, story-driven look at the future of the global economy, written by a leading expert To predict our future, we must look to the extremes. So argues the economist Richard Davies, who takes readers to the margins of the modern economy and beyond in his globe-trotting book. From a prison in rural Louisiana where inmates purchase drugs with prepaid cash cards to the poorest major city on earth, where residents buy clean water in plastic bags, from the world's first digital state to a prefecture in Japan whose population is the oldest in the world, how these extreme economies function--most often well outside any official oversight--offers a glimpse of the forces that underlie human resilience, drive societies to failure, and will come to shape our collective future. While the people who inhabit these places have long been dismissed or ignored, Extreme