NPR.

To Martin Wolf, democracy is in trouble.

We see very clear erosion of the legitimacy of the functioning of democratic norms in high

income, developing countries, above all the US, and to a lesser extent the UK.

Martin Wolf is the chief economics commentator for the financial times, and he has a new

book out today in the US, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.

Martin thinks this erosion of democratic norms is driven by upheavals in the economy.

For one thing, we're not getting better at producing as much stuff and services at the

same pace as we used to.

The productivity growth has collapsed almost across the developed world, and if the society

isn't getting richer, then the only way some people become richer is if other people

get poorer.

This is the indicator from planet money I'm Darian Woods.

Today on the show, why Martin Wolf thinks democratic capitalism might be in deep trouble,

and what he thinks could be done about it.

democratic capitalism has been the standard arrangement for most high-end-conquan countries

for the last 80 years.

But Martin Wolf sees the system as a very fragile marriage, and partly that's because of

his personal background.

My parents were both refugees from Hitler, and they got out successfully, but in both my

parents' case, their wider families, which were very large, were all killed in the Holocaust.

I became convinced that a crucial element in the collapse of the German attempt above

...