What We Owe Each Other longlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Minouche Shafik’s What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society has been longlisted for the 2021 Financial Times and McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award.

Praised by Melinda Gates as a “powerful and persuasive argument” and by Christine Lagarde as a “must-read recipe for the improvement of our life together,” What We Owe Each Other is an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive.

Whether we realize it or not, we all participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change.

Drawing on global examples and data, Minouche Shafik takes readers through stages of life—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—to demonstrate how we can build a better, more generous and inclusive, society—together.

The prestigious Financial Times and McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award is given annually to the “book that is judged to have provided the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.” The prize will be awarded December 1, 2021 in London.

Read an interview with Minouche Shafik in Time.

About the Author

Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously vice president of the World Bank, permanent secretary of the Department for International Development, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and deputy governor of the Bank of England.