That’s not the only time you’ll be forced to the dictionary. Bruckner loves to throw around words like “abulic,” “aporia,” “dietetics” and “inanition.” One sentence gives us “notarial cadastre”; another includes both “ataraxia” and “atony.” Pity the poor translator, Steven Rendall, but don’t pity him too much: At some point he seems to have just given up. Robert E. Diamond Jr., for instance, is the former chief executive of Barclays, but by the time he’s been translated into French and then back into English, he has become the “former general director of Barclay’s.” And if you venture into the footnotes, you’ll find English-language works by Robert H. Frank and Esther Duflo cited, unhelpfully, only in their French translations.

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Is it Rendall’s fault that the Vanderbilt mansion in New York had 137 bedrooms, in this translation, rather than 137 rooms? Perhaps. But other factual errors are surely Bruckner’s. The budget of the Gates Foundation, for instance, is not “three times larger than that of the World Health Organization” (they each spend about $4 billion a year), even if Gates looms much larger in Bruckner’s mind.

Bruckner, it turns out, has very peculiar ideas about America in general, a country that, in this book, essentially becomes an anticapitalist’s caricature. For all that the Gates Foundation has real power, it doesn’t run “the risk of establishing a private monopoly and taking control of world health as a whole”; neither does the European Commission, “under the influence of American multinationals,” want to abolish authors’ royalties. Bruckner is happy to declare that “in the United States, economics is a branch of theology”; that “in the United States, the middle classes, which are being impoverished, have already lost their role as a demographic and economic pillar”; and that “Americans have replaced their suspicion of eroticism with an immoderate appetite for profit.”

And Bruckner really hates economists, financiers and anybody who has the basic numeracy to be able to deal with money professionally. He compares the Nobel laureate Gary Becker to Joseph Stalin and calls George Soros a “reckless speculator”; thinks that high-frequency trading is done by “fops in suspenders” with “unlimited power to do harm”; describes competition as being a “monster”; says that the rich have “chosen to make money precisely because they don’t know how to do anything else”; asserts that national deficits and economic crashes are “good examples of mathematics gone mad”; and worries that money “reduces the human condition to the sinister tonalities of calculation.” There’s nothing sinister about calculation, Pascal! In fact, if you listened a bit more closely to those tonalities, you might understand why, no, it would not be a very good idea to wipe away all of the debts of “the great countries of Europe,” even if it’s true that they won’t ever repay what they owe.