The inevitable results are spiralling rents, overcrowding, fewer jobs involving ever-longer journeys with rising transport costs: a huge drop in living conditions.Davis locates the blame for this with the neoliberal economic policies of the World Bank and the IMF and what he calls 'soft imperialism ' (p. 75). Financial aid is tied to the adoption of neoliberal orthodoxies, in the form of Structural Adjustment Programs. These entail cuts in government spending, especially on social programmes such as health care and sanitation; Davis cites descriptions of conditions that outdo Victorian slums and the trenches of the First World War for degradation and squalor, including slum public toilets that have to be paid for -a growth industry, apparently. The privatization of as many markets as possible, particularly housing, is insisted upon. And, of course, there is a minimum of taxation, certainly nothing progressive. The result of this surrender of economic independence to western neoliberal doctrine is that, as living conditions deteriorate, so formal employment for men disappears. The burden shifts to women doing informal work. As a Marxist, Davis might be expected to have little good to say about these institutional bastions of capitalism, but his shredding of the economic theories of Hernando de Soto is especially effective. De Soto's self-help, 'bootstrap model of development' (p. 179), based on entrepreneurs and infinitely flexible informal labour, is taken apart, point by point, leaving neoliberalism depicted as a system based on wishful thinking, excess bureaucracy, a refusal to acknowledge the damage it is doing, and, ultimately, exploitation. Neoliberalism in the Third World, is, says Davis, catastrophic.Davis ends this book, the structure of which sprawls like the slums it discusses, with the bleakest section of all, an emotive look at the extremes of exploitation to which an informal economy can lead: child labour and the selling of body parts.Neoliberalism has no answer to the problems it is producing, only segregation and ever-increasing blocks on migration. All that is left are slums: a billion people cut off from the traditional subsistence life available in the countryside and from the cultural and political life of the traditional city; 'peri-urban poverty' in a 'zone of exile ' (p. 201). The final pages of this grim, meticulously argued assessment of the effect of global economic policies and urban development contain a warning: Davis raises the spectre of a militant refusal by the poor to accept their 'terminal marginality' (p. 202). The Pentagon is already preparing for an unending, low-intensity war against a criminalized urban poor in slums across the world.