IT'S been said before, but the real divide in the post-financial crisis world is not between Keynesians and monetarists, or between free-marketeers and interventionists, but between Tiggers and Eeyores.

Tiggers believe that what capitalism does is bounce, and it will quickly learn the lessons of the past three years to re-emerge stronger than ever. The Eeyores, by contrast, believe there is a dark thundercloud to every silver lining, with the upturn of the past year or so merely interrupting the long and painful adjustment to past excesses.

Anatole Kaletsky is as Tiggerish as they come. In Capitalism 4.0, he explains how the near-death experience of the western banking system in the autumn of 2008 will hasten the arrival of the fourth variant of capitalism since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century.

Capitalism 1, the era of laissez faire and small government, ended with the Wall Street crash and the great depression of the 1930s. The next 40 years were marked by Capitalism 2, the decades of Keynes and Beveridge, when it was thought the state could do no wrong. That model crashed and burned during the stagflation of the 1970s, to be replaced by Thatcher, Reagan and the belief during the years of Capitalism 3 that the state could do no right.

The market fundamentalist model, Kaletsky argues, has now run into the sand and will be replaced by Capitalism 4.0, an acceptance that both markets and governments are prone to error. Pragmatism will replace free-market ideology, the right lessons will be learned, and the long post-cold-war upswing will resume after a fairly brief interlude. Kaletsky is relatively kind to the banks and saves his real venom for Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs chief executive who was US Treasury secretary during the crisis. It was the failure of Paulson, steeped in the anti-government culture of Capitalism 3, to rescue Lehman Brothers in September 2008 that turned a “fairly normal boom-bust cycle into the greatest financial crisis of all time”.

If all this sounds a little bit too good to be true, that's because it almost certainly is. For a start, the development of industrial capitalism since 1750 can't really be divided into the neat segments that Kaletsky describes. There was a big role for the market during Capitalism 2, just as the state was still a big player in economic life during Capitalism 3. More fundamentally, the book seems to assume a seamless transition to Capitalism 4; given the power of those with a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo, especially in the financial sector, that looks highly improbable.

That said, Kaletsky's core argument — that capitalism has shown amazing flexibility and adaptability — is right. As you would expect from one of Britain's best newspaper columnists, his book is cogent, readable and thoroughly enjoyable.

Stephen D King, the global chief economist at HSBC bank, is more of an Eeyore. Like Kaletsky, he accepts that the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 coupled with the digital revolution have changed the world. But he is much less sanguine about where globalisation is heading, fearing that the developed nations are set for a battle for resources and influence with the emerging powers of Asia and Latin America. It is a battle the West might not win.

While Kaletsky identifies innovation and adaptability as the reasons for the success of the western capitalist model, King says market forces appeared to work well in the developed world in part because they were not allowed to work elsewhere.

— The Guardian, London