The cover image of the new UK edition of The Road From Ruin: A New Capitalism for a Big Society features landmarks of the City of London skyline such as the Lloyds Building and the Gherkin. My assumption is that they symbolise the ruin rather than the hope for a better capitalism, but at a fascinating discussion of the book I attended last night with the authors – Matthew Bishop of The Economist and Michael Green – it was hard to move on from the question of the banks and bankers.

Have they shown enough contrition about their role in the crisis? Could we not move on from obsession with bonuses (this from the bankers present)? Were bankers, in their co-ordinated claims at Davos that things are back to normal, in denial of reality? Why was popular hatred of the bankers more acute in the UK than elsewhere? Apart from the fact that the damage done by bail-outs to the UK's public finances is worse than any other large OECD economy, and apart from the fact that in Northern Rock we had the first and only classic bank run of modern times, and apart from the extreme disparity between bankers' bonuses and average pay in the UK (second only to the US), who could say?

Setting aside the sarcasm, the answer is to be found in the subtitle of the book – the reason for the heightened political salience on this side of the Atlantic lies, it seems to me, in the fact that we have a government which is more or less explicitly reshaping the role of the state in society. At this stage, what voters see are cuts to public services and higher taxes, which makes the continuing subsidy to banks and the outrageous bonuses so toxic – all the more so when leading bankers with catastrophic timing try to persuade the public that it's time to move on. I rather think the bankers will find themselves unable to move on from the debate about their culpability for a while yet.

However, there is much more to this book than diagnosis of the crisis and the banking system. The authors argue for an updated popular capitalism, with stronger connections between individuals and business in general. They argue ardently that institutional investors need to rethink their role and aim for a longer-term perspective. This is partly a matter of principles and values, and partly a matter of changing seemingly dull technicalities such as the nature of their fiduciary duties. I'm sure this is correct, and indeed the short-termism of investment in the UK has been part of the diagnosis of our flawed version of capitalism since at least Will Hutton's 1995 The State We're In, or possibly the 1980 Wilson Committee report into financial institutions and 1931 Macmillan Report.

Developing a long-term perspective is the key challenge of our times – it's what my forthcoming The Economics of Enough is also about, albeit from a different angle. I argue that having a sufficiently long time horizon in taking decisions is the only way of bringing about sustainability in its broadest sense. So of course I wholeheartedly agree with this theme in The Road From Ruin. The discussion about the book centred on two themes: the need for business and political leaders to take personal responsibility for reinvigorating the sense of (moral) value in what they do; and the importance of transparency as both a lever or process for reform and as a source of legitimacy, so badly needed given the low levels of trust in key social and economic institutions. Anyway, read this timely and clear book for the authors' more detailed agenda. I should add that there is a prior US edition for American readers. It was reviewed in the FT, Strategy & Business and elsewhere earlier this year.