Which brings me to a fine new book by the economist Russell Jones. Entitled The Tyranny of Nostalgia – Half a Century of British Economic Decline, it explains, among many other things, how “the end of the period under study saw the fabric of the UK’s economic and social infrastructure stretched dangerously thin”. Moreover, “Britain’s once proud and dominant manufacturing sector was permitted, and at times even encouraged, to wither away.” The only sympathy I have with most Brexiters is that they simply had no idea of what they were in for. Plainly, now, most people do, and rightly don’t like it This powerful and elegant account of the twists and turns in British macroeconomic policy should be essential reading for students and practitioners alike. Russell Jones’s analysis of the past half a century of British economic life – and particularly of the run-up to Brexit and of its subsequent implementation and its disastrous consequences – is absolutely stunning.” For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. We are all creators of fictions, and we all have a role to play in imagining our way out of the nostalgic traps strewn around us. But there are special opportunities open to those of us who create fiction for a living, and above all to those of us who are writers, because we are freer to create what we wish, without requiring funding for our projects, as a film-maker might. We are the startups of the storytelling world, the crazy solo inventors in the R&D department of humanity’s narrative imagination. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Well, the understanding is less limited now. The only sympathy I have with most Brexiters is that, as Jones implies, they simply had no idea of what they were in for. Plainly, now, most people do, and rightly don’t like it. The complex and persistent woes of British economic developments over the past fifty years are covered in fascinating detail by Russell Jones in this joyously readable book. The book works brilliantly both for those that have, like me, shared Jones’s path through the world of high finance and for those that haven’t but want to try and understand the role of individual politicians and policymakers, and the circumstances surrounding their vain attempts to steer the UK to a more fruitful pasture.”

The importance of clan, family, history, honour and formality were a useful education to this California boy finding his way in Pakistan’ … The Lord of the Rings. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Our reaction is predictable. The kind of futures we would like to inhabit seem unlikely to occur. The futures that we suspect are likely to occur, meanwhile, fill us with anxiety. And so we are left stranded: unstable in the present, being dragged from the past, resistant to the future. We become profoundly angry, vulnerable to the dangerous calls of charlatans and bigots and xenophobes. We become depressed. And in our depression we become more dangerous, too. A suicide bomber is someone killing themself, after all. Russell’s brilliant book does us all a favour, … giving us an excellent economic history of Britain since the gloss peeled off the Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s. He shows us how each administration was effectively handed a set of problems to solve, how they each tried to solve them in the shadow of the prior administration’s failures, and how that process always produced the next set of problems.”

The result? The destruction of what Harvard politics professor Daniel Ziblatt calls two “master norms”—mutual toleration, whether we “accept the basic legitimacy of our opponents”; and institutional forbearance, whether politicians are responsibly wielding their power. We can see that happening every day. The performance of the British economy over the past fifty-odd years does not make for comforting reading.Nostalgia for the great days of the past has become tyrannical - and is in some sense embodied in the form of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's famous 'budget box', made for William Gladstone in the 1850s and only passed over to a museum in 2010. The UK electorate was also poorly informed and misled: “The general level of ignorance across the population about the EU proved extraordinarily high.” I had always been a daydreamer, and I whiled away long hot summers in Lahore playing make-believe, by myself, or with my cousins. But I also began to do something strange. I became fascinated by atlases, with their gorgeous multicoloured maps, their different icons for settlements of different population sizes, their snaking, undulating contour lines. I became fascinated by almanacs, with their brief descriptions of countries: a snapshot of history, demographics, chief exports, climatic conditions. And I began to make countries of my own. https://lpp-books.sumupstore.com/product/the-tyranny-of-nostalgia-half-a-century-of-british-economic-decline

Neither of these policies is likely to make a significant difference in the lives of Trump’s voters, but that’s not really the point,” Illing writes. “By pandering to fears and resentments, Trump both deepens the prejudices and satisfies his base.”You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. One especially helpful aspect of the author’s approach is to identify the principal tenets of the dominant paradigm of economic thinking – or “economic orthodoxy” – which prevailed at any one time and demonstrating how this drove the policy debate and resulting policy decisions. Thus, we witness the downfall of naïve Keynesianism in the face of the onset of “stagflation”, the (brief) ascent of monetarism and all the subsequent thinking regarding how GDP growth could be maximised while the volatility of economic growth and inflation is simultaneously minimised. You’d think the social compact—which is defined as an implicit agreement among members of society to participate in a system that benefits everyone—would prevent the splintering of America and the rise of fringe politics. But the social compact only works when the system delivers on its promises, and increasingly that is not happening. It is sometimes said that there is a trade-off between sovereignty and influence. By being a member of the EU, the UK pooled some of its sovereignty but magnified its European and global influence by sitting around the EU table. Jones writes: “Engagement with the EU had helped amplify Britain’s voice on the global stage. Brexit would muffle it, perhaps to the point of inaudibility.”