LONDON In 1969, the British financial journalist Samuel Brittan published a book called Steering the Economy: The Role of the Treasury. At the time, it was still widely assumed that the United Kingdom’s economy was steerable and that the Treasury (which was still in charge of monetary policy) was at the helm.
LONDON Is the world economy globalising or de-globalising? The answer would have seemed obvious in 1990. Communism had just collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. In China, Deng Xiaoping was unleashing capitalist enterprise. And political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the “end of history”, by which he meant the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.
LONDON Is the world economy globalising or de-globalising? The answer would have seemed obvious in 1990. Communism had just collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. In China, Deng Xiaoping was unleashing capitalist enterprise. And political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the “end of history”, by which he meant the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.
LONDON In December 1939, police raided the home of George Orwell, seizing his copy of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. In a letter to his publisher after the raid, Orwell wondered whether “ordinary people in countries like England grasp the difference between democracy and despotism well enough to want to defend their liberties”.