I REALLY HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE PAST THREE decades given we’ve never had it so good, because the next few decades are going to be horrendous.
Wait, let me rewind: where are we, economically? Not day-to-day; not post-Covid or mid-war or mid/whatever-Brexit, but panning out to a longer perspective. This boils down to two macro factors, two tides you can’t swim against: demographics and globalisation.
“The political divide of the future will be over the elderly protecting their social safety net and the working-age population their real post-tax incomes.”
This was Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan in an influential paper written for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in 2017, which they expanded into The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival, published in August 2020 before the wheels really fell off the world economy. Life comes at you fast these days.
There is a brief (terse, even) postscript where they try and read the runes on early-doors Covid’s effect on their argument:
The overall impact will be to accelerate the trends we have outlined. China will become more inward-looking and less deflationary globally, and inflation will rise much earlier and faster than anticipated.
This short, punchy book, peppered with simple charts backing their arguments, is distressingly convincing; presumably the next edition will have a chapter on the impact of the “full” pandemic, Putin’s war, etc, but you have to
