Poverty was once the norm. A quarter of babies died in their first year of life. In 1980, around 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today only 10% of people do. Much of this is thanks to fossil fuels. The burning of wood, then coal, gas and oil, enabled us to prosper. […]
‘It’s painful to say, but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it.’ It’s the kind of supportive message you might expect from a friend you consulted for advice on, say, how to get over a breakup. Not the advice you would send to Jeffrey Epstein if you were one of the […]
Governments generally use Christmas and the New Year to bury bad news, hoping no-one will notice while they’re distracted by paper hats, mince pies and brandy butter. But this year Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook decided to ring the changes by swapping the traditional Scrooge costume for announcing glad tidings of comfort and joy instead. The […]
Adam Smith attributed the ability of one man to do the work of many to the ‘invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour’. Writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Smith witnessed one of the most profound reorganisations of human capital in history: the transition to mechanised production. The […]
During the Thatcher premiership, popular capitalism came to the fore, focused on boosting home ownership and broadening share participation. It was a period when the City was growing and finance was helping drive economic success, and there was a desire for more people to share in this. The Big Bang reforms of 1986 transformed London’s […]
The rules of growing up in modern Britain appeared to be simple for decades: if you work hard at school, go to university and graduate with a degree, you will come out with a well-paid job that sets you up for life. The argument seemed straightforward: since graduates earned considerably more than non-graduates, the way […]
Sven Beckert, a Harvard professor, has written a very long history of capitalism. As its subtitle suggests, ‘Capitalism: A Global History’ covers all of the inhabited world and spans a millennium, starting with 12th-century merchants trading through the port city of Aden. The enterprise is of more than purely historical interest. As Beckert points out, […]
Society and politics are forged by movements. The evolution of our country, and its state today, is a consequence of these movements, and their influence on our institutions. When people think of politics today, they think of parties, but parties have constraints that movements do not. Britain’s history has made this clear time and time […]
The UK is the place where free markets first unlocked what the economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the ‘Great Enrichment’ – the extraordinary wealth and human flourishing made possible by the industrial revolution. Yet today, the UK – as well as much of the rest of the western world – is economically stagnant, and has drifted […]
Arise Sir Idris Elba, Sir Christopher Dean and Dame Jayne Torvill. This year’s New Year Honours list had a host of well-deserved gongs for famous and not-so-famous names, alongside the usual criticisms about back-scratching cronyism too. Whatever the rights and wrongs of last week’s list, the idea of getting a gong or a title feels […]
It is impossible to pinpoint an exact place or moment when capitalism began. Capitalism is a process, not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end, and it did not drop fully formed into a particular location. Even today, no society is organised along fully capitalist lines, and some have argued that a […]
Will France need to be bailed out under the latest of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) damage limitation devices, the magically named Transmission Protection Instrument? France’s minority government under embattled Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has finally succeeded in passing a social security budget – by including a provision temporarily suspending President Emmanuel Macron’s flagship pension […]
Donald Trump’s political future is uncertain, but the dissatisfaction as well as a peculiar ideological mélange that he defined is not going to go away regardless of what happens to the man himself. Individuals certainly matter in history, but deep economic and political currents and subcurrents matter at least as much. After four years of […]
For my last column of the year, the editor of this fine publication asked that I try to inject a spot of early Christmas cheer, and offer some reasons to be positive and hopeful as we lurch into 2026. Amid the doom and gloom of Labour’s Britain, I thought initially that the task might be […]
Labour is leaning hard into ‘affordability politics’. Ministers don’t use the phrase, but the governing theme is clear enough: promise to ‘cut the cost of living’ by fiddling with headline prices. We’ve had pledges to ban ticket resale for profit, freeze regulated rail fares, cap prescription charges and give tenants new powers to challenge rent […]
Joe Stiglitz is always interesting. He may be more of an ideologue than economist these days but he’s far too bright not to be interesting. So it is with his new report for the G20 about inequality, which gets really interesting if we follow the evidence actually presented. The base assertion is that inequality is […]
Watch or listen to CapX’s weekly podcast ‘The Capitalist’ wherever you get your podcasts.
