The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline

The performance of the British economy over the past fifty-odd years does not make for comforting reading. Indeed, the story is a depressing catalogue of misapprehensions, missteps, wasted opportunities, crises and humiliations, with all-too-familiar problems arising time and again and yet never being satisfactorily addressed.

All nations and their economic policymakers are to a certain extent prisoners of their history, but this seems to apply more to the UK than to other countries. Nostalg...