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

by Russell Jones

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 states. 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. Nostalgia has led to wishful thinking, and this has been the underlying sentiment driving poorly thought through – sometimes even panicky – initiatives that were blindly borrowed from elsewhere, that flew in the face of experience, or that were drawn from theoretical and political extremes. This book describes and interprets the economic and political history of the past half a century, examining the challenges confronted by successive governments and their chancellors, the policies employed for good or ill, and – running through it all – the desperate search for a panacea that could arrest the nation’s relative decline and return the country to its supposed former glories.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, Politics, History, British Literature

480 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 4, 2023

About the author

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Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really informative read but I didn't have sufficient baseline knowledge to easily understand a lot of what was being written about, so if you're an economist maybe it's a 5 star read, for me it was at too high a level to be a comfortable read. I do feel like I learned a lot about the history of how we got here, which is what I was after, but this book generated too much homework!