DESPITE the First World War ending the previous November, the year 1919 was a very bad one. For example, the UK entered what was by far its deepest ever economic recession. Output fell some 25 per cent between 1919 and 1921 as the economy attempted to adapt
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How many people across the world in the history of humanity have fled from a capitalist country to a socialist one? There was much amusement at the height of the long miners’ strike of 1984/85. A National Union of Mineworkers official from Yorkshire, a crony of Marxist
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Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, hit the headlines at the weekend, claiming that Marxism could once again become a prominent political force in the west. Automation, it seems, may not just destroy millions of jobs. For all except a privileged minority of high-tech
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The first column of a new year is the time for a prediction. By far the hardest part of forecasting is to identify tipping points. The success rate of calling a break in an established trend is very low. Accompanied by suitable health warnings, 2018 looks like
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The great Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter, writing in the 1940s, predicted the eventual demise of capitalism. He did not want this to happen. But he envisaged that the “intellectual class” would eventually develop values which were hostile to free markets and private property. Schumpeter’s definition of “intellectuals”
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