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“Mark

Many thanks for another excellent post which makes (all too) perfect sense to me.

I wonder what is going through Gordon Brown's mind: last week on Radio 4, when reminded of various warnings about the UK economy over several years, he dismissed such criticism as "nonsense" and repeated that we have seen ten years of stability, continuous growth etc. Without any qualifications as to the meaning of the GDP measure he pointed out that the UK has yet to see any negative growth - unlike Germany - and didn't enter a recession in 2001, unlike the US. If you wanted confirmation that he has no inkling of the higher level ideas you have outlined in your post, I think this is it. Of course, it's tempting to think that he has to say such things for political reasons, and that really he is fully aware of what he is doing, but putting together his actions over many years with all the statements of his that I can find on the web, I really don't think so; I think he uses the word "stability" in the sense of someone with eyes shut driving a car very smoothly towards the edge of a cliff.

Not forgetting the thrust of your argument (that the West has been deluding itself for a lot longer than 10 years), throughout Gordon Brown's tenure as Chancellor, global economic circumstances meant that whatever he did, growth and low inflation were the default result. The brave, clever and perceptive thing to have done would have been to stifle 'growth' (debt) with the future in mind. But at what point would such a suggestion stray into the realms of 'socialism'?

Did any government in the world conspicuously do the right thing over the last decade?” source...