Ideas
When Covid closed everything down, governments had to save the economy. Their most useful tool, argues historian Adam Tooze in Shutdown (Allen Lane), was quantitative easing (QE). Tooze calculates that, in 2020, some $18 trillion of government debt was issued by advanced economies. “The most spectacular surge in debt in peacetime,” he says, could only have been done with QE. Duncan Weldon’s Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through (Little, Brown) argues that more muscular intervention in the economy will only be accomplished through a wider overhaul of the British way of thinking.
Mariana Mazzucato agrees. Her Mission Economy (Allen Lane) proposes that we need to corral the state’s energies into risky moonshots—just as JFK did with space travel. The mission then needs translating into a target whose achievement can be monitored. According to ex-Bank of England governor Mark Carney, the missing ingredient in economics is morality. In Value(s) (William Collins), Carney says sustainable growth must be rooted in an ethical framework. LSE head Minouche Shafik, who was born in Egypt, is mindful of the need for social contracts to go with the grain of local traditions. But if one sentence sums up What We Owe Each Other (Bodley Head), as she told Prospect, it’s “do it like Denmark.”