“The great thing that democracy and the market have in common is feedback,” Martin Wolf tells me. “You can’t sell your product, you go out of business; you can’t persuade voters, you go.” At one level, the economics oracle is doing what he always did, and arguing that the broadly liberal way of running things is best.
But as Wolf—the Financial Times commentator once hailed by former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers as “the world’s pre-eminent financial journalist”—publishes what he’s promised his wife will be his last book, there is no mistaking a new intensity. The liberal promise is not just feedback, he tells me, “it’s feedback without death… a spectacular social invention. For most of history, a change of regime meant mass murder. So this is an incredibly great achievement”. It is also a fragile one.