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For many of today’s high-income economies, the postwar boom was an unsurpassed success. This was also true for the UK, even though its economy grew far more slowly than those of its European neighbours. Growth rates slowed quite generally from the early 1970s, but least so in the US and UK. The plausible explanation is that the big opportunities had by then been exploited . From the 1980s, they were to be found instead in emerging Asia, whose economies feasted on opportunities for growth previously enjoyed by Japan and South Korea. China was the outstanding example of such success.

New technologies also continued to be created, notably those of the digital revolution. But the argument of Robert Gordon, in his masterpiece The Rise and Fall of American Growth, that there has been a marked diminution in the overall rate of technological progress compared with its scope and scale before the second world war, is persuasive. A further reason for slowing overall productivity growth is the rising role of labour-intensive services, in which productivity is hard to increase.

There have also been inescapably transitory boosts to growth in the 20th and early 21st centuries. One was rising female labour force participation. Another was the universal move towards longer years of education, notably including tertiary education. Yet another was declining overall dependency ratios, as the “baby boomers” entered the labour force. The UK itself also benefited from membership of the EU, which it then lightly discarded.

Another transitory boost, notably to the UK public finances, came from inflation, which helped to wipe out the burden of public debt accumulated during the war. The UK public sector also enjoyed the windfall from North Sea oil revenues and the proceeds from privatisation , both of which were consumed. Unfortunately, the impact of the financial crisis and the pandemic was then to bring public debt back up, albeit not close to the heights of 1945.

A last one-off boost came from the explosive growth of the financial sector in which the UK played a more than full part. As I argued on November 5, the financial bubble “not only exaggerated the sustainable size of the financial sector, but also exaggerated the sustainable size of a whole host of ancillary activities”. This again is unrepeatable, or so at least one has to hope. So what now lies ahead ? Is the post-2007 sluggishness the norm for the old high-income economies, except, perhaps, the US? Happily, some new opportunities do exist. One is to catch up on the US, as occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. For the UK, another opportunity is to raise the lagging incomes of the “left behind” regions. Another possibility is a return to the EU’s customs union and single market.