An ethical economic system – where everyone has a stake in future well-being – is essential to address the problems facing the economy and society. To achieve this, policy makers should look to Britain’s history for inspiration.
There are two clear periods in our past when everyone in society contributed to the population’s basic social security, education and health needs because everybody could see the strong and tangible benefits that resulted from it.
Most obviously, this happened in the postwar decades of the new welfare state as hitherto unseen levels of investment in the population’s health and education fired up productivity growth so that it reached a historic peak of 2.4% per annum from 1950-1973, three times higher than the entire period 1871-1937.
