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posed to society by unregulated economic markets and immoderate extremes of wealth and poverty.
    As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders. Relative indifference to wealth for its own sake was widespread in the postwar decades. In a survey of English schoolboys taken in 1949, it was discovered that the more intelligent the boy the more likely he was to choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage over a job that would merely pay well. 4 Today’s schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job.
    How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus. Thinking ‘economistically’, as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.

CHAPTER TWO
    The World We Have Lost
    “All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.”
     
—KARL MANNHEIM, 1943
     
     
     
     
    T he past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present—and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.
    Between the two world wars Americans, Europeans and much of the rest of the world faced a series of unprecedented man-made disasters. The First World War, already the worst and most intensely destructive in recorded memory, was followed in short order by epidemics, revolutions, the failure and breakup of states, currency collapses and unemployment on a scale never conceived by the traditional economists whose policies were still in vogue.
    These developments in turn precipitated the fall of most of the world’s democracies into autocratic dictatorships or totalitarian party states of various kinds and tipped the globe into a second World War even more destructive than the first. In Europe, in the Middle East, in east and southeast Asia, the years between 1931 and 1945 saw occupation, destruction, ethnic cleansing, torture, wars of extermination and deliberate genocide on a scale that would have been unimaginable even 30 years earlier.
    As late as 1942, it seemed reasonable to fear for freedom. Outside of the English-speaking lands of the north Atlantic and Australasia, democracy was thin on the ground. The only democracies left in continental Europe were the tiny neutral states of Sweden and Switzerland, both dependent on German goodwill. The US had just joined the war. Everything that we take for granted today was not only in jeopardy, but seriously questioned even by its defenders.
    Surely, it seemed, the future lay with the dictatorships? Even after the Allies emerged triumphant in 1945, these concerns were not forgotten: depression and fascism remained ever-present in men’s minds. The urgent question was not how to celebrate a magnificent victory and get back to business as usual, but how on earth to ensure that the experience of the years 1914-1945 would never be repeated. More than anyone else, it was Maynard Keynes who devoted himself to addressing this challenge.

THE KEYNESIAN CONSENSUS
    “In those years each one of us derived strength from the common upswing of the time and increased his individual confidence out of the collective confidence.