It is a nice question whether Britain's economic institutions or the attempts of economists to explain why they do not tick are in a greater mess. Every now and then, albeit with decreasing regularity, a government minister will tell us, as the Chief Secretary of the Treasury does in the collection of essays on The 1982 Budget, that there is a new dawn over the hill, that, before our very eyes, 'things are improving' - only to be contradicted by some even more authoritative voice, although it hardly needs the CBI to remind us of the frailty of political positive thinking. Yet the present administration has at least made Britain's economic sickness superficially more accessible to reason by specifying both the disease and its putative cure in radically simple terms.

LRB 18 November 1982 | PDF Download