Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The surprising story of Britain's economy from boom to bust and back again

Product Information

With the rise of the entrepreneur, the landed gentry became less influential. Despite productivity increases the working class benefited little. The great reform act of 1832 changed the structure of the House of Commons and ended the dominance of the aristocracy. Globalisation ebbs and flows. The world of 1914 was much more globalised in relative terms that the world economy of 1979. Britain was the premier financial centre of the world in the late Victorian world, declined during the war years (1914 – 1970), and them boomed again between 1980 and the 2008. For the latest CapX Podcast, Duncan joined our editor John Ashmore and Tom Clougherty, Head of Tax at our parent organisation, the Centre for Policy Studies, to chat about the book and analyse where the British economy may be heading as we recover from the Covid cataclysm. Get more from CapX In war, do not think that trade did not continue. In 1809-1810 Britain continue to buy grain from France to feed its troops. The money France received helped fund their war, while France also needed clothing from the UK, which helped fund the UK war. French troops where often killed by the British wearing coats made in Northampton and Leeds.

Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through by Duncan Weldon

Eisenhardt, K.M. 1989. Making fast strategic decisions in high-velocity environments. Academy of Management Journal 32: 543–576. The UK is, at the same time, both one of the world's most successful economies and one of Europe's laggards. The country contains some of Western Europe's richest areas such as the south east of England, but also some of its poorest such as the north east or Wales. It's really not much of an exaggeration to describe the UK, in economic terms, as 'Portugal but with Singapore in the bottom corner'. Looking into the past helps understand why. The Malthus theory states that the world is governed by a brutal logic; human wants are infinite but human means were finite. Put simply, to limit starvation and masses of poor people, the best way to restrict population growth. Feeding the poor would only result in more poorer people. In some way it links in with your theory about housing and governments liking to restrict the population growth and therefore in the short run/their premiership taxation costs. Rapid population decline is not what governments want, as like Spain in the 1930, there are not enough people to harvest the corn.March, J.G. 1978. Bounded rationality, ambiguity, and the engineering of choice. Bell Journal of Economics 9: 587–608. A lot of the received wisdom in UK economic history in a nice concise and readable format. I felt the writing improved as the chapters came up to date with more of a narrative and less lists of figures. But I find more recent economic history most interesting so maybe that's just me. One of the traditions in the bounded rationality line of thinking is incrementalism – otherwise known as ‘muddling through’. It was conceived by Charles Lindblom in two key articles (Lindblom Public Adm Rev 19: 79–88, 1959; Public Adm Rev 39: 517–526, 1979), and it has influenced the management literature in several ways. Keywords A book that tells the story of Britain’s economic history over the past 200 years could hardly be more timely. The country is emerging from the grip of a pandemic that triggered the deepest recession in more than 300 years and the biggest annual increase in public borrowing in peacetime. At the same time businesses are grappling with the fallout from Brexit in the form of significant new barriers to trade, leading to empty shelves and staff shortages. Meanwhile, the government is split between a prime minister who believes that Britain can spend its way to a “roaring twenties” and a chancellor who fears that a heavily indebted government is at risk of an inflationary bust. So where do we go from here? This is an accessible overview of the last two hundred years of British economic policy-making. I have been looking for a book like this for some years and I was really pleased when I saw that Duncan Weldon was working on such a topic, as his laconic style goes some way towards making this often confusing narrative coherent.

Years of Muddling Through: The surprising story Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The surprising story

It's fair to say that Weldon succeeds in answering it with his pacy, vivid canter through the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, post-war decline and resurgence in the 1980s, right up to the current crisis.Centuries of a largely agrarian economy vanished with the Industrial Revolution. Productivity and standards of living rose. The population and production moved from homes in the country to crowded towns. Increased coal production was needed to power mills. Canal traffic rose and railways boomed.