History Future Now

On the eve of the First World War the entire British state — army, navy, empire, courts, schools, roads, poor relief, the lot — cost a little over twelve per cent of national income.

In July 2026, Elon Musk sat down with the Economist's editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, and predicted "an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of."

Every month the British government takes in around £100 billion and spends around £113 billion.

In 2000, launching a technology company meant spending a fortune on servers before writing a line of code.

Every era produces the same pattern: fragmented, bespoke, expensive production transformed by shared infrastructure that democratises access to speed and scale.

A software founder builds one thing.

Innovation has always clustered where the distance between thinking and making approaches zero.

In February 2026, the Green Party overturned a century of Labour dominance in Manchester's Gorton and Denton by-election by courting a Muslim voting bloc.

The gender ideology gap runs 15 to 50 points across the developed world — yet it does not exist in the Middle East, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Indonesia.

Britain teaches its children a remarkably narrow slice of history — the Tudors, the World Wars, and the Holocaust — and then wonders why adults reach for the same historical analogies every time.

Robots are not stealing jobs.

Most political positions are argued from ideology.

The Netherlands and Denmark are the two best-documented case studies on the fiscal and social costs of immigration in Europe.

Every great economy in history was built behind tariff walls.

Guilt societies are ruled by an internal judge; shame societies by the eye of the crowd.

China banned gallium and germanium exports in 2023 and most Western policymakers had never heard of either element.

The average house in England costs 7.7 times the median salary.

Water is the one resource for which there is no substitute.

Young women have moved sharply more liberal across the developed world.

Trust in government, media, science, and the judiciary is at historic lows across the Western world.