Quotes from Edward Luce

An ageing society is a less entrepreneurial one.

The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal,' de Tocqueville wrote, 'but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.

Orwell envisioned a future in which an all-seeing dictatorship would stamp out free thinking and outlaw human intimacy. But the internet has given us something far closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sales of both books shot up the charts after Trump was elected (along with Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism). Orwell's fear was that Big Brother would always be watching you. Huxley's dread was that we would be too busy watching Big Brother on TV to care. There is no need to ban books if people are not reading them. If the people are entertained, they will also be docile.

Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century.

History tells us that inequality soars when societies develop.

According to one Harvard study, more students attended America's elite universities from the top 1 per cent of income backgrounds than from the bottom 60 per cent.

In 1970 only about one in seven American families lived in neighbourhoods that were unambiguously 'affluent' or 'poor'.40 By 2007 that number had risen to almost one in three.

Chicago's success is no longer symbiotic with its rural neighbours. It comes at their expense.

In 2011, Boris Johnson, then London's mayor, saw the downside when the capital's fringes went on the rampage for several days, smashing up shops and burning cars, looting what they could not have. Five years later Britain's left-behinds vetoed London's economic interests in the Brexit referendum.

The stability of the planet – and the presumption of restraint – will have to rest in the hands of Xi Jinping and other powerful leaders. To forestall disaster, the rest of the world will have no choice but to try to put themselves in Trump's shoes.

For all the emphasis we place on our multicultural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality.

The West's global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment.

There is a thin line between convincing people of the merits of a case and suggesting they are moral outcasts if they fail to see it.

Ironically, some of the lowest-paid jobs – in barbershops and nail salons – will be among the safest.

All of America's new jobs have been generated by independent work, which has risen by 7.8 per cent a year.65 The next time an economist boasts about America's low unemployment rate, remember that number means something very different from what it used to.

Just as the West's support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America's Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world's current democratic recession.

All of America's new jobs have been generated by independent work, which has risen by 7.8 per cent a year.65

In its study of the future of work, the laissez-faire Baker Institute admitted it had been 'unable to find any solutions based on the free market'.

It is the elites who are loosening their allegiances and workers who are reaching for national flags.

Summers complained of 'the development of stateless elites whose allegiance is to global economic success and their own prosperity rather than the interests of the nation where they are headquartered'.75

He advised a new 'responsible nationalism', which would 'begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good'.76

We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination and economic globalisation.

If the democratically backed will of the world's largest trading bloc can be undone by a group of unelected trade judges, imagine the odds for anyone else.