Quotes from Edward Luce

The world's elites have helped to provoke what they feared: a populist uprising against the world economy.

It would also require a conscious effort to look at the world from unfamiliar standpoints and admit that the West has no monopoly on truth or virtue.

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.

In the US, the more liberal a city's politics, the higher the rate of inequality.

America's opioid epidemic is another warning light. Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, said that when societies hit a civilisational break the suicide rate soars.

They yearn for the security of a lost age. Just as America believed it had entered a post-racial era, Britain persuaded itself it had become a classless society.

Older societies are also less likely to launch businesses. The rate of start-ups in America has been dropping for years and is beginning to rival Europe's less entrepreneurial pace.

The fastest-growing units in the big Western companies are the legal and public relations departments. Big companies devote the bulk of their earnings to buying back shares and boosting dividend payments.

Slumburbia has also given rise to a new form of poverty: the amount of time people have to spend in their cars driving from one part-time job to another. The more time you waste in traffic, the likelier you are to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, stress and obesity. A life spent in the car is bad for your life expectancy. As we have seen, it can also play havoc with your political state of mind.

Much like the giant sucking sound of London hoovering up the UK's talent, Chicago now takes the best and the brightest from the small towns of America and plugs them into the global economy. Chicago's success is no longer symbiotic with its rural neighbours. It comes at their expense. Like London, Chicago's erstwhile middle classes also find it increasingly hard to keep up with rising costs. As

To the West's economic losers, cities like London and Chicago are not so much magnets as death stars.

Bismarck once said, 'Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

Though I try to avoid generalising about gender, it is fair to say that men are less adaptable to disruptions in their work routines than women, and more liable to vent their anger politically. To anyone who doubts that, I have a flying car to sell you. Meanwhile, remind yourselves of the impact manufacturing job losses have had on Western politics. Way more than half of Trump's voters were male. The same applies to the Brexit electorate.

In the West we spend half our time fretting about low-skilled immigrants. We should be worrying at least as much about high-skilled offshoring.

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. This is not your parents' economy.

Jeffrey Garten's history of globalisation, From Silk to Silicon, tells the story of the last millennium through ten biographies. His book ends with Steve Jobs. It opens with Genghis Khan. The latter's impact was a fitting one with which to begin his story.

The advantages of being raised on the right side of the tracks are too implicit to be enumerated. It is the few who have escaped who grasp the full impotence of those they have left behind. After

The meritocratic society has given way to a hereditary meritocracy. The children of the rich are overwhelmingly likely to stay rich.

The paranoia of strongmen far outweighs the supposed efficiency of their methods. Trust is the glue of a successful free society; fear is the currency of the autocrat. It is the former that is most desperately needed. By this measure – the most important of all – Trump is an unabashed autocrat. The more resistance he encounters, the more he will sow mistrust. Technology is Trump's friend. Science is his enemy.

Work is not just about economic reward. It is also about purpose and self-respect.

People tend to form political beliefs in their early years and then stick with them for life. If today's rich young are tomorrow's thought leaders, democracy has a shaky future.

Brecht once said: 'All power comes from the people. But where does it go?

No bourgeoisie, no democracy.

the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good'.76