Quotes from Edward Luce

Many comfort themselves that Trump's victory was an accident delivered by the dying gasp of America's white majority – and abetted by Putin. History will resume normal business after a brief interruption. How I wish they were right. I fear they are not.

With chisels and pickaxes we made our tiny contributions to this orgy of historic vandalism.

Mitt Romney

On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.

The search for Eden always ends in tears.

It is as if we were to start hacking a path through the Amazon forest. By the time we have proceeded a hundred yards, the undergrowth takes over again.

By any numerical measure, humanity is becoming rapidly less poor. But between half and two-thirds of people in the West have been treading water – at best – for a generation. Tens of millions of Westerners will struggle to keep their heads above the surface over the coming decades. The spread of automation, including artificial intelligence and remote intelligence, which some call the fourth industrial revolution, is still in its early stages.

It is not just that people are staying physically put. They are also likelier to stay trapped in the same income group. America, in particular, which had traditionally shown the highest class mobility of any Western country, now has the lowest.

For those who still believe our age's disruptions match what happened after 1870, ask yourself which you would first give up, your iPhone or the flush toilet? Laptop or antibiotics? If you have trouble answering those, ponder life without electricity. It is a measure of our solipsism that we take for granted what went before.

To be clear: the West's souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.

The emergence of China is the most dramatic event in economic history. We are living in an age of convergence no less dramatic than the age of divergence brought about by European colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. The downward pressure on the incomes of the West's middle classes in the coming years will be relentless.

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science fiction likes to depict a dystopia in which the robots have taken over. A less fantastical idea is that the robots will indeed take over. But it will be at the behest of a narrow elite of human masters.

the Toil Index – the number of working hours it takes a median worker to pay the median rent in one of America's big cities. In 1950 it took forty-five hours per month. A generation later it had edged up to fifty-six hours. Today it takes 101 hours.

The meritocratic society has given way to a hereditary meritocracy.

the murder rate has fallen by 16.7 per cent in the US cities since the turn of the century, while rising by 16.9 per cent in the suburbs – almost an exact mirror image.42

every single one of America's 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton.43 The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small-town, went for Donald Trump.

M + D = C, Monopoly plus Discretion equals Corruption

Almost half of Americans would be unable to pay a $400 medical emergency bill without going into debt.67

The new economy requires consumers with spending power – just as the old one did. Yet much like the farmer who eats his seed corn, Big Data is gobbling up its source of future revenue.

Davos has become the emblem of a global elite that has lost its ability to listen.

GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history. FRIEDRICH HEGEL

GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions. The world's most informative graph is the Elephant Chart.

if you want an economic chart that stops you from sleeping you should start with the elephant.