I noted earlier that the “conservative revolution” that gripped the United States and Great Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, and that led to, among other things, greater tolerance of very high executive pay, was probably due in part to a feeling that these countries were being overtaken by others (even though the postwar period of high growth in Europe and Japan was in reality an almost mechanical consequence of the shocks of the period 1914–1945).
