The underlying problem, as always, was that there was little idea of what life for ordinary people could or should be like in ten or twenty years’ time. And this wasn’t an economy that had been doing reasonably well and needed only a gentle steer: a deeply exploitative colonial economy had been followed by war and a disastrous socialist experiment. Capitalism was then resuscitated in the 1990s by a hodgepodge of illicit industries. It was an incredibly unequal economy that was in danger of being overwhelmed by two unmanageable forces: the disastrous effects of climate change and the rise of
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