Most economic policy still operates on the assumption that the levers work the way they did between 1985 and 2008. Lower the rate, the economy heats. Raise it, prices cool. Open the fiscal taps, demand follows. Cut taxes on capital, investment follows. The post-2008 record is a graveyard of these correlations, and the post-2020 record is worse.
This essay opens a series. The chapters that follow will look at each failed lever — monetary, fiscal, industrial, trade — in turn.
What stopped working
Lower interest rates were supposed to mobilise idle capital. Instead, a decade of near-zero rates produced the largest asset-price inflation in modern history, with negligible productive investment to show for it.
The argument is not that growth is impossible — it is that the institutional configuration we built around the 1985-2008 window has become a negative causal factor: the very mechanisms that once amplified investment now suppress it.
The phrase
Common wealth without growth is common poverty.
The phrase is meant literally. Redistribution that arrives without productive expansion is rationing under a different name. Most of the political language of the last decade — fairness, equity, sustainability — has been used to describe rationing while pretending it’s something else.