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Advertising legend and Spectator columnist Rory Sutherland joins Michael Simmons to explain why he thinks Britain’s economic problem isn’t income, tax rates or even inequality — it’s property, rent extraction, and a national belief that housing is the safest and smartest place to store wealth.
Reading Careless People, an exposé of life within Facebook written by a Kiwi, it occurred to me that one potential advantage that the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have over the US is we do not unthinkingly idolise the very rich. Americans sometimes find this confusing: it always irked transplanted American bankers in London that local employees were eager to make a few million quid, but lost interest beyond a certain threshold. Once they had a rectory in the Cotswolds, an Aga, two labradors and a Range Rover it was game over, you win. This is because the US is more of a money/power economy, whereas the Commonwealth countries
London and the South East, The Innocent, Spring, All That Man Is, Turbulence – the titles of David Szalay’s first five novels, which won a flurry of prizes, are all captured, in a sense, by Flesh, his sixth. Much of the latest book is set in Britain’s capital, and the innocent frequently lose that tag as its protagonist battles to advance his position. When we first meet him, Istvan is 15, living with his mother in Budapest in the dying days of communism and being introduced to sex by a neighbour. Having served a jail sentence for killing the woman’s husband, this ‘solitary individual’ joins the army and, after tours
Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse
Fleishman is in Trouble was one of the funniest novels of 2020, and it catapulted Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times journalist, into the spotlight with a US TV series two years later. Long Island Compromise is a rollicking family saga written with the same sardonic wit. It is centred around a wealthy family living in a suburb of Long Island, who owe their fortune to the late patriarch, a Jewish European émigré who set up a successful factory making polystyrene foam moulds. There’s a backstory to this, which we learn later, but his indomitable widow and his son Carl’s wife Ruth rule the roost. At the beginning, Carl is
Apparently much of the notoriety – or perhaps by now it has become allure – of Essex is my fault. In 1990, weeks before Mrs Thatcher was defenestrated, I wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph called ‘Essex Man’, in circumstances that Tim Burrows describes entirely accurately in this exceptionally well-written and intelligent book. Although the Iron Lady was about to be history, the part of England that had come to exemplify her achievement and her legacy was throbbing with capitalist energy more than ever – which motivated the profile of Essex Man and his hard work and ability to seize opportunities in a society where native ability counted for
In October 1897, the grandees of the Royal Horticultural Society gathered to bestow their highest award, the Victoria Medal of Honour, struck to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, to 60 of gardening’s greatest luminaries. For the first time, these included two women. One was Gertrude Jekyll, known by all as the Queen of Spades; the other was the 39-year-old Ellen Willmott. But Willmott did not turn up. This public snub was the beginning of her reputation as ‘gardening’s bad girl’, as Sandra Lawrence puts it, one that increased exponentially until it exploded in stories of daffodils being booby-trapped to deter bulb thieves. By trawling through innumerable newly discovered diaries and
The $5.79 trillion budget plan Joe Biden submitted to Congress yesterday was more notable for what it didn’t include, rather than what it did. There were no line items on the environment or education – key pillars of his ‘Build Back Better’ agenda – but it did call for a new minimum tax requiring ‘billionaires’ to pay at least 20 per cent of their income in taxes, including on the gains on investments that have not been sold. This will, apparently, reduce the government deficit by $360 billion over the next decade. The President is in a tight spot. Since the turn of the year, his approval ratings have fallen
Gstaad Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with talking about privilege is that the discussion goes around in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than about the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question to my son’s friends. There were no straightforward answers. Let’s face it, privilege is so enjoyable that the beneficiaries are mostly seen as undeserving, spoilt lightweights — by the underprivileged, that is. Envy has always been around, as has the urge to
