The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All, by Martin Sandbu

The attitude to the remaining pillar—the postwar social market economy—is more complicated. Ultimately it is also the most consequential, for, as I will argue, the other two pillars of the Western order will stand or fall depending on whether it can deliver on its economic promise.

The Western-style social market democracy that thrived in the postwar decades was an unwritten but firm social contract. One of its vital elements was economic solidarity: a promise that everyone would share in the fruits of growth. Common to most of those rallying behind illiberal or nationalist forces is their sense that the economy has changed for the worse in general, and for people like them in particular. The reason why the slogans about restoring past greatness—“ Make America Great Again” and “Take Back Control”—have such appeal is that the economic and social order of the postwar decades is remembered not as something to be rejected but as something to be restored.

Behind the illiberalism and nationalism, therefore, there is a prior economic claim. This claim is that the economic opportunities on which previous generations thrived have dried up, and those that still exist have been closed off and reserved for an elite to which “normal people” don’t belong. Those turning against the Western order are those who feel left behind in it, but not just that: they feel left behind by their own—betrayed by the elites who constructed the system and were entrusted with making it deliver.

https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/the-economics-of-belonging-a-radical-plan-to-win-back-the-left-behind-and-achieve-prosperity-for-all-by-martin-sandbu?utm_source=newsletter_mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter