Recently I re-read a couple of Daniel Bell books – just finished a volume he edited with Irving Kristol called 'Capitalism Today'. The striking think about the essays by economists such as Bob Solow, Robert Gordon and martin Bronfenbrenner is that there are remarkable parallels between the late 70s and today. This struck me to when I first started my re-doing Bell phase with The Post-Industrial Society, a couple of years ago, but has become more striking now the crisis is upon us. The terms in which people wrote then about the turning point in capitalism are very similar to those being used now. There's a lesson for us there but I'm not sure whether it's about the severity of the crisis or the resilience of capitalism.

Last post for a few days as I'm taking a well-deserved break in the Scottish highlands, with Team of Rivals for reading.