A century ago, people like me — macroeconomists — did not exist. Nor did macroeconomics itself as a discipline. It took the tumult of 1929’s stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s to usher in an intellectual and policy revolution: the national accounts (the statistical bedrock for measuring the economy), macroeconomic theory (the conceptual basis for understanding the economy) and monetary and fiscal policy frameworks (to help the economy avert future tumult). 

A century on, echoing Milton Friedman’s words in the 1960s, we are all macroeconomists now — armchair or otherwise. Small movements in GDP and inflation dominate public discourse. Taxation and government spending shape political and public debate. Yet the greatest peril facing us today is not a repeat of the Great Crash or Great Depression (though neither is impossible). Rather it is a widening of a “Great Division” that has emerged within and between societies over the past half-century.  

We see those divisions at the geopolitical level in the increasing numbers of wars, real and trade-related, and an arms race in defence spending and tariffs. We see those divisions nationally, with fractured and polarised electorates engaged in fractious and polarising elections this year. And we see these divisions locally too, in the rising discontent and insecurity felt within many communities — something recent riots in the UK and Ireland illustrated only too clearly.