Over the last decade, popular writing on economics and government has often—understandably enough perhaps—wallowed in despair. Since the financial crisis, economic growth has been lukewarm at best and wage growth distinctly soggy. Our economic future seemed perilous even before the pandemic hit in 2020. Warnings of rising inequality, robots taking our jobs and of a broken political system have been all the rage. James Plunkett’s End State, though, is rather different: it is a refreshingly optimistic book.
Organised around nine political, economic and social problems, End State sets out the difficulties but also works through potential solutions. Hope for the future comes from looking back into the past. For Plunkett, the digital revolution is as important today as the industrial revolution was to the 19th century. In the short term, the industrial revolution brought disruption, suffering and misery to many. But, managed under the right social and political framework, it eventually drove up living standards, life expectancy and satisfaction to previously unimagined highs.
Back then, sweeping technological change required equally sweeping reforms to political, legal and social models. Plunkett argues that what is needed now is a similar embedding of new technologies in an updated framework. Take the gig economy. Uber, says Plunkett, is “probably the best way to run a taxi service humanity has ever dreamed up.” But Uber sits within a framework of tax and employment laws unfit to deal with the new digital reality. The ideal would be “a well governed Uber; the power of digital technology but shaped and directed so that it’s humane.”
Plunkett is a well-respected policy thinker who has spent the last decade and a half variously in Downing Street, studying at Harvard, in think tanks and at NGOs. He is well versed in his subject matter and on top of the detail and yet, thankfully, the book does not read like a collection of policy reports. His style is engaging and personal. The reader experiences each chapter almost as a journey, exploring the topics alongside a knowledgeable and chatty tour guide.
