Jamie Merchant is media director for the Center for Progressive Strategy. He depicts the decline of capitalism, focusing on the US and British economies.

US real growth per head averaged 2.3 per cent from 1953 to 1973, 2 per cent from 1973 to 2007, and 0.7 per cent from 2007 to 2019. From 1950 to 1973, the world economy grew on average by 2.92 per cent per head, by 1.8 per cent from 1973 to 1990, then by 1.5 per cent, down to 1.2 per cent in 2019.

There was a time, as Sean McMeekin reminds us, when public commentators were in near total-consensus. Communism had been tossed aside in eastern Europe in 1989. Two years later it met the same fate in the Soviet Union. In China the communist leadership was by then pursuing the benefits of capitalist economics. Governments actually committed to communism remained in only a few countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, and it seemed that the wheel of global history had turned irreversibly against it.

Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to Think Impossibly, draws on a range of sources including gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.