The great reversal is coming. Is, in fact, already here. “The future will be nothing like the past” is the contention of Charles Goodhart in his and Manoj Pradhan’s extraordinary book. Nothing like the past. The great deflation is over; the great population boom has finished; the epic march of globalization is waning. The future will be nothing like the past. A return of inflation as the glut of workers product of China’s urbanization and the liberation of the enslaved living behind the iron curtain age and are not replaced. A return of nativism not through increased power of labor unions but of reactionary populist politics – voters turning to their voting cards as their union memberships lay scattered across the wreckage of workless towns. A glut of aged and infirm – the ravages of dementia as our next health crisis.

The future will be nothing like the past.

In this extraordinarily well researched and forward thinking book, these trends, which are already well advanced and at this point irreversible, are laid out and explained. It is not an “easy read”. You’re gonna have to slog through it – rereading sentences and paragraphs and putting it down to research something online. Do it; because we need to know what is coming.

The only place this book falls down is in the end, in recommendations. Tinkering with our tax code is not going to answer the problems created by the great reversal. We need a rethink of how society is organized.