“I used to be a Marxist myself when I was about fifteen. I think it was easier to believe in Marx at that time, before or during the Second World War, because there had been this slump in the 1920’s. I lived in the north of England where mining and shipbuilding were major industries, but when I was young, they collapsed. The pound was overvalued. I was used to a situation seeing a lot of unemployed people picking up cigarette butts. To my mind at that time, capitalism had no future. But when I worked in OECD I changed my position. It seemed to me that capitalism was not dead or dying. I think what has happened to the communist countries since 1990 or so shows that that system didn’t work.”

Angus Maddison, Economist