"The next 30 to 40 years are going to be very difficult," the influential economist Charles Goodhart warned recently.
"Those who lived primarily in the years between 1950 and 2020 — those 70 years — those were probably the best years in terms of growth, living standards, [and] conditions that not only the UK but effectively the Western world has ever seen."
Goodhart is an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and a former senior official at the Bank of England.
Peter McCormack is a bitcoin enthusiast who describes his personal politics as "small-c conservatism with a strong bent toward libertarianism", and he has had figures on his podcast, including Tommy Robinson and Curtis Yarvin.
If you are unfamiliar with Goodhart's approach to life, he made this observation at the start of their conversation:.
According to Goodhart, the early decades of the UK's inflation-targeting era coincided with a period of globalisation in which Western countries pushed manufacturing industries offshore and shifted domestic production to services.
"It was a temporary fortunate period, but people didn't realise how temporary and how fortunate it was, partly because they thought it was all due to the brilliance and expertise of the central banks in maintaining these inflation targets."
"But the central banks didn't have any difficulty."
Jump forward to 2026, he said, and younger people are living in a different world.
In coming decades, he said, aging populations would also put younger workers under an increasing tax level, and the UK government would have to overhaul its tax system to adjust to some serious demographic and fiscal realities.