Martin Wolf - The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

The Shifts and the Shocks: What Weve Learnedand Have Still to Learnfrom the Financial Crisis

Fixing Global Finance

Why Globalization Works

The Resistible Appeal of Fortress Europe

Indias Exports

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Attributed to Mark Twain

My opinions have altered as the world has unfolded. I make no apologies for this. Those who have not changed their opinions over a lifetime do not think. But my values have not altered. I inherited them from my parents, both refugees from Hitlers Europe. I believe in democracy and so in the obligations of citizenship, in individual liberty and so in the freedom of opinion, and in the Enlightenment and so in the primacy of truth. The role of the fourth estate is, in my view, to serve these great causes. I am proud to have been one of its servants.

I made these remarks in New York on June 27, 2019, when I received the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for business journalism. They are my credo. This book is witness to where those unchanging values and evolving opinions have brought me at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

In the middle of the eighth decade of my life, I see a long historical circlea circle that includes not just my life but also those of my parents. This story of two generations began on April 23, 1910, with the birth of my father, Edmund Wolf, in the Polish city of Rzeszw, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By then the potent nineteenth-century mixture of industrialization, urbanization, class conflict, nationalism, imperialism, racism, and great-power rivalry had been at work for a long time. Four years later, the First World War, the conflict that was to demolish European stability, began. My grandfather, Ignatz, fearful of the arrival of Russian armies, moved his family to Vienna, where my father grew up. My mother, Rebecca Wolf (ne Wijnschenk), was born in Amsterdam on August 30, 1918, just over two months before the First World War ended, although the Netherlands itself remained neutral. The Bolshevik revolution was just over nine months old when she was born.

Monarchs fled. European empires fell. A new world was born. But the hopes that it would be a better one proved a fantasy. In its place came the chaos of the interwar years: in the 1920s, hyperinflations, a fragile and unbalanced economic recovery, and battles among democrats, communists, and fascists; in the 1930s, the Great Depression, the collapse of the gold standard, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the US, Japanese militarism, Stalins show trials, the Spanish civil war, appeasement, and at the end of the decade, the Second World War. This surely had been a time of trouble.

My father, rightly fearful of what Hitlers Germany intended, left Austria in 1937. My mother fled the Netherlands with her parents and siblings in May 1940, as the Nazis invaded. My parents met in wartime London in the autumn of 1942, at a party given by Dutch Jewish friends of my mother to celebrate the return from internment of my fathers closest friend, who had been interned in Australia as an enemy alien, while my father had been similarly interned in Canada. My parents marriage on October 21, 1943, led to my birth on August 16, 1946, and so to my life as a man brought up and educated in Britain. I have also spent all but sixteen years of this life as a Londoner.

Without the Second World War and the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, my Austrian-Jewish father and my Dutch-Jewish mother would never have met. I and my brother, born in 1948, are, like many millions of others, children of catastrophe. My parents and their immediate families escaped the wreck. My fathers family (his parents, brother, sister, and his brothers wife and daughter) did so by managing, with difficulty, to reach Palestine in 1939. My mothers family did so by reaching an English fishing port on a trawler in May 1940. Their wider families of aunts, uncles, and cousins were murdered almost to the last individual. My mothers family had been large: her father, born poor in Amsterdam, was one of nine siblings. She told me that about thirty of her close relatives died during the Shoah, or Holocaust, as it is more usually known. She almost never spoke of this catastrophe. But I was aware that my parents history was not like that of the other adults I knew, except for my parents closest friends, who shared similar histories as refugees.

Not infrequently, people who read or hear me complain of my pessimism. To this criticism, I give three responses. The first is that my pessimism has made most of the surprises I have experienced pleasant ones. The second is that my biggest mistakes have come from overoptimism, most recently over the wisdom of finance and the good sense of electorates. The third and probably most important response is that my existence is due to the decisions of two pessimistic men: my father and my mothers father. My father took the opportunity afforded by the royalties he earned from early successes as a playwright in Vienna to leave for London on the way, he hoped, to America. My grandfather, who had left school in Amsterdam as a child and became a successful fish merchant in Ijmuiden on the coast of North Holland, was not only realistic, but also able to make quick decisions. As soon as the Germans invaded his country, he obtained a trawler and a captain (being a well-known fish merchant, he presumably found this not too difficult) and invited his relatives to join him and his family. He waited for some hours, but none of them came. In the end, the captain told him they had to go, presumably because of the speed of the German advance. My grandfathers combination of pessimism with quick wits saved his own family. But almost all their relatives perished. Pessimism saved him.

Yet these answers, while true, are not the whole story. My family history makes me aware of the fragility of civilization. Any moderately well-informed Jew should know this. But the connection to the Shoah reinforces it. Homo sapiens is prone to orgies of stupidity, brutality, and destruction. Humans naturally separate people into those who belong to their tribe and outsiders. They slaughter the latter gleefully. They have always done so. I have never taken peace, stability, or freedom for granted and regard those who do as fools.

My childhood was, nevertheless, secure. I loved and trusted my parentsand rightly so. Postwar England was shabby: I still remember the bomb sites in the City of London. But the country felt to me stable, peaceful, democratic, and free. The Cold War was a shadow upon us and at some points, notably the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, was even terrifying. Yet the world seemed solid as I grew up.