This week we learned that John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) had been voted the most significant scholarly work for modern Britain.

Actually, if we go back a little further to 1930, Keynes was already writing extensively about the risks of an economy becoming stuck in a period of semi-permanent slump. Just how prescient today are these words from 87 years ago?

"For it is a possibility that the duration of the slump may be much more prolonged than most people are expecting and much will be changed both in our ideas and in our methods before we emerge.

Not, of course the duration of the acute phase of the slump, but that of the long, dragging conditions of semi-slump, or at least sub-normal prosperity, which may be expected to succeed the acute phase.”

This quote comes from a superb lecture on the UK and US labour markets from Professor Danny Blanchflower given at Stirling University a few weeks ago. He returned to the UK this week to give a talk at the University of Leicester. He appeared yesterday in a lively economic discussion on the Daily Politics.