Every book has its moment of conception and its period of drafting. This book has been a long time in the making, but its drafting began only very recently and at a particularly awesome moment. Drafting began in the interregnum between two US Administrations, just as Donald Trump was poised to become the forty-fifth president of the United States; and on the day in which, in the United Kingdom, the new Conservative Government led by Theresa May lost its first by-election in a strong Tory seat, as buyer’s remorse about the Brexit vote began belatedly to surface. Because of developments of this kind, early 2017 seemed to be both a good and a bad time to begin to write. Given all that was happening around us, it seemed a particularly appropriate moment to put together a systematic reflection on the future of both societies, and on the likely strength of the economies on which those societies rest. But it was also a moment at which such a reflection was bound to be difficult to deliver, because there was suddenly so much political novelty and uncertainty in both London and Washington, DC. Any reflection written to illuminate the times would, therefore, need to explain that novelty and uncertainty, as well as throw light on the continuities that make the novelty so disturbing.

For just twelve months earlier, when Barack Obama gave his last State of the Union Address and David Cameron returned from Brussels with his renegotiated settlement with the European Union, neither Donald J. Trump’s occupancy of the White House, nor Theresa May’s of No. 10, was visible on the political radar of any serious public commentator. But here we were, facing 2017 with both newly in charge: the one poised to substantially reconfigure America’s already inadequate welfare net (and to do an additional set of entirely unclear things to “make America great again”); the other poised to somehow negotiate the UK’s route out of the European Union without damaging still further the already vulnerable UK economy. Of course, neither of these political figures will necessarily be with us for long – May, if her weakened condition after her unsuccessful general election continues, Trump if he is eventually impeached – but even if either/both fall from power as sharply as they rose, the political volatility from which they both benefited will undoubtedly persist.