Jesse Heasman

BREAKING: University College London Professor Tim Rocktäschel officially launches Recursive with $650M in funding at a $4.65B valuation led by Google Ventures.

Sweden is choosing capitalism. Social spending as percentage of GDP is now 24%, lower than most of Northern Europe. Sweden has surpassed the US in billionaires per capita. School choice is universal, one in ten teens goes to a school operated by a company listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. Taxes have been cut three years in a row. Sweden has seen "more than 500 initial public offerings over the 10 years through 2024, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain combined" Nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are now privately owned. The result? Same as always. Sweden is projected to grow 2% a year through 2030, which is the same as the US and double France and Germany. How many times does this have to keep happening across the world? How many times does free market capitalism have to prove itself superior to socialism before the world accepts the truth?

Governing today should be about one thing and one thing only: economic growth. Not as a nice to have, not as proof that you’re doing a good job, but as the vital underpinning requirement for everything. This government has never understood that. Chances are no new Labour PM will, either.

More capitalist countries have lower income inequality, not higher. High income inequality is caused by cronyism which goes hand in hand with highly regulated markets. Welfare states also lower inequality, but you need free markets wealth to have generous welfare states.

Until someone bites the bullet, slashes spending, and does the difficult pro-growth reforms this country desperately needs, we will continue to have a ridiculous carousel of Prime Minsters. The truth is the Prime Minister could have survived the Mandelson scandal if people felt better off in their pockets. While there’s no growth, there’s no longevity of political tenure. Blair survived plenty of scandal, and plenty of Mandelson, ultimately because everything in life’s wider context didn’t feel so desperately shit. Until we have a political class brave enough to end the overspending, liberalise the labour market, and *actually* overhaul the planning system - we’re going to be stuck in this same psychodrama of doom.

We lack the words to describe our current economic model. Link below.