The enduring enigma of economic growth

[LONDON] Keir Starmer became the UK’s prime minister by promising to reignite economic growth. Less than two years later, his poll ratings have tanked, and his defenestration is almost a done deal. One reason for his political troubles (there are many) is that the British economy never took off.

Politicians like to pretend that they control the levers of economic growth. But as Starmer’s plummeting popularity shows, that pretence has worn increasingly thin.

The people who call themselves development economists, by contrast, do not even pretend to know the root causes of growth. A quarter-century ago, they decided that the riddle of why some countries become rich while others stay poor was too tricky to tackle.