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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Reality and the power of narrative [1]

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Date: 2023-02-06  

Simon Tilford/Foreign Policy:

Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands

Things weren’t nearly this bad in the 1970s—but the country’s leaders haven't grasped that yet.

By any criteria, the United Kingdom faces a serious economic and social crisis, one that will deepen without big shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of this crisis among the country’s elite, not least its politicians.

The power of narratives helps explain this disconnect. The gap between the U.K.’s reality as portrayed by the dominant narrative of its economy’s performance and real life as experienced by its average citizen has widened to the breaking point. The resulting political distortions are now making the underlying problems even worse.

Narratives and the emotional impulses that drive them play an underappreciated role in our understanding of the way economies work and whether they are perceived to be performing well or not. Sometimes, there is real grounding to those narratives; other times, they are largely fictional constructs. This does not necessarily mean that those who believe them and propagate them are dishonest, only that their personal experience may not be representative of the economy as a whole.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/6/2151282/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Reality-and-the-power-of-narrative

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