Toward a lost decade

About 30 years ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ideas about the "free market" and its magical powers were becoming almost depressingly dominant. The narrative went that the market, free from "regulations" (essentially the forces of capital freed from society), promoting free competition and opening the way for innovation everywhere, would bring prosperity and liberal democracy everywhere in the world. It was "The End of History," as political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote in his 1989 book.

Today, 30 years later, the world economy is entering the worst five-year period of recent decades. We might even be looking at a "lost decade," as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank warned a few days ago.

The global economy is entering a five-year period that seems to be the worst that humanity has seen for about 30 years, since the 1990s, said IMF...