ABSTRACT
In 1960 Britain came tenth in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) league table of real income per capita.2 This represented a striking change from fifty years earlier when Britain had been the wealthiest nation in Europe and if not the richest country in the world, then behind only the United States and perhaps Canada. That the average Briton in 1960 enjoyed a standard of living that his countrymen of 1910 would hardly have been able to conceive of was certainly true. It was equally true, however, that over the intervening decades real income per head had grown more slowly in Britain than in several other nations.
