In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected president of the US, he promised to learn from Germany. Rightly or wrongly, any American president who did so today would be regarded as mad. Germany is now viewed as the sick man of Europe.

This illustrates a fascinating reversal. The long decades of post-second world war decline of the English-speaking, high-income countries have ended. Since the early 1990s they have been doing better than many other long- established high-income countries and, above all, than the four dominant non-English-speaking countries: Japan, Germany, France and Italy.