Within hours of becoming Prime Minister last year, Theresa May made an important economic statement. She put ‘Industrial Strategy’ in the title of the Department for Business. No longer, she was declaring, would a Conservative administration regard active government intervention in the economy as anathema. The economy was too weak for such a luxury. Henceforth the state would play a leading role in getting markets and private enterprise to work better. In most developed countries this would not be news. But industrial strategy in the UK has tended to be regarded as something we did in the 1960s and 1970s – and it didn’t go well. Governments tried to ‘pick winners’ and ended up picking losers (Concorde, British Leyland) instead. This view was always a caricature, but it’s

As you would hope, there was a lot of new economic thinking at the recent (21-23 October) Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) conference in Edinburgh. Economists from across the world presented stimulating papers on issues ranging from secular stagnation to imperfect knowledge, the dual economy to macroeconomics and gender. There were evolutionary and behavioural economists, post-Keynesians and complexity theorists. But after all was said and done, did it add up to anything more than the sum of its fascinating parts? Is there a coherent new economics emerging out of this ferment? This is not an academic question – though it should also be