The post-war decades created an extraordinary period of rising wages, affordable homes and economic security. Those conditions are gone. Politics must stop promising their return and start deciding how prosperity is shared in a slower-growth world.

Picture a working family in an Australian city in 1935. They rent. The father has been in and out of work for five years. Three years earlier, 29 per cent of trade union members had no job. There is no national unemployment benefit, only state relief. Food is the biggest item in the weekly budget. The parents were born into a country where one baby in 10 died before its first birthday. Materialism was not about buying the next iPhone but rather a fresh pair of socks.

Now picture their children in 1965. They own a house or are buying one. The husband has never been unemployed. Across his working life, the jobless rate has rarely risen above 3 per cent. One wage carries the mortgage. There is a car in the drive and the promise of a pension at the end of a working life. Their own children will finish school, and some will go to university.

Those children grew up assuming this was how the world worked. Work hard, buy a house, retire secure, watch your kids do better than you did.

They were wrong about one thing. It was not how the world worked. It was how the world worked for about 30 years, in a few dozen countries, once. For all of human history, this lifestyle was fantastical.

Most of our politics is now an argument about how to get back there. Almost nobody in public life will say out loud that the conditions that built it are gone. This truly was a unique period in human history.

For most of the history of the industrial West, the mass of people lived close to the edge. Not always destitute. But one illness, one layoff or one bad season away from it.

The numbers are plain. An Australian boy born in the first decade of last century could expect to live to 55, a girl to 59. American households in 1901 spent 42.5 per cent of their budget on food. Food, clothing and shelter together took almost 80 per cent. There was very little left for anything that might be called a choice.

In 1940, nearly half of American homes lacked complete plumbing. That means hot and cold piped water, a bath or shower and a flush toilet. This was the richest country on earth, on the eve of the boom.

In 1899, the researcher Seebohm Rowntree surveyed the English city of York and found about 28 per cent of its people in poverty. He went back in 1936. Eighteen per cent of those he surveyed were still poor. The causes matter more than the count. A third of the poor were in regular work, on wages too low to live on. More than a quarter were poor because the breadwinner had no job.

It would be wrong to say nothing improved before the war. Real wages rose. Families got smaller. By the harshest measures of destitution, poverty among British working households fell close to zero between 1904 and 1937.

But the gains were thin and easily reversed. The Depression proved it. Australia had lifted home ownership to 49 per cent by 1911. Thirty-six years later, after a depression and two........

© Pearls and Irritations