Keen On

What the former Finance Minister of Chile Andres Velasco has called the Deliveroo effect is most evident in Poland. Despite unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, Velasco explains, Poles remain miserable. The problem, he suggests, is that we’ve become so used to the magical efficiencies of the digital revolution, that we expect instant miracles in both our political and economic lives. That’s one of the core issues Velasco, now Dean of Public Policy at the London School of Economics, and a group of leading public policy experts address in an intriguing collection of essays entitled The London Consensus. What the authors - who include Philippe Aghion, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in economics - explore is how to come up with economic principles for the 21st Century that make us both happier and more prosperous, while confronting an existential challenge like climate change that didn’t even register in last century’s Washington Consensus. But democracy, Velasco warns, can’t work like a delivery app. We’v