And yet, until the 1980s it was not clear how irretrievably the foundations of the golden age had crumbled. Until the USSR and the Eastern Europe of 'real socialism' had collapsed entirely, the global nature of the crisis was not recognised.The crisis decades after 1973 were not a 'Great Depression' in the sense of the 1930s The global economy did not break down, even momentarily. In 1991, the countries of the developed capitalist world were, taken as a whole, far richer and more productive than in the early 1970s, and the global economy of which they still formed the central element was vastly more dynamic.But the situation in particular regions was considerably less rosy. In Africa, in Western Asia and in Latin America the growth of GDP per capita ceased.

For these parts of the world the 1980s were an era of severe depression, in which most people actually became poorer. As for the countries of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, their economies, which had continued in modest growth during the 1980s, collapsed utterly after 1989. In this region the comparison with the Great Slump was perfectly apposite, although it underestimated the devastation of the early 1990s. Russia's GDP fell by 17 per cent in 1990-91, by 19 per cent in 1991-92 and by 11 per cent in 1992-93.

Poland had lost over 21 per cent of its GDP in 1988-92, Czechoslovakia almost 20 per cent, Romania and Bulgaria 30 per cent or more. And though the capitalist world economy flourished, it was not at ease. The problems which had dominated the critique of capitalism before the war, and which the golden age had largely eliminated for a generation - poverty, mass unemployment, squalor, instability - reappeared after 1973. Growth was, once again, interrupted by severe slumps, as distinct from 'minor recessions'. Unemployment in Western Europe rose from an average of 1.5 per cent in the 1960s to 4.2 per cent in the 1970s.

At the peak of the boom in the late 1980s it averaged 9.2 per cent in the European Community; in 1993, 11 per cent. Even many of the richest and most developed countries found themselves, once again, getting used to the sight of beggars on the streets, and of the homeless sheltering in doorways in cardboard boxes. On any night of 1993 in New York 23,000 men and women slept on the street or in public shelters. In the United Kingdom (1989) 400,000 people were officially classed as 'homeless'.