CAMBRIDGE — What is the government’s proper role in an advanced market economy? That is the fundamental question at the heart of the economic debacle in the United Kingdom.

CAMBRIDGE  —  Until this year, inflation in advanced economies like the United States and the United Kingdom had been so low for so long that one needed to be well into middle age to remember what living through the price surges of the late 1970s was like. It was bad.

CAMBRIDGE  —  Ask any economist whether competition is always a good thing, and the answer will be a resounding yes.

CAMBRIDGE  —  Starting in the 1980s, transnational production enabled the expansion of global trade and low prices for goods, contributing significantly to economic growth.

CAMBRIDGE  —  The recent publication of the UK government’s Leveling Up White Paper is a significant event.

CAMBRIDGE — How should we measure economic success? Criticisms of conventional indicators, particularly gross domestic product, have abounded for years, if not decades.

CAMBRIDGE — In the period leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis, a few prescient voices warned of potentially catastrophic systemic instability. In a famous 2005 speech, Raghuram G.

CAMBRIDGE — In his elegiac memoir The World of Yesterday, which he wrote while in exile from the Nazis, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig observed that most people cannot comprehend the prospect of catastrophic changes in their situation.

CAMBRIDGE — One of the economic challenges facing all Western governments in these uniquely testing times is how to redress geographic inequalities that have emerged over several decades.