We are all about to get a lot poorer — that much is baked in. The question is, who gets the blame? Will we take out our frustration on incumbent governments or attribute our fall in living standards to the global crisis?

The only meaningful way to measure wealth is to look at the ratio of time worked to goods or services purchased. How many minutes did you need to put in to afford, say, a haircut, a cup of coffee, an hour of artificial light, or a journey to the nearest city? By that measure, human beings have been getting steadily richer for several hundred years. But there are occasional downswings, and this one looks especially nasty.