Monocle Monday

On the high-speed train back from work, I indulge in a moment away from everything with the April issue of Monocle. From Seminyak to Portugal via Café Prückel in Vienna, its pages fill me with equal measures of nostalgia and excitement about the future.

Apparently, that feeling is quite different from how most people seem to view the world these days. As Gordon Brown writes in today’s The Guardian, decades of near-zero growth have left many Europeans convinced that the future will be bleak and that they can only do better if others do badly; zero-sum beliefs that help explaining, at least in part, the support for far-right parties and their short-sighted protectionist policies.