"History Pays Interest" begins from a different premise entirely: that time is not neutral, and that the past does not simply precede the present - it funds it. The economist who understands what came before does not just have context. They have an edge. History, studied carefully, compounds. It reveals the load-bearing structures beneath institutions that look natural but were built. It exposes the strategic logic behind outcomes that look accidental. It shows, with uncomfortable clarity, who has been paying whose tab. The fifteen pieces in this issue are written by correspondents who have gone looking for that edge - and found it.

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The issue opens with "What History Lent Us" - five pieces that reach back to find the origins of structures so embedded we have stopped noticing them. Sushant begins at the furthest point, asking whether the Black Death was not merely a catastrophe but the founding shock of the modern labour movement - a moment so total in its disruption that it permanently repriced what human work was worth. Deniz Cicek stands under the Portico and asks whether UCL's founding promise - that education drives economic progress - has actually held true. Atreyi goes down a similar avenue, examining whether two centuries of expanding higher education in the UK have actually moved the needle on inequality - or whether the widening of the gate has been more symbolic than structural. Amba Arjun reconstructs the long invisibility of women's labour, arguing that the rise in female participation over the past century is not a story of women entering the economy for the first time, but of their work finally being counted. Saksham closes the section by standing far enough back to see two hundred years of UK trade history in a single frame - and finding that the patterns visible at that distance look very different from the ones that dominate the current conversation.

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The second section, "How We Spent It", asks what was done with the inheritance. Shalin opens by examining South Korea's chaebol economy - industrial conglomerates built through deliberate state strategy that grew so large and so entrenched that dismantling them became politically unthinkable, raising the question of whether the growth they produced was ever really separable from the power they accumulated. Matteo then makes the case that Italy's postwar growth was never quite the miracle it appeared - that competitive devaluation was doing quiet, sustained work beneath the headline figures, and that the loss of that tool upon joining the euro explains more about Italy's subsequent stagnation than most accounts allow. Dhwani chronicles the long, unsuccessful history of de-dollarisation attempts, finding that each successive challenge to dollar dominance has foundered not on politics or will but on the structural gravity of a currency so deeply embedded in global trade architecture that alternatives cannot simply be chosen into existence. Janice Goh goes a step further by taking the fractures in globalisation seriously, tracing how BRICS+'s push for de-dollarisation reveals a world economy splintering not into blocs, but into parallel financial architectures that may have to learn to coexist. Shreyas closes the section by asking the most direct question of all: has economic growth in the UK actually reduced inequality, or has the growth dividend been spent in ways that left the distribution largely untouched?

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The final section, "What We Still Owe", is where the compounding becomes visible. Louis opens by examining energy as a geopolitical weapon - tracing how dependence that was once managed as an economic variable has become a lever of coercion, and what the historical record tells us about who ends up paying when that lever is pulled. Dimitrios then asks who really absorbs the cost when the Middle East destabilises, finding that the shock is distributed asymmetrically across economies that had no meaningful role in the decisions that produced it. Alisa examines the stabilising mechanisms behind Hong Kong's currency peg - a system that has held through considerable pressure, but whose architecture requires a particular configuration of global conditions to keep functioning. Siddhant asks whether 19th century capital markets saw the whaling industry's collapse coming - and finds, through a regression across 2,000 voyage records, that they didn't. Samuel Ducrey closes the issue by asking how many UCL economists it takes to explain one more pint at the Rocket - and finds that Jevons on marginal utility, Robbins on scarcity, and Deaton on wellbeing between them account for pretty much every decision a UCL student makes before noon.

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History pays interest. Not as a metaphor, but as a mechanism. The economists who have shaped the world have almost always been the ones who understood what came before well enough to see what was coming next. We hope the pieces in this issue offer some of that understanding - and that the return, as ever, justifies the time invested.

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This is the third and final issue of The Economic Tribune under my editorship. I came to the Tribune as an economics correspondent myself - though my relationship with writing started earlier than that, with a couple of children's books I published at ten years old that have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with why I still believe writing does something models cannot. The Tribune gave me a place to pursue that belief seriously, and the people who made it possible deserve more than a paragraph. To Yueqi, Alberta, Navin, Siya, Laboni, Aadi, Samaira, and Ella - thank you for making this year's team one worth remembering. To every writer who trusted us with their ideas, and every reader who found something worth thinking about in these pages - this was for you. The Tribune has given me more than I gave it, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say. To whoever carries it forward: the foundation is solid, the standards are high, and the readers deserve everything you have. History pays interest - and so, it turns out, does this.

 

With interest, always,

Jai Vasandani
Director, 2025/26