The world is facing five fearsome new giants

THE Second World War was won on the home front as well as the battlefield. As early as 1942, the British government pledged itself, as soon as the Nazis were defeated, to slaying “Five Giants on the road to reconstruction”: disease, want, ignorance, squalor and idleness.

- ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE

This pledge boosted morale and provided the template for the postwar welfare state. A “revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching”, wrote William Beveridge, the Liberal grandee who wrote the government report that identified the giants.

Today we are involved in another war and another revolution — an undeclared war against the “axis of autocracy”, led by Russia and China, and a revolution driven by technological innovation.

The Five Giants that Beveridge identified have largely been vanquished. Life expectancy across the West is about 20 years longer than it was in 1942. But new giants have emerged — giants that are more subtle than the old giants but no less fearsome.

These giants explain why the West is gripped by such a sense of malaise despite relentless material progress and why its citizens’ confidence in the future is fading.

What are these new giants, and how can we defeat them?

Loneliness: More than a quarter of US households consist of one person living alone - “cat ladies” and “cavemen”. Many workers, particularly in the just-in-time economy, work alone as well as live alone.

A quarter of US 40-year-olds have never married, up from just 6% in 1970. Social isolation is bad for individuals, increasing the chances of premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but it is also bad for the species. The German fertility rate is just 1.35 children per woman and the South Korean rate is 0.7.

Addiction: This is a growing problem thanks not only to a new generation of super drugs, such as fentanyl, but also to the skill of supposedly respectable companies in encouraging addictive behaviour.