Seven lessons What 28 years as economics editor has taught me

Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and Nigel Lawson her chancellor. Neil Kinnock was leader of the Labour party.

- Larry Elliott

The iron curtain separated Europe. Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House was drawing to a close. Donald Trump floated the idea that George H.W. Bush might want him as his running mate in the looming US presidential election, an overture Bush described as "strange and unbelievable".

This was the political backdrop when I joined the Guardian in 1988 - the year before Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, when mobile phones were in their infancy and the climate crisis was just starting to become a hot political issue.

It was a time when free market ideas ruled. A combination of high inflation and recession - stagflation - in the 1970s had led to a crisis of postwar social democracy and given rise to a new set of beliefs: privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts paid for by shrinking the state, curbs on the power of trade unions, the dismantling of capital controls.

All this would give capitalism its mojo back, leading to wealth creation that would trickle down from those at the top to those struggling at the bottom.

Since this is my last column after 28 years as the Guardian's economics editor, I thought I would devote it to some lessons learned during my time on the paper.

Lesson No 1 is that the free-market experiment has failed, as some of us said it would all along. Wealth did not trickle down, and instead the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened. The workers laid off when the factories closed in northern England and the US Midwest did not find new well-paid jobs but were either thrown on the scrapheap or found low-paid, insecure work in call centres and distribution warehouses.