In 1922 Vladimir Lenin, criticised by Communist militants for tolerating a minuscule role for the private sector in Bolshevik Russia, insisted that it was a reasonable trade-off because the state would still control “the commanding heights” of the economy. For much of the rest of the 20th century that phrase came to stand for state meddling—not a complete clampdown on private markets, but preference for a dominant economic role played by the mandarins of the public sector.
In the 1980s that changed. For most of the period since then it was market forces, rather than the state, that have been in the ascendancy across the
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