Since Donald Trump swept to power in 2016, we have seen plenty of startling statistics about western politics. For me, the single most thought-provoking chart came courtesy of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.
In a Lunch with the FT interview last year, Ray Dalio, Bridgewater’s founder, told me that the proportion of the western world voting for populist candidates had risen to 35 per cent. The figure, from a report by his firm, was starkly higher than at the start of the decade (when it was 7 per cent), after running at about 10 per cent in previous decades.
Indeed, such a surge was only previously seen in the 1920s after the Great Depression, when the populist vote jumped from 4 per cent to a peak of 40 per cent in 1939, before elections halted as the world tumbled into the second world war.