In the years since the financial crisis, Simon Wren-Lewis has arguably been Britain’s leading economic Cassandra. And I say this both in praise and in sorrow.

In the original Greek myth, after all, Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of true prophecy, but then cursed her by ensuring that nobody would ever believe her dire warnings. And so it has been with macroeconomics.

It’s not widely appreciated, but basic, textbook macroeconomics – the kind of economics Wren-Lewis has been applying and trying to explain – has worked remarkably well since the crisis.

Thus, where many people were warning that central banks like the Bank of England or the Fed were courting runaway inflation by ‘printing money’, economists argued that this was no danger in a depressed economy; they were right. When many pundits warned that debt and deficits would send interest rates skyrocketing, economists argued that this wouldn’t happen; they were right. And when politicians called for fiscal austerity to increase ‘confidence’, economists warned that this would deepen and prolong the slump; yet again, they were right.

And nobody would believe them.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the torch of economic truth was largely held aloft not by regular journalists – although there were a few, like Martin Wolf and, I hope, yours truly – but by economics bloggers. In America that meant people like Berkeley’s Brad DeLong. In the UK it meant, above all, Wren-Lewis and his blog, mainly macro.

I’ve been following Simon’s blog faithfully since he started it in 2012, both because of the depth and clarity of his analysis and because economic debate in the UK has provided an illuminating counterpoint to debate in the US. We had a broadly sensible administration hamstrung by divided government and a bizarre Beltway consensus that deficits were a more important problem than mass unemployment; you had unified government committed to bad ideas, cheered on by what Simon calls ‘mediamacro’. Media malfeasance helped us stumble into the nightmare of Trump; it helped you stumble out of the European Union.

In this book Wren-Lewis collects a number of his plain-English blog posts in which he tried to debunk the myths driving UK economic policy – like the pervasive, utterly false myth that Labour profligacy made austerity necessary and inevitable.