My grandmother always wanted me to be rich but I was never interested. She was born in 1906 in London’s East End to Jewish parents who had recently emigrated from Eastern Europe. For her becoming prosperous meant her family escaping the poverty into which she was born. In the late 1970s and 1980s she identified strongly with Margaret Thatcher, then the UK’s Conservative leader and prime minister, as someone fighting to ensure that the self-made person got their just deserts.

In contrast, from my time at university in the early 1980s onwards I thought of myself as a person of the Left. I shared my grandmother’s sense of betterment but thought it was best achieved by social change rather than individual entrepreneurship. Although I was critical of much of what passed for left-wing politics, I held to the view that social inequality was unjust. I believed that the rich minority somehow exploited the mass of society. And I particularly resented the global division between rich and poor countries that left much of the world’s population, as I saw it, condemned to poverty.

Looking back on our heated rows many years ago I can see that something strange has happened. To the extent it is still possible to talk of the ‘Left’ it has given up on the struggle to make the mass of society more prosperous. On the contrary, most self-proclaimed radicals emphasise the need to impose limits on consumption and economic growth. For them, most of the population is addicted to rampant consumerism – it is plagued by ‘affluenza’, ‘luxury fever’ or ‘stuffitis’. Alternatively western policy-makers are said to suffer from a ‘growth fetish’. As a result we are facing a ‘shopocalypse’. To the extent that the critics are concerned about economic development it is restricted to alleviating the suffering of the poorest of the poor. Even then, such concerns are often framed in terms of stopping a descent into criminality or terrorism rather than seeing greater affluence as good in itself. If someone, such as myself, puts the case for popular prosperity we are often condemned as, at best, the dupes of corporate interests.