Why is American politics so angry (when Americans have never had it so good)?

Prospect of the old Palace of Whitehall from St James's park as it appeared c.1676, by Hendrick Danckerts. Another wonderful picture of old London via Sir William Davenant.

• Surveys suggest Americans are about as satisfied with the economy and with their lives as they were in 1983 when Ronald Reagan captured the optimistic mood with “morning again in America”. So why is today's American politics so angry? Lynn Vavreck of the New York Times has an interesting analysis of polarisation of party identification, and of attitudes to race. Thanks to Ian Leslie.

• Janan Ganesh is brilliant in the Financial Times, this time on the alleged mood against liberal economics:

Britons think they want a more managed economy without meaning it or voting for it. Not a year has passed since Ed Miliband led the Labour party into a general election on a semi-corporatist prospectus, with Germany as its explicit destination. There were to be price interventions, industrial strategies and less of the easy foreign money that comes from low tax rates and skimpy regulation.

This vision was so compelling that Mr Miliband is now a backbencher trying to make himself useful. Part of the trick of politics is smelling the difference between what voters say and what they mean.

• ​I reviewed Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists the other day. Suffice to say that I was not persuaded by his argument for a universal basic income, one of the most persistent and mistaken memes of welfare policy. However, I was unfair to him in saying that he "doesn't tell us much about the conclusions" of the Mincome experiment with a basic income in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1973, "apart from quoting one couple who liked receiving free money".

He actually reports this from the 2011 review by Evelyn Forget:

Young adults postponed getting married, and birth rates dropped. Their school performance improved substantially: the “Mincome cohort” studied harder and faster. In the end, total work hours only notched down 1% for men, 3% for married women and 5% for unmarried women. Men who were family breadwinners hardly worked less at all, while new mothers used the cash assistance to take several months’ maternity leave, and students to stay at school longer.

Forget’s most remarkable finding though was that hospitalizations decreased by as much as 8.5%. The financial implications were huge, considering the size of public spending on health care in the developed world. Several years into the experiment domestic violence was also down, as were mental health complaints. Mincome had made the whole town healthier. Forget could even trace the impacts of receiving a basic income through to the next generation, both in earnings and in health.

• And finally, thanks to Andrew Denny ‏for this:

"I hear the man who invented coloured cloth has died."