In January, the IEA’s Director General Mark Littlewood wrote, in an article titled ‘Ignore the doomsayers’, that we should be in celebratory mood, bursting with optimism, and that the 2020s were going to be the best decade ever to be alive.

Despite the current crisis, Mark  writes in his biweekly Times column that he is willing to stick by his prediction in January.

“For all that has befallen us in the last few months, the likelihood remains that this coming decade will bear witness to more prosperity, less poverty and greater human flourishing than any previous one. Such an outcome may be frustrated by brazen acts of human stupidity or by a run of further bad luck, but, on balance, there remain good reasons to be cheerful.” Read in full here.