Darius Guppy

Picture a village. It has a grocery shop and a pub. A little down the road you can find a cobbler and a hardware store. A factory manufactures parts for some large concern in a nearby city and local farmers supply their produce to the villagers. There are a dozen taxi drivers, a priest, a few doctors, teachers, nannies and so on. Crucially, there is also a shared idea of what constitutes the good life, a common culture that enables the inhabitants to trust each other - perhaps the most fundamental and most overlooked component of a properly functioning economy. We are looking, in short, at that increasingly endangered social construct: a community. Now the village also has a bank. Once, a man rather like Captain Mainwaring was its manager and he was known and respected in the community.