I first heard of Martin Daunton in 1983 during a postgraduate research seminar chaired by Theo Barker at the LSE. Discussion turned to the Post Office, and someone mentioned that Martin was writing its history. Even then the mention of Martin's name carried a quiet authority with it, with no one in the room doubting that what Martin wrote would be of the highest quality. Yet, because I was not the most outgoing of creatures, I was not to meet Martin until 2006. Sitting in a hostel in Dali, China in January 2006 and, as one does, checking through my university email, I noticed an invitation from Martin to give a paper to the modern economic and social history seminar at Cambridge. I accepted the invitation, and so began the first of several happy visits to stay with Martin and Claire at Trinity Hall. Later that same year, Martin and I both gave papers to a UK–Russian seminar on state and industry relations at the International Economic History Congress in Helsinki. In 2009 I began work on the final volume of the Oxford economic and social history of Britain, to which Martin had already contributed two volumes, as well as being the general editor of the series. Throughout the long process of writing my volume, Martin endured sporadic bursts of email from me on topics ranging from John Hicks and what became the IS/LM model, to the likely rates of return on the technology shares gathered together in the Scottish Mortgage investment trust. Throughout, Martin has remained good humoured, well-informed and highly perceptive, qualities which abound in his writing.

This chapter examines one of the main concerns of the fifth volume of the Oxford economic and social history of Britain, which I am currently finishing. Its concern is with time, and in particular with the increasing use of ‘discounting’ over time by post-World War II UK governments in their approach to the management of public expenditure. While other approaches to the accommodation of the future, such as insurance, take precautions to mitigate the risk and magnitude of contingent future events, the practice of discounting differs in valuing not the risk and its cost, but instead the income and the returns from the future in terms of the present.