Among very bright, very smart young people, there is a crass anticorporatism, summed up in the phrase “hang the greedy bankers”.

This cynicism is shrill and deeply embedded. They see economic growth as a problem, something that makes people unhappy and mentally ill and destroys the planet. Graduates are turning their backs on the corporates, seeing them as corrupt and venal.

The political elite goes along with this popular feeling, which leads to windows being broken at the home of Sir Fred Goodwin, the former RBS chief executive.

Politicians should be putting the argument about the values of economic growth. Instead they are losing the hearts and minds of the young people who should be shaping our future. This is not the way forward for a serious country that needs to create wealth.

Politicians and business leaders need to be having a conversation with people as citizens of this country. They could point out that, even though China’s economic growth is slowing down an increase of 6 per cent or more is forecast for this year. They could ask what we need to do to achieve similar growth. They should encourage people to think they can make a difference. Instead, they are running scared because they think saying such things will be unpopular.

It is superficial to say that the economic crisis was created by the financial sector; it was also caused by a failure to take risks and to invest in a production economy. For the past 10 to 15 years, venture capitalists were not going into new manufacturing processes – they just wanted to make a fast buck in the financial sector.

The traditional role of the financial sector was to facilitate large projects – house building, road building, nuclear power stations – not to pursue money markets. Why do we have a transport infrastructure befitting a Third World country? Where is our superfast train network to match those on the Continent? We do not know what it feels like to be in a dynamic economy.

You have to speculate to have a future. Instead we are retracting, yet still wasting money. Research councils and universities are more tightly tied to outcomes, to solving specific problems, yet they know that the more unfettered the research, the better and more unlikely the outcomes.

Governments are committed to improving healthcare and education but what are they doing about the misspent millions on stupid health promotion schemes, alternative medicine and failed computer systems?

Why are at least 25 per cent of the people employed in schools not teachers but therapists, advisers and helpers of one sort or another? How many more quangos and para-state organisations are we going to have?

Instead, the country needs investment in productive activity and a stronger focus on pure science and open-ended research.

Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, was expanding on her remarks at the The Times debate to Tony Dawe