But there’s a school of thought that its authors were doomed from the start. If you believe that geography is destiny then the North-South divide can’t be fixed. At best, the government can redistribute resources as a kind of consolation prize. Or, as Victoria Wood’s snooty continuity announcer once put it: “We’d like to apologise to our viewers in the North — it must be awful for them.” 

Except that the lesson of history is that geography is not destiny. Time and again, we see examples in which the relative fortunes of different regions draw level, or even reverse altogether. Take Belgium, whose Northern and Southern halves are distinguished by language as well as location. 

For many years, Flemish-speaking Flanders was poorer and less powerful than French-speaking Wallonia. Following Great Britain, Belgium was the second country in the world to industrialise — but because the coal deposits were concentrated in Wallonia, it was a lopsided revolution. The Walloons weren’t just part of a larger linguistic zone — they dominated the economy too. 

All that changed with de-industrialisation. For the Flemings, the cultural and political dominance of the French-speakers was always hard to swallow — but once the latter began demanding subsidies, it became unbearable. Today, Belgium is a rare example of a country in which the ethnic majority has separatist tendencies. 

But perhaps the industrial revolution was a unique moment in history that gave early adopters a one-off boost which then faded away. Certainly we see shifts in the geographical distribution of power and wealth that are too big and began too early to be explained by coal deposits or anything like that. Look at the whole of Europe. In classical times, the Mediterranean was where it was at. Ancient Greece, followed by Ancient Rome, were the dominant powers. To the north lay the abode of barbarians — to be civilised at the point of a sword or walled-off behind fortifications.

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And yet long before the industrial revolution, the balance between the Europe of wine and olive oil and the Europe of beer and butter began to swing the other way. There was an intermediate period in which the south held its own — for instance, the Renaissance had an Italian origin and Spain and Portugal pioneered the Age of Exploration. But by the time of the Enlightenment, it was clear that the future of Europe — indeed the whole world — would be shaped in northern cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow

Of course, I’m describing a mega-trend that unfolded over centuries and millennia. A conscious policy of levelling-up needs to show progress over a much shorter time frame — decades at most. So do we have any examples of that happening?  

Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, looks to the Republic of Florence for inspiration. Under the rule of the Medici family, the city-state became the birthplace of the Renaissance. As Gove himself makes clear, there’s a wider range of reasons for its success than the Medicis’ famously lavish patronage of high culture. Nevertheless, a key part of his levelling-up strategy is to redistribute arts funding from London to the rest of the country. 

For a more recent — and more significant — example we need to look east. When the Iron Curtain fell, it revealed a profoundly unequal continent. The ex-Communist countries are still much poorer than the countries of Western Europe, but the extent to which they’ve levelled-up has been impressive. Indeed, in recent years we’ve seen the richest parts of countries like Poland and Hungary overtaking the poorest parts of the UK — much to the horror of British tabloids. 

But from a British perspective, the most relevant ex-communist state is the former East Germany. That’s because since reunification, the story is one of levelling-up within the same country. 

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It’s not been a total success. After three decades of living together, the East is yet to catch-up with the West. But, again, there’s no denying the progress made. Immediately following reunification, economic output per head in the former East Germany was only 60% of that in the former West Germany. It’s now more like 85%.

This has produced a sobering outcome for the British. The fact is that, today, most of East Germany is as rich or richer than most of northern England. Data analyst Tom Forth illustrates this by comparing the English region of Yorkshire and Humberside with the German state of Saxony. At first sight this might not appear to be a fair contest. Saxony had a pretty rough 20th century: in the post-war period it passed from Nazi to Communist rule — until, that is, the Berlin Wall fell and East German industry collapsed.

And yet since 1990, Saxony hasn’t just caught up with the Yorkshire region, it has overtaken it. The crossover point was around 2010. By 2017, GDP per head was €28,000 in Saxony compared to less than €25,000 in Yorkshire.

So what can we learn from the German example? Well, there’s one thing that stands out — but, for a Conservative government, it’s rather awkward: the Germans spent a whole heap of money. According to Kathrin Enenkel of the Centre for Cities, the total sum between 1990 and 2014 averages out at £71 billion a year. She puts the UK’s levelling-up fund at £4.8 billion in total.

Of course, the German challenge was much bigger. After 45 years of democracy versus communism, there was a lot to be levelled-up between the two Germanies. But even if we focus on the policy areas that are relevant to the British situation, it’s obvious that we’ve been out-spent. To return to the Yorkshire example, Forth puts the level of government funding for R&D at €150 per head per year. The figure for Saxony? €450.

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It’s encouraging that today’s white paper includes a promise to increase R&D funding for the rest of the country beyond London and the South East. But by how much does it intend to boost the total? Just one third. The Yorkshire-Saxony comparison would suggest that’s simply not enough. 

Transport is another area in which south-eastern England gets the lion’s share of public funds. So how much levelling-up can we expect from the Government here? Again, not much. In recent months we’ve seen funding for the “Bus Back Better” initiative slashed; the Northern Powerhouse Rail project has been downgraded; and the eastern branch of HS2, which would have run to Leeds and Sheffield, has been chopped. Meanwhile in Saxony, the city of Leipzig has been part of the German high-speed rail network for years. 

The problem with the white paper, then, is what’s not in it: ambition and a sense of urgency. Levelling-up the land is not an impossible dream. The lesson of history is that economic miracles do happen — but only if you put in the investment. 

Five years in the freelance galleys have made me familiar with every imaginable formula wielded by salaried cheapskates in order to acquire work, knowledge and ideas for nothing. The digitally-driven age of “free”, in which a vast expansion of corporate and institutional power rests on the exploitation of barely-paid or even unpaid casual labour, has compounded the ancient toxins of Grub Street with a fresh poison of wheedling, entitled hypocrisy.

“Precarity” — a clumsy word for an ungainly state — has always shadowed working life outside the walls of guild, cloister, palace, office, studio or college. And technological upheavals have regularly tilted the balance of the seesaw that links producer and client.

The media evolve, and the money that backs them moves around. What remains constant is a tetchy stand-off between makers and the intermediaries, the patrons, publishers and distributors, who stand between them and their consumers. The mindset of the self-employed artisan or artist — proud, prickly, jealous, at once eager to please and quick to take offence — has endured to jump the centuries between Gutenberg and Google. Visit the National Gallery’s new exhibition devoted to Dürer’s Journeys, for instance, and you meet an artist-entrepreneur who pioneered both the role of the lone creator as hard-bargaining, self-sufficient pro — and found ways to fight back against mean or crooked clients and rivals.

Curated by the gallery’s Dr Susan Foister, Dürer’s Journeys takes as its focus the career-enhancing trips that the Nuremberg-born painter and printmaker took around Germany, over the Alps into northern Italy, and up the Rhine into the Low Countries, at various times between the mid-1490s and 1521. Paintings, drawing, prints and books both by Dürer and his peers present the artist as a shrewd, tough and even cantankerous travelling salesman, avid to collaborate but flintily convinced of his own worth. The National plays with a straight, scholarly bat. So you won’t encounter much of the airy extrapolation that this kind of article routinely indulges. I rather enjoyed the stern rejoinder in one of the catalogue essays that Dürer’s personality “should not perhaps concern art-historical research”. That’s telling me.

But… with my 21st-century, gig-economy spectacles on, it becomes sorely tempting to see Albrecht Dürer, son of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled in free-trading Nuremberg, as patron saint of the stroppy modern freelance. From Venice to Antwerp, he modelled the novel Renaissance costume of the artist as celebrity. He designed his own logo, cultivated his own brand, and harnessed the new technology of print to spread his fame through engravings and woodcuts to thousands of clients who never saw a painting of his. His sympathy for the humanistic learning of Erasmus (of whom he drew a wonderful portrait in chalk, later engraved) and the reformist theology of Luther partnered a pursuit of professional autonomy, as maker and merchant alike.

Prints and their cross-Europe distribution brought freedom from the capricious arrogance of single patrons: the bishops, dukes and princes who expected you to flatter and fawn for a commission, then paid late and little, if at all. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian did grant Dürer a 100-florin pension in 1515, but cannily offloaded its funding onto the Nuremberg city council. The artist struggled for years to get it paid. His triumphant year-long stay in the Low Countries in 1520-21 began with an in-person plea to Maxmilian’s successor Charles V to renew the stipend — but soon morphed into a high-profile business venture, based in cosmopolitan Antwerp.

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Dürer saw early that print technology might allow him to make a better living from a hundred merchants than one snooty margrave. His first popular series, the 15-strong Apocalypse woodcuts of 1498, capitalised on the end-times anxieties that gathered as the half-millennium of 1500 drew near. The star illustrator needed a grasp of public hopes and fears, as well as the negotiating nous to strike smart deals. By 1512, after engravings of Christ’s Passion had become a cross-border sensation, the writer of a Description of Germany could state that “merchants across the whole of Europe are buying impressions for their artists”. Dürer attracted not just punters, but copyists too.

His images – intricate, enigmatic, dream-like – not only sold far and wide. They bedded down into the collective unconscious of his era, and of posterity. It’s no accident that Dürer remains unique among Renaissance masters in that a selection of his graphic works – such as the so-called “Master Engravings” of the 1510s, “Knight, Death and the Devil”, “Melencolia I” and “St Jerome in his Study” – are more familiar than any oil painting he ever did. Save, perhaps, for the cocky Munich self-portrait of 1500; sadly, not in the NG show. In it, the 28-year-old artist gazes out at us with a withering stare from underneath his flowing mane: part-Messiah, part-hipster, all-round superstar.

Mass-produced engravings and woodcuts earned more in the long run than work in traditional media (one set of prints might sell for the same price as a small portrait in oils). They pushed Dürer’s fame into new markets all over Europe. While his mother helped market the product around Nuremberg, his wife Agnes acted as his agent elsewhere in the German lands, especially at the huge Frankfurt fair. Crucially, the print market gave him all the bristling dignity of independence, financial and professional. “Here I am a gentleman,” he wrote from Venice during his Italian sojourn of 1506: “at home I am a parasite”.

While abroad, he drew and painted in return for favours as well as cash. If the Nuremberg master turned up to dinner with a spectacular drawing of the host, and asked for nothing at the time, he would expect the bill to be settled in other ways. After a foray to Brussels, he records tartly that “six people have given me nothing for doing their portraits”. Dürer’s motto might have been “quid pro quo”. Something-for-nothing belonged to the old feudal order he despised. One hard-headed adjective pops up time and again in the revealing journal of his Low Countries travels in 1520-21. Whether a banquet, a robe, a painting, a house, a jewel, if Dürer rates it, it’s köstlich: not pricey or kostspielig as such, but exquisite, lovely, precious, though always with a hint of sheer cash value.

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Dürer may have sought to break the chains of royal, noble or ecclesiastical patronage. But, like artists of various kinds today, he did not operate in a pure consumer economy. For reasons of prestige, if not turnover, he needed that imperial pension – which Charles V did finally extend. Likewise, he yearned to secure a splashy, high-end commission from Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands. She consistently failed to deliver – in fact, she even rejected his gift of a drawing of her father, Maximilian. As his stint in the Low Countries ended, Dürer snarled to his journal that “I have lost out, and quite especially with Lady Margareta, who in return for what I presented to her and gave to her has given me nothing”. Herr Quid-Pro-Quo of Nuremberg kvetches again.

This portrait of the artist as a pennywise hard bargainer, if not a surly old grump, may dismay romantics. It should give comfort to any of his successors, in whatever medium, who would rather ply an honest trade than kiss the hem of patrons – whether the prelates and princes of the 16th century, or the jargon-stuffed arts bureaucrats, conformist dons and trend-crazed plutocrats of today. Dürer’s progress, though, holds another salutary lesson for his freelance heirs. New cultural technologies may carve new pathways between artist and audience. Equally, highwaymen may lurk along them, ready to pounce. More prints meant more forgeries, more imitations, more deceptive pastiche and passing-off.

Famously, Dürer devised and applied his “AD” monogram as trademark and signature: not the only Renaissance artist to do so, but the first to make the logo really shout. Just look at where he puts it, too: hanging from the tree on a placard in the Garden of Eden in his “Adam and Eve”; prominently propped up beneath a skull beside the horse’s hooves in “Knight, Death and the Devil”; right under the dedication on a panel next to the great scholar’s hands in the Erasmus engraving; even on the nails driven into Christ’s hands on the cross. How handy, too, for such a tireless self-promoter that he should share initials with the Latin tag – Anno Domini – that marked humanity’s passage through post-incarnation time. Every year could be the year of Albrecht Dürer.

The trouble with logos, though, is that fakers or competitors mimic and purloin them. When it happened to Dürer, he fought back hard. In Venice in 1506, he brought perhaps the first case for copyright infringement, against one Marcantonio Raimondi. A clever print-maker who sailed close to the wind, and once got himself jailed by the Pope as a pornographer. Marcantonio had republished Dürer’s set of prints depicting the Life of the Virgin – AD monogram and all. Dürer sued, but with mixed results. Marcantonio could go on reprinting the engravings, but only as acknowledged copies with the logo removed.

When he published his own edition of the Life of the Virgin in 1511, the ripped-off artist prefaced the pictures with this blood-curdling warning: “Hold! You crafty ones, strangers to work, and pilferers of other men’s brains. Think not rashly to lay your thievish hands upon my works. Beware! Know you not that I have a grant from the most glorious Emperor Maximilian, that not one throughout the imperial dominion shall be allowed to print or sell fictitious imitations of these engravings? Listen! And bear in mind that if you do so, through spite or through covetousness, not only will your goods be confiscated, but your bodies also placed in mortal danger.” Exhilarating, hands-off-my-livelihood rhetoric – even if, like aggrieved content-creators then and now, Dürer overstates the likely penalties in intellectual-property lawsuits with that bit about “your bodies also placed in mortal danger”. If only…

In terms of business acumen and artistic renown, Dürer’s zealous policing of his image and brand paid handsome dividends. His work has never faded from view. When he died in 1528, he left Agnes an estate valued at 6,874 florins – a more than tidy sum. As for those “crafty ones, strangers to work, and pilferers of other men’s brains”, they stayed on the scene.

Non-payment, low payment, late payment and promises of jam tomorrow, or at some unspecified future date, bedevil the freelance life as they did five centuries ago. Across arts and crafts, marketplaces remain as patchy, flawed and skewed as ever. Patronage – now more often corporate than courtly – stands ever-ready to wrap shivering talent in its cosy, stifling embrace. Thieves and tricksters infest cyberspace just as they once skulked around the fairs and print-shops of Renaissance Europe. Revisit Dürer’s work, and you come face to face with a proud innovator who saw how technology and trade conjoined might let his vocation flourish as a profession and a business, too. I’ll be thinking of his grinning skulls the next time someone asks to pick my brains.

Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist continues at the National Gallery, London until 27 February 2022

By the time that Capt Cook set sail for the South Pacific in 1769 he had grown confident in a remedy, the only problem being that it was sauerkraut – never a particularly popular meal in England, and at a time when vegetables were looked down upon. How to convince the crew to eat 7,860 lbs of fermented cabbage on their long journey east? Cook simply ordered it to be a served only at the Captain’s Table, not to the men. As he noted in his journal: “The moment they see their superiors set a value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the world.”

“Sure enough, the lower ranked players began requesting it,” Will Storr writes in his excellent new book, The Status Game. “Before long, sauerkraut had to be rationed. The number of men that died from scurvy on that expedition was a record-breaking zero.”

The battle for status has defined human history; in the form of kleos or “glory” it provides the impetus for Homer’s heroes; it has been the subject of countless works of English literature; and the inspiration for absurd fashions from codpieces to ruffs to unwearable high heels. More recently, as status markers like accents or dress have levelled, and traditional barriers to social climbing (or abseiling) reduced, so the ways of signalling status have become more nuanced. And in some ways more competitive and vicious.

Life is a status game, and Storr identifies three methods by which we reach the top: dominance, competence and virtue (although most people use a combination of two or all three). It is the last of these which is the most interesting, and sometimes the most dangerous, inspiring immense cruelty.

Status is extremely important to wellbeing, so much so that it can have a profound effect on our health. People more successful in their careers tend to live longer, even taking into account confounders like smoking. The demoralising feeling of lower social status can send our bodies into a sort of crisis mode which in the long term puts us at higher risk of neurodegenerative disease, heart disease and cancer.

Being a loser can be fatal, and people who feel low status are also more likely to become ungenerous towards others and pick up destructive personal habits such as eating more sugary food — unsurprisingly, being overweight is an obvious status signal in rich countries. They are also more likely to kill themselves, with loss of job or divorce being the biggest risk factors for male suicide in middle age, for men who find themselves no longer provider or patriarch. Some people find the status game so stressful they simply drop out, most notoriously in Japan where more than half a million hikikomori have “social withdrawal syndrome”, locked in their bedroom doing God-knows-what.

Such is the beneficial effect of high status that most workers would choose a fancier title over a pay rise; in comparison having more power does not equal a happier life, heavy being the head that wears the crown. Our lust for status, in contrast, is insatiable.

When a high-status individual does something, Storr writes, “our subconscious copy-flatter-conformprogramming is triggered and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behaviour… We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised. People will believe almost anything if high-status people – whether priests, generals, actors, musicians, TikTokkers – suggest them.” Indeed they will profess to believe quite obviously untrue things.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, a huge amount of effort goes into signalling and detecting. “High-status people tend to speak more often and more loudly,” he notes, and “are perceived to be more facially expressive; achieve more successful interruptions in conversation; stand closer to us; touch themselves less; use more relaxed, open postures; use more ‘filled pauses’ such as ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and have a steadier vocal tone”. In fact our voice tone and even the frequency of our voice – the hum – changes to match the higher-status people. I’ve known workplaces where people come to imitate the laugh of the boss; you could hear them howling together, vocally members of the same tribe.

These signals dominate office and corporate life. A friend who works in finance recounted how Zoom conferences were far more exhausting because in real-life meetings you can easily tell from body language who was important, and mentally zone out when low-status clients started babbling away.

The human need for status can be hugely beneficial. Visit any major art gallery and you will see the result of this intense competition in late medieval Italy, where rival families hired the greatest artists and architects to raise their status. In 18^th century Britain, membership of clubs and societies became a social marker, the result being that the number of learned societies rose from 50 in 1750 to 1,500 in 1850, with an enormous impact on education levels, wealth and a variety of other measures.

Another example he cites is British cooking, which improved from the 1980s with the rising prestige associated with leading chefs, influenced by the very alpha male Marco Pierre White. (It is worth noting that, where something is low status, it will often be female-dominated because men place huge emphasis on employment status: whereas the traditional English male chauvinist believed that women belonged in the kitchen, his French equivalent saw it as the exclusive domain of the all-male culinary art.)

But just as often status games can be toxic, and do dreadful things to people — especially if religion, politics or some other marker of identity are involved.

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I’ve long believed that political beliefs work as status-markers, and have become more so in recent decades as other signals have declined in importance. People will adopt positions not just out of sincerity, partisan loyalty or conformity, but because they signal social status. Crime and immigration are the most obvious examples, because liberal positions are associated with higher education levels. Low-status members of society are less likely to benefit from freedom of movement, and more likely to be victims of crime. At best these views are vulgar.

This can have perverse results, the most visible example being with architecture. Post-war architecture is almost universally loathed, which is why pre-20^th century buildings consistently sell for more, even though they have huge technological disadvantages. Polling shows that a dislike of modernist architecture is one of the few things that every demographic agrees on – black, white and Asian, male and female, rich and poor, young and old. They all prefer the vernacular style.

The one section of society which disagrees happens to be architecture students — and the longer someone has been studying architecture, the more pro-modernist their views. That suggests an opinion which has become a status signal, marking the sophisticate out from the hoi polloi who share Prince Charles’s love of “pastiche”. If the public suddenly decided they actually liked the stuff that wins architecture awards, the high-status people would all be trying to build the new Poundbury.

That may be just my cynicism, but humans will repeat untruths if they feel it helps their position, and Storr cites various social science experiments showing that participants will make statements which they know to be false if other, high-status “participants” (actually actors) say it first. Worse still, “those asked publicly not only endorsed the false majority view, they punished the sole teller of truth by down-grading them.” If you’re ever mobbed on social media for a bad opinion, it might be of some comfort to know that a lot of the people throwing stones will secretly agree with you. Or perhaps it won’t.

To some extent all societal debates are in part a status competition, especially with regards the modern quest for moral status. Although dominance games are behind a great deal of violence across the animal kingdom, humans have evolved to live in far larger groups than other great apes and have therefore become much less violent. Instead, we we have learned to use virtue to raise our status, a quality which shows commitment to the wider community.

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Unsurprisingly, it has been the strategy of choice for manipulative bullies since time immemorial, with virtue games inspiring some of the most appalling cruelty in history, ranging from the witch hunts of the 17^th century to the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s.

Those responsible for these atrocities played a virtue game, creating the narrative that they were fighting some all-powerful, evil enemy, with the “maintenance of conformity, correct beliefs and behaviours being of heightened importance.”

The same process is clearly at work behind social media-led bullying, These are always framed in terms of protecting the weak, the urge to care and protect from harm; the more people imagine themselves aiding the vulnerable, the more horrendous their behaviour, giving them free rein to commit what Jonathan Sacks called “altruistic evil”. People do terrible things more out of love than out of hate. But it is also a status game, the aim being to “seek the maximal removal” of their opponent’s status: “ideally, reputational death.”

“When their mob grows into a status goldrush, a massive blast of vindictive energy gets directed at the victim. Attracted by the prizes, more and more ambitious players pile in and the game becomes an animal of attack, glorying in the ecstasy of dominance.”

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This is all especially dangerous because status is important not just to individuals but to groups, too, and many people feel that collective success and failure intensely. When a group is on top, its people feel happier; Storr cites a study tracking language across millions of books and newspaper articles which suggests that the British were most content in the 1880s. I don’t find this implausible: despite the huge amounts of poverty and early death relative to today, it was around the period when “to be born an Englishman was to win first prize in the lottery of life”.

Modern-day identity politics is dangerous because it unleashes a competition for status that can never really end. Many idealists hope to make the world fairer by raising the status of one group, often by increasing the prestige of their ancestors through historical reinterpretation. Yet status is a zero-sum game, and unlike wealth the pie cannot be expanded: if your group rises in status, others must fall, and the psychological and even physical effects of losing status are real.

Most of humanity’s problems have to some extent been solved or alleviated by technology and progress; we have never been richer, healthier or more at peace. But desire for status is the one thing that can never be overcome, because it is not enough that I succeed — others must fail.