IN BRITISH English one standard response to the question, “What’s going on?” is: “Nothing much.” This is either a way of closing down a conversation that risks becoming interesting, or a snap assessment of a life that seems unremarkable even to the person living it. The difficulty, for attuned natives and bemused foreigners alike, is knowing which of these meanings applies.

What is happening in Britain, at the halfway point of the current parliament? In a sense, nothing much. In economic terms, the country is in stasis, which is what some biologists call the boring longueurs between evolutionary leaps. Bagehot suggests that both versions of “nothing much” apply here, for this is a surface stillness with some troubling, long-term implications.

For the past three years, while other countries have seen stronger recoveries or deepening slumps, Britain’s economy has been flat: it dipped back into recession, but not so deeply that coming out took much effort. Fresh GDP figures suggest an overall shrinking of 0.1% this year. The forecasts in the chancellor of the exchequer’s autumn statement this week suggest several years of nothing too exciting to come. His response is not to change course but to continue on the current path for longer.

Unemployment, meanwhile, has moved only a little up or down, complicating a relationship with growth that economists had thought straightforward, in part because more people are working fewer hours. House prices did not suffer the same lurch in Britain as they did in America, but nor are they recovering now. Immigration has declined, removing another possible source of dynamism and disruption.

Companies are experiencing a similar phenomenon. Despite the availability of cheap financing for those big enough to tap the bond market, and attractive valuations, there are few mergers or acquisitions. Once the odd category of “businesses without employees” is discounted, the rate of business creation is flat. R3, a trade association for insolvency practitioners, says that one in ten companies are able to pay the interest on their debts but are unable to make a dent in the principal, which is one definition of a zombie business. These firms would have been creatively destroyed but for the low interest rates supplied by the Bank of England. Instead they potter on.

This is new territory. Since the second world war Britain has had four recessions. The first three were accompanied by terrible unemployment, plus inflation so high that people needed calculators to discover how much worse off they were. Searching for a word to describe what the country feels like in 2012, newspapers have settled on “Austerity Britain”, a nod to the recessionary years after the war, when it was difficult to buy a whole Mars bar and orange juice could only be acquired at a chemist.

Yet despite the odd story of making-do, Britain is not back in the 1940s. True, government spending is being cut, albeit from a high base, with the pain falling disproportionately on those receiving state benefits. Lots of jobs are being lost in the public sector. But austerity also implies something strong, unadorned and purposeful, like an electricity pylon or a multi-storey car park. That description does not fit the flatlining era, which for most people is characterised more by stagnation and drift.

Thus far, Britons have determined that the best response to this new nothing, whatever it ought to be called, is to sit still, cling on to house and job and wait for better times. Sales of homes are at half the level they were in 2006. The number of people working in jobs that they have held for less than a year, which is one measure of churn in the labour market, is lower than at any point since the government started to collect data in 1985. Recruitment companies report a healthy demand for staff, but say that moving people is hard because everyone fears being last in and first out.

Such behaviour is entirely rational for individuals: in a tough climate, it can be better to stick than twist. Stasis seems preferable to the turbulence of Ireland or Greece. The problem is that in other countries that have learned to live with it, such as Japan or Italy, adjusting to a world in which nothing much is happening tends to result in atrophy.

Nothing will come of nothing

There are some signs that Britain is already becoming a little Japanese—and not just because it is now popular to watch women in bikinis eating live cockroaches on prime-time television. For example, the trend for children to live at home with their parents has accelerated. In Japan half of those between 20 and 34 are fridge raiders; in Britain the proportion has hit one in three for men and one in six for women, with an overall increase of 6% this year alone. A supply of people able to work for less than their cost of living gives parsimonious firms a convenient pool of temporary workers. This is how two-tier labour markets, with a group of insiders enjoying job protection and a group of outsiders with none, are born. Undoing the situation can be impossible.

One result of this holding pattern is likely to be even greater frustration with politicians, who nevertheless find themselves prevented from shaking things up by society’s entrenched winners. Successive governments in Japan have found it so hard to push through change, when faced with well-organised groups who stand to lose out, that they have given up trying altogether. Something similar happened in Italy, another long-static country, until the bond market sacked Silvio Berlusconi last year.

To adapt a more noble Italian: if Britain wants things to stay as they are, things will have to change. For the alternative is not the indefinite continuation of today, as over time a stuck society will mutate and decline of its own accord. That might be a less troubling outlook than riots and protests. But five more years of it will still alter the country in ways that are undesirable.

Economist.com/blogs/Bagehot