Adam Tooze examines the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on finance and business, highlighting just how unprepared and vulnerable economic systems were to the crisis. He highlights the ways in which institutional failures, political interests, economic policies, and geopolitics interacted with the pandemic to shape its impacts. Characterizing the situation as a polycrisis, he applies […]
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy Read More »
Solutions to single problems are never enough when crises stem from flaws in their hosts systems. The New Systems Reader brings together thinkers and activists to propose strategies for systemic change. “The starting point for this book is the inability of the traditional politics and policy to address fundamental challenges. Our goal is not to
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Mark Swilling proposes that “we need to understand the dynamics of the current global polycrisis as the emergent outcome of intersections between four dimensions of transition: socio-metabolic transition, techno-economic transition, socio-technical transition and long-term global development cycles. When understood as multiple cycles that intersect concurrently and asynchronistically across these four dimensions, the emergent outcome can
The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World Read More »
Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan argue that systemic risk is endemic to globalization that cannot be removed. “It is a process to be managed rather than a problem to be solved” (p. xiii). But rather than retreat from globalization and forfeit its considerable benefits, the authors argue that systemic risk requires global governance reforms to
The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about it Read More »
Anthony Hodgson introduces the World System Model as a new and holistic way to understand of the key issues facing humanity and their interconnections. The book explains how the model can be applied by different groups and examines the kind of resilient and adaptative solutions that may prove most useful.
Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World Read More »
From shallow lakes that flip from clear to turbid water to major climate shifts, big shifts in social norms to the collapse of societies and ecosystems, Marten Scheffer shows that many complex systems undergo “critical transitions” (or “regime shifts”) between multiple stable states (or “equilibria”). In these transitions, slow and often unseen change in a
Critical Transitions in Nature and Society Read More »
This book explores global catastrophic risks that threaten civilization and humanity’s continued existence, addressing key methodological, ethical and policy issues. Chapters by leading experts address such risks as astronomical and earth-based natural catastrophes, nuclear war, terrorism, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and social collapse.
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This book contains the earliest use of the term polycrisis. Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern argue that “one is at a loss to single out a number one problem to which all others would be subordinated. There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems,
Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium Read More »
After explaining the shortcomings of other accounts of societal collapses, Joseph Tainter presents his own, universal theory. Societies, he argues, are problem solving organizations that solve an unending stream of problems by increasing their complexity. Each addition of complexity, however, has an energetic costs to create and maintain it. Because societies solve their easiest problems
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