Wolf argues that we cannot think about and address the many problems facing the world separately from one another. “The alternative of thinking about the interactions among [macroeconomics, finance, politics, social change, disease, and the environment] is also too hard. But sometimes, as now, it becomes inescapable… The point is that we need to analyse […]
How to Think about Policy in a Polycrisis Read More »
Geoff Mulgan argues that the United Kingdom suffers from an “imagination gap” that impedes its ability to navigate multiple crises, manifest in short-sighted policies and over-reliance on past solutions. He explains how politics, financing, and academia contribute to the gap and provides historical examples where imaginative experimentation helped solve crises. Mulgan concludes that “it is
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström argue that global crises are accelerating in their occurrence, amplifying in their effects, and synchronizing due to largely unseen causal connections between them. The result is a polycrisis, a term that “implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises.” The authors
What Happens when a Cascade of Crises Collide? Read More »
Highlighting the connections between economic and non-economic shocks to the world, Adam Tooze proposes that “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the
Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis Read More »
Ahead of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Lawrence H. Summers and Masood Ahmed implore these institutions to avoid a global economic downturn by addressing the polycrisis: “Challenges ranging from increased interest rates, climate change and an epically strong dollar, to food-supply shortages, high inflation and a still-prevalent pandemic all
IMF-World Bank Meetings are the Last Stop before a Coming Economic Storm Read More »
Niall Ferguson proposes that “Superficially… [it’s] no more than a very nasty coincidence that the latest wave of the pandemic should happen at the same time as so many extreme weather events and a wave of social and political unrest. On closer inspection, however, we can see that these are connections between these disasters –
The World’s Cascade of Disasters is Not a Coincidence Read More »
William E. Rees asserts that humanity is heading to a critical ecological situation that diminishes the prospect of continued civilized existence, and considers why, despite the magnitude of the threat, the world community is not acting sensibly. He further explains how social inequality and the current political agenda obstruct effective action.
Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse Read More »
