Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan present their top ten geopolitical risks for 2023: an increasingly rogue and reckless Russia; an increasingly powerful and unconstrained Xi Jinping; the weaponization of artificial intelligence; shockwaves of global inflation; Iran backed into a corner; higher energy prices; reversals of development; political divisions in the United States; the disruptive digital […]
The report highlights the distinctive harms for children and future generations of eight global trends that are part of the polycrisis: continued impacts of the pandemic, inflation, food insecurity, energy shortages, underinvestment in children, threats to democratic rights, international factionalism, and internet inequality.
Prospects for Children in the Polycrisis: A 2023 Global Outlook 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
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 »
The author defines megathreats as “severe problems that could cause vast damage and misery and cannot be solved quickly or easily” (p. 4). “We are facing megathreats unlike anything we have faced before… [and] they overlap and reinforce one another” (p. 5). Roubini explores ten megathreats: debt accumulation and debt traps; easy money and financial crises;
Megathreats: Ten Dangerous Trends that Imperil Our Future and How to Survive Them Read More »
This Foresight Brief argues that conventional risk management frameworks cannot grapple with the growing number of systemic and existential risks generated by decades of globalization. Instead, these risks require more long-term thinking – “intentional consideration of what might happen in the future, the choices for influencing it and the consequences of those choices” (p. 10).
Adam Tooze frequently discusses various aspects of the polycrisis in his blog posts. Notable entries include: “Defining polycrisis – from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix” (24 June 2022) “Calibrating the polycrisis – with the help of the International Bank of Settlements” (26 June 2022) “Polycrisis – Thinking on the Tightrope” (29 October 2022) “Haiti
Ian Bremmer argues that the world faces three major crises—pandemics, climate change, and disruptive technologies (AI, lethal autonomous weapons, cyberwarfare, and biotechnology)—but our ability to respond effectively is hampered by broken American politics and the worsening rivalry between the United States and China. The three crises, however, present an opportunity and the necessary impetus for
The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – And Our Response – Will Change the World Read More »
Camille Carlton and Maria Bridge argue that technology can amplify the metacrisis in two ways: by creating a centralized dystopia in which governments use technology to control citizens, or by creating decentralized chaos and catastrophe in which individuals wield immense technological powers in a free-for-all.
A Deeper Dive into the Meta Crisis 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 »
