The year 2020 exposed the risks and weaknesses of the market-driven global system. It’s hard to avoid the sense that a turning point has been reached. Could it be that Covid ends the neoliberal era?
Tooze analyses how the high-level, technocratic decisions of central bankers and finance ministries drive history. We are now at the first crisis of the Anthropocene – the epoch of significant planetary human impact.
“Conservative administrations everywhere have been taking radical measures long demanded by politicians of the left, and were egged on in doing so by the usual guardians of orthodoxy in the World Bank and IMF. But they were doing so not to build a new society, but to preserve the old one. The result is paradoxical: they wanted to support the market, and used the full power of the state to do so; central bankers justified their interventions by the need to maintain the integrity of financial markets, as if that were a more legitimate aim than improving people’s lives.”
Anything we can actually do, we can afford … said John Maynard Keynes 1942
Read Has Covid ended the neoliberal era? – by Adem Tooze, The Guardian, 2 Sept 2021.
Related readings
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze – published by Allen Lane, 7 Sept 2021.
Adem Tooze interviewed by David Runciman and Helen Thompson on Talking Politics podcast, 23 Sept 2021
Is Boris Johnson’s government really Blue Labour – Jonathon Rutherford, New Statesman, 25 Sept, 2021
The ALP must tackle economic inequality – by Peter Holding, Open Labor, March 2021
Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. In 2019, Foreign Policy Magazine named him one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade. His latest book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy is on sale now.
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