polycrisis

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze  · 15 Nov 2021  · 561pp  · 138,158 words

for neoliberalism? Or the culmination of a process of decline stretching over many decades. Or the insularity of their political cultures?24 In the EU, “polycrisis” is a term that has come into use in the last decade. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker borrowed the idea from the French theorist

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between 2010 and 2016 of the eurozone crisis, the conflict in Ukraine, the refugee crisis, Brexit, and the Europe-wide upsurge in nationalist populism.26 Polycrisis neatly captures the coincidence of different crises but it doesn’t tell us much about how they interact.27 In January 2019, China’s president

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together as a sovereign bloc to defend its economic interests because nobody—including the U.S. evidently—will help us.”10 Corona was becoming a polycrisis. Though the UK had been exempted from Trump’s travel ban, there was little cause for glee there. On March 12, Prime Minister Johnson adopted

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was ever the first item of business, either in Brussels or Berlin. It was not. Not in 2016, when the EU was recovering from its “polycrisis” over Ukraine, Greece, and the surge of refugees from Syria, and not in December 2020, as the moment of Brexit truth arrived. As 2020 ground

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, on housing, on the environment, on immigration.4 On the campaign trail, Biden had repeatedly evoked four converging or overlapping crises—his version of the polycrisis—the pandemic, the economy, the call for racial justice, and the climate.5 In his inaugural, he added “America’s standing in the world.” While

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larger point. The fact that Chen’s map of convergent crises was so apt, that it was more illuminating than the EU’s talk of polycrisis or America’s solipsistic preoccupation with its national narrative, should give us pause. The intellectuals of the Chinese regime are loyal to their party’s

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, 198–200; and ideological conflict, 18; and lessons of 2020, 295; and pandemic mortality rates, 28; “People’s War” on the virus, 55, 66; and “polycrisis” concept, 6; and scope of 2020 challenges, 7, 8; and second wave of pandemic, 233; and state capitalism, 200–205; and supply chain failures, 86

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, 52, 56, 70; and history of epidemic diseases, 47; human rights abuses, 218; hundredth anniversary, 18, 298; and onset of coronavirus pandemic, 49–51; and “polycrisis” concept, 6–7; and SARS epidemic of 2003, 62; and state capitalism, 201; and success of China’s pandemic response, 63, 198; and U.S

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–49, 251, 289 Philippines, 11, 83, 106–7, 189 PIMCO, 146, 262 Piñera, Sebastián, 12 Poland, 279–80, 280–81, 283 polio, 30, 32, 235 “polycrisis” concept, 6, 81, 279, 288, 305 Pompeo, Mike, 68, 70, 218 populism, 3, 6, 12, 47–48, 77, 173, 179, 219, 269, 275, 280, 284

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; and early responses to pandemic, 66; and economic impact of pandemic, 43; and influenza, 30; and “lockdown” term, 10; in Northern Italy, 71–72; and “polycrisis” concept, 7; “quarantine gate,” 58; and role of the WHO, 32; and short-time working, 103–4; in South Korea, 80; in Spain, 85; and

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of 2020, 301; mistakes on pandemic preparedness, 47–48; national emergency declaration, 82; nationalistic rhetoric, 68, 193; and Operation Warp Speed, 239–40, 303; and “polycrisis” concept, 6; relations with the IMF, 162; tax cuts, 76–77, 115; and travel bans, 81; and Turkish financial crisis, 267; U.S.-China economic

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Hong Kong, 198–99; and hundredth anniversary of CCP, 298; and onset of coronavirus pandemic, 49, 50–51; and origin of coronavirus outbreak, 1; and “polycrisis” concept, 6; and relaxation of lockdown measures, 90; teleconference on February 23, 70; on theater shutdowns, 100; Trump’s praise of, 68 Xinjiang Province, China

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

simultaneously? Writing in the Financial Times in October 2022, Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia University, described the current conjuncture as a “polycrisis,” noting: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”4 In a

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demonstration of just how fraught and contested the times were, some leftist commentators even criticized the term polycrisis, claiming that it obfuscated the fact that there was only one underlying crisis: capitalism itself. “Pandemics, climate breakdown, wars and global deflationary pressures are not

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point.12 So, what was the prognosis for capitalism, two and a half centuries after Richard Arkwright opened Cromford Mill? One scenario was that the polycrisis would continue, intensify, and possibly even prove fatal—an outcome that Streeck predicted. Citing the examples of Polanyi, Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, and others, the German

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Report 2023, 9, figure B, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2023.pdf.   4.   Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis,” Financial Times, October 28, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7–11b1–494b-9cd3–6d669dc3de33.   5.   Farwa Sial, “Whose

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Polycrisis?,” Developing Economics (blog), January 27, 2023, https://developingeconomics.org/2023/01/27/whose-polycrisis.   6.   Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin, “Shrinking Capitalism: Components of a New Political Economy Paradigm,” Oxford Review of Economic

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et al.) Polish Socialist Party political action committees (PACs) Political-Economic Review Political Economy of Growth, The (Baran) political polarization Political Quarterly Pollascek, Mihály pollution polycrisis Ponzi finance Poor Law Amendment Act Popov, P. I. Popper, Karl Popular Unity population growth populism Populus Porter, Noah Portugal Postcapitalism (Mason) Postlethwayt, Malachy potential

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

by Scott Patterson  · 5 Jun 2023  · 289pp  · 95,046 words

September 11, 2001, terrorist attack in America. British historian and economist Adam Tooze coined a term for the converging, expanding risks the world faces—the polycrisis. It’s a world in which pandemics, inflation, recession, the climate crisis, nuclear escalation, and other risks combine to magnify harm via a series of

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a global hunger crisis that affects poor people in low-income countries, leading to destabilizing mass migration that triggers political unrest and topples governments. “A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises,” Tooze wrote. “It is a situation… where the whole is even more dangerous than the

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, 251 Pershing Square Capital Management, 2, 3, 4, 176 Pew Research Center, 122 Phillips, Keith, 247 Piedmont Lithium, 247, 248 Pimco, 24 Pinker, Steven, 124 polycrisis, 35 Popper, Karl, 62, 65–66 Powell, Jerome, 287 Powers, Jimmy, 52, 56 precautionary principle, 36–37, 189–90 Precautionary Principle, The (Taleb et al

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight

by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears  · 24 Apr 2024  · 357pp  · 132,377 words

social class or immigration were reopened. Divides have widened between north and south, towns and cities, young and old. Multiplying global problems – the so-called ‘polycrisis’ of pandemics, mass migration, war and climate change – have pushed voters this way and that with many of them losing faith in politics to make

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institutions and the country itself. Lifted off its moorings The early decades of the twenty-first century have often been described as an era of ‘polycrisis’. After terror attacks in the United States at the start of this century came the war in Iraq, then there was the financial crash which

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

for a lack of solidarity in dark times. It was shock upon shock. Former EU president Herman Van Rompuy spoke in late summer of a ‘polycrisis’: ‘So much happening in so short a time, it’s very destabilizing.’ He believed Europe was in an even worse state now than during the

Carbon: The Book of Life

by Paul Hawken  · 17 Mar 2025  · 250pp  · 63,703 words

Austin Harper, “The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule,” The New York Times, January 26, 2024, nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/polycrisis-doom-extinction-humanity.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT turned the table: Báyò Akómoláfé, “Let’s Meet at the Crossroads,” commencement address to Pacifica

The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World

by Philip Coggan  · 1 Jul 2025  · 96pp  · 36,083 words

iPhones in the US’, Financial Times, 28 April 2025, ig.ft.com/us-iphone/ 6 Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024: Pathways out of the Polycrisis (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024), worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-prosperity-and-planet 7 Saloni Dattani et al., ‘Life expectancy’, Our World in Data (2023

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

by Ingrid Robeyns  · 16 Jan 2024  · 327pp  · 110,234 words

streams away from the Global South, which is in turn leading to increasing xenophobia in countries of the Global North. We are thus witnessing a polycrisis, much of which can be traced back to the way the global economic elite are pushing their own agenda. All of this social and economic