Shutdown

"This book s great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis." Robert Rubin, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books

Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed.**

The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.

Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.

Autorentext

Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Crashed, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, one of The Economist's Books of the Year, and a New York Times Critics' Top Book. He lives in New York City.

Klappentext

Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything-from the acclaimed author of Crashed.

The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.

Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions-such as health-care systems, schools, and social services-in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.

Leseprobe

Chapter 1

 

Organized

Irresponsibility

 

Skeptics-and there have been skeptics from the start-like to point out that the remarkable thing about the Covid crisis is that we turned something ordinary into a global crisis. No matter what we do, people die, and the same people die of Covid as die normally-old people with preexisting conditions. In a normal year, those people die of flu and pneumonia. Outside the privileged core of the rich world, millions of people die of infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. And yet "life goes on." Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was, by the standards of historic plagues, not very lethal. What was unprecedented was the reaction. All over the world, public life shut down, and so too did large parts of commerce and the regular flow of business. All over the world this massive interruption of normality stirred, in various degrees, incomprehension, indignation, resistance, noncompliance, and protest. One need not sympathize with the politics of the objectors to acknowledge the historical force of their point. In a new and remarkable fashion, a medical challenge became a much wider crisis. Explaining how this might have happened not as the result of effete and overly protective political culture or as the result of a deliberate policy of repression, but as a result of structural tensions within early twenty-first-century societies, will help set the stage for understanding the crisis of 2020.

 

It is true that old people die, but what matters is how many and at what rate and from which causes. At any given moment, this rank order of mortality can be described in terms of a matrix of probabilities that has evolved over time and is held in place by medical possibilities, health economics, and the pattern of social advantage and disadvantage.

 

Table 1: Causes of Death                                                                                             

 

            Total deaths                 Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (%)             Noncommunicable diseases (%)            Injury (%)   &#1…