A Historian of Economic Crisis on the Fire This Time
Economic crises have reshaped the modern world. Economic historian Adam Tooze tells Jacobin how the coronavirus pandemic will upend global politics and commerce for decades to come.
Illustration by Rose Wong
Adam Tooze is the leading expert on how economic crises have remade the modern world. Here, he tells Jacobin that the COVID-19 pandemic will transform global politics even more than the 2008 financial crash, inaugurating an age of instability.
Daniel Finn
In the run-up to the pandemic, many people were anticipating a rerun of the 2008 financial meltdown based on the same underlying factors. Instead, there was a very different type of crash. You point out in your book Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy that the threat of infectious diseases generating a global pandemic had long since been identified by various experts and responsible bodies. What does it tell us about the world system that no effective preemptive action was taken?
Adam Tooze
It has something to do with the nature of the threat. Epidemic disease belongs in the same class as climate change, as a threat that is unconventional. That isn’t to say that it hadn’t saturated the scientific discourse for decades before things got real. But it remains outside the imagination of people who spend their time thinking about financial risks. Right now, we’re going through the process of trying to get financial regulators and central bankers to internalize issues like climate risk within their own system.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.