Re: <nettime> A Historian of Economic Crisis on the World After

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Thanks for sending this. It is a pleasure to find out that Adam Tooze is a
real human being. Plus he is centrally concerned with climate change. The
pandemic has opened up the best side of the economists.

All of it was brilliant but especially the start. Tooze says that the
distinctive trait, the fundamental break with neoliberalism since 2008, is
that even emerging-market countries can print money without triggering
inflation. When central banks supply money at will, there's a basic shift
in how value is conceived. It becomes a lot more malleable. Given the
backdrop - a pandemic depression with 1930s proportions - the conclusions
are pretty obvious. For better and worse, the money will be printed and
spent in a transformative way, to actually accomplish things. Right now
that's the official Democratic party platform, let's hope it becomes
something. The era of the experimental state in the Anthropocene is about
to get underway.

On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 12:00 AM nettime's_future_historian <nettime@kein.org>
wrote:

> < https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/adam-tooze-how-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-change-world-history.html >
>
> A Historian of Economic Crisis on the World After COVID-19
>
> By Eric Levitz
> @EricLevitz
>
> In March, history broke into our house, and ever since, we've been cowering in panic
> rooms, wondering what our home will look like when the mad thief is finally through.
>
> Or at least this is how living in the COVID era can feel. We know that an unprecedented
> economic cataclysm has rippled across the globe. But the precise consequences of this
> catastrophe -- for the global economy, geopolitics, climate change, and our own little
> lives -- remain opaque.
>
> If anyone can discern the outlines of what's on humanity's horizon, it may be Adam Tooze.
>
> Tooze is a leading expert on how economic crises have remade the modern world. His books
> have elucidated the role that fiscal quandaries played in bringing the Nazi regime to
> power and have charted the globe-spanning, geopolitical consequences of the 2008 crash.
>
> Intelligencer spoke with the economic historian this week about how the COVID-19 crisis is
> upending economic orthodoxy, his nightmare scenarios for the post-pandemic world, and
> whether the Cold War ever ended, among other things.
>
> [QUESTION] The COVID-19 crisis has sparked a lot of anxious introspection as we all try to
> figure out which parts of our model of the world still hold, and which parts the pandemic
> has discredited or destroyed. But even before the crisis, a central theme of your writing
> concerned the various ways in which geopolitical elites were already operating off of a
> set of ideological assumptions that had congealed in the 1990s and already gone rotten by
> 2008.  What did you see as the most pernicious, outdated assumption shaping global
> politics before COVID? And to what extent is the present crisis awakening policy-makers to
> the obsolescence of that idea?
 <...>

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