Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

In 2020, at least as far as the financial system is concerned, managerialism once again prevailed, but it was less an exercise in all-powerful technocratic manipulation than a scrambling effort to preserve a dangerous status quo. “Too big to fail” has become a total systemic imperative. The effect is to underwrite successive rounds of escalating debt-fueled speculation and growth. Can it go on? There is no fundamental macroeconomic limit that anyone can discern. The question rather is whether technocratic governance can keep up and whether society and politics can handle it. Can it be democratized? If not, can it at least be legitimated? And can we find ways to absorb or offset the inequalities that this growth model produces? The full force of those questions was first recognized after 2008. After 2020, they still awaited an answer.

Can it go on ? Answer is in ecology, not economics.