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the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage

The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years

Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.

in April 2022 the Cascade Institute published an interesting report on the theme by Scott Janzwood and Thomas Homer-Dixon. They defined a polycrisis as follows:

We define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects.

A global polycrisis, should it occur, will inherit the four core properties of systemic risks—extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty—while also exhibiting causal synchronization among risks.

Can economic historians give policy-makers advice on the basis of what they believed caused the Great Depression? A discussion of this topic by Britain’s top economic historians in a lecture at Cambridge University on November 4th suggested the question is more complex than it first appears

what has made producing lessons more difficult is that many traditional views about the causes of the Depression have been overturned by academics in recent decades.

Although the rise of protectionism increased the velocity and depth of the depression when tariffs started rising in 1930, they were still only responsible for part of the fall in world GDP during the Depression

That idea — a small tax on high-volume goods and services — is among those proposed by an independent panel appointed by the United Nations to figure out how to pay for the staggering humanitarian crises facing the world today

Aid for the millions of people affected has sharply risen, but it has not kept pace with demands.

The world needs $40 billion each year to meet the needs of those affected by wars and natural disasters and already faces a shortfall of $15 billion for this year. Those needs are expected to grow; as the report stated bluntly, “Never before has generosity been so insufficient.” Already, food aid has been repeatedly slashed for refugees fleeing conflict in places like Somalia and Syria.

the strange condition of American conservatism, in which two crises, one normal and one existential, are happening at once.

The normal crisis is a party crisis, the sort that afflicts all political coalitions. The Republican Party 40 years ago coalesced around a set of appeals that enabled its leaders to win large presidential majorities and set the national agenda.

beneath this party crisis there is the deeper one, having to do with what conservatism under a liberal order exists to actually conserve.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

Pedro Pierluisi was sworn in as Puerto Rico's 12th elected governor on Saturday, promising to turn the page on years of social and political turbulence in the U.S. territory and to restore trust in a government whose credibility has been badly damaged by its response to a string of recent crises.

His swearing-in on Saturday was the culmination of two prior attempts to claim the governorship, first in 2016, when he lost his party's gubernatorial primary, and again in 2019, after the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.

At the heart of Pierluisi's address on Saturday was an acknowledgement of the pain that many Puerto Ricans have endured in recent years — from twin hurricanes, earthquakes, the island's debt crisis, corruption scandals and the ongoing pandemic — and a pledge to usher in better days.

So, am I wrong to delight in this bird when so much woe stalks birds in general? The question seems pertinent when our mental bandwidth is packed with generalized gloom

There is the problem of climate, the problem of democracy, the problem of gun violence, the water problem, the social media problem, the free speech problem, the policing problem, the inequality problem, the debt problem, the border problem, the overdose problem, and the linked problem of inflation and bank collapses. Oh, yes: And the bird problem.

Nor might it be coincidence that the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center — excellent sources when it comes to opinion surveys — report that the ground has begun crumbling beneath American morale.

This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.

In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.

The regional tensions came to a head last week when Mr. Maduro went on television to chide the Organization of American States, which has criticized Venezuela’s handling of the economic and political crises.

So far, he’s gone virtually unchallenged. He has said the 2008 financial crisis “was the first time ever that markets were broken and could not fix themselves” (ever hear of the Depression?), and that he “could have caught a number of different crises” during his tenure at the Fed (which begs the question of why he didn’t). Journalists have asked such penetrating questions as, "You were knighted. Does that come with a title or anything?" Even the tough-minded Binyamin Applebaum called Greenspan "one of the nation’s most astute economic observers." Overall, the media has presented Greenspan's book as part of a soul-searching quest for why he missed the greatest economic collapse in decades—a frame that is needlessly obsequious and suggests he was a bystander to the disaster, not a central actor.

The great issues of the war were not resolved on that April morning at Appomattox.

not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost.

if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die.

The definitive book about financial crises has become “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” published in 2009 with exquisite timing, by Carmen M. Reinhart, now of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, of Harvard.

Surveying hundreds of years of crises around the world, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff conclude that debt is the primary cause and that the aftermath is “deep and prolonged,” with “profound declines in output and employment.” On average, a modern financial crisis has caused the unemployment rate to rise for more than four years and by 7 percentage points. (We’re now at almost four years and 5 percentage points.) The recovery takes many years more.

As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama

Now, obviously I disagree with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

there’s nothing quite like sustained poor economic performance – the kind of poor performance brought on by Europe’s austerity and hard-money obsessions — to undermine the elite’s reputation for competence.

Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority

That’s probably why one recent study found a consistent historical relationship between financial crises and the rise of right-wing extremism. And history is repeating itself.

A recent research paper, “Going to Extremes: Politics After Financial Crises, 1870-2014,” argues that financial crises like the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recent prolonged recession push voters in a conservative direction and allow right-wing parties in Europe to flourish.

under such circumstances,Votes for far-right parties increase strongly, government majorities shrink, the fractionalization of parliaments rises and the overall number of parties represented in parliament jumps.

Trump and Cruz are, in effect, the rebellious American counterparts to the UK Independence Party in England; the National Front in France; and the People’s Party in Denmark.

The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age — the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism — and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world.

the calamitous 14th century is not as far removed from our own experience as we would like to think.

Since the Second World War, we have experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth, and so it was for Medieval Europe on the eve of the Black Death

oil spill off the coast of California. Half a century later, this annual day unites millions across the globe, drawing attention to the huge challenges facing our planet.

Now more than ever, Earth Day offers an opportunity for us all to reflect upon our relationship with the planet, amid the most powerful possible message that nature can surprise us at any moment, with devastating consequences for pretty much every individual. It is a time when the health of the planet and its people has never been so important.

There was much talk of nature as the bridge between the biodiversity and climate crises, of nature-based solutions such as forestation, peatland restoration and the protection of mangroves as the answers to some of the challenges we face today, and of natural capital supporting sustainable development and human wellbeing.

The author demonstrates that there is far more to economics than Thomas Carlyle's “dismal science”. And she does so with all the style and panache that you would expect from the author of the 1998 bestseller, “A Beautiful Mind”

In lesser hands Ms Nasar's story might have degenerated into a series of pen portraits: tittle-tattle for the middlebrow. But she unifies her account with a series of big questions. How, for example, did humanity escape from the grinding poverty that has been its lot through most of human history? Why was a static society replaced by a dynamic one? And how best to cope with the booms and busts that have been capitalism's peculiar contribution to human life?

In Marx's view the capitalist system, for all its ability to unleash productive power, was haunted by a contradiction: the drive to increase profits would immiserate the poor and lead to crises of overproduction