Adam Tooze, Crisis Historian, Has Some Bad News for Us - The Atlantic - 0 views
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merica and the world are living through what Adam Tooze, the internet’s foremost historian of money and disaster, describes as a “polycrisis.”
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a long list of challenges: War, raising the specter of nuclear conflict. Climate change, threatening famine, flood, and fire. Inflation, forcing central banks to crush consumer demand. The pandemic,
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Each crisis is hard enough to parse by itself; the interconnected mess of them is infinitely more so. And he feels “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.”
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he’s among the world’s most influential financial commentators, with loyal readerships in Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, as well as on Wall Street
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Tooze’s readers turn to him for his uncanny ability to know which numbers on a spreadsheet matter, or when a trend has hit the point at which it has started to shape history.
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“Economic events have had such a huge influence on politics this century,” Robert Skidelsky, the John Maynard Keynes biographer, told me. Tooze “illustrates the interpenetration of economic policy and political events. It’s as simple as that.”
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the revelation that Tooze is now putting forth is that we might not be emerging from crisis. Indeed, we might be in a worsening one, in which much of the world faces a series of self-reinforcing financial and geopolitical pressures, building, perhaps, to some ominous end.
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The combination of COVID-19, buckling supply chains, and central banks’ scramble to respond constituted “the first crisis where I found my professional existence, my personal existence, and my understanding of my relationship to history were all just completely seamless, continuous,” he says. He found his niche—and thousands of new readers.
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As he tells it, he’s not just circulating data or building arguments; he’s also bathing in an anarchic, unstoppable flow of information. “What does it mean to be in the present, in this constant experience of obsolescence, this constant experience of having your ideas and preconceptions consumed by the flow toward the future, which, at any given moment, is fundamentally unpredictable and then once you have consumed it, becomes obsolete?” he says effusively. “That’s my now—this literal floating on the surface tension of the current moment.”
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Hitler was compelled not just by murderous anti-Semitism but by shortages of land, steel, and fuel, Tooze argued in 2006’s Wages of Destruction,
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“We always wonder what drives this propulsive quality of the Nazi state, why it is so intent on blitzkrieg and fast conquest,” says Susan Pedersen, a renowned historian of Europe. “Adam lays out how they are operating in a world of economic constraint: For them, victory is possible, if it happens fast.”
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As Tooze sees it, the forces of central-bank tightening, war, inflation, and climate change are reinforcing one another. He is offering no reassurance about where that might head—only the hope that perhaps this polycrisis might be knowable to us.