Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? A really excellent retelling of the modern political history of Western Europe and the US through the lens of energy. What Thompson does is not so much to introduce new stories, but to frame what you already know in a new and novel way. Although this thesis does have some explanatory power for the fall of the Roman Republic that Polybius foresaw, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as a long historical generalization. But I was quite taken with his notion that each form of government is destroyed by its own excess, generated from within itself by its own inherent and particular vice. While we are not accustomed to thinking about democracy in this way, I think we can see this phenomenon quite clearly when we reflect upon the end of various European monarchical regimes—take the ancien régime in France or Czarist Russia. The question then becomes whether we should treat modern democracy as somehow immune to the problem. Now, obviously, many people would argue that it is, following Tocqueville in treating democracy as ultimately irreversible, at least at a certain level of economic development. But I start off as a skeptic on providential claims about democracy. DSJ: I’m intrigued by your claim that the humanitarian tragedy in Syria was even more disruptive than the Iraq War. Can you explain your reasoning here, especially as it relates to new interstate rivalries and the challenges facing NATO?

Disorder ebook by Helen Thompson - Rakuten Kobo Disorder ebook by Helen Thompson - Rakuten Kobo

To give credit where credit is due, the book does offer a valuable perspective on the uncertainties and upheavals of the modern age. For readers patient enough to dissect each sentence and dedicated enough to piece together the scattered puzzle of Thompson's thoughts, there might be some golden nuggets to be found.The energy narrative starts with the rise of oil and its replacement of coal which gradually disadvantaged Europe. The monetary strand starts in 1971-1973 with the dissolution of Bretton woods and the ERM and then Euro. It covers both sides of the Atlantic with alternative threads of discussion flipping between the US and Europe. There's fascinating insight into the tensions between Britain, France and Germany at that time. The second monetary chapter is about US-China relations the build up of easy credit and the cause of the 2007-2008 crash. There is a November 2022 interview on the Demand Side podcast where the author explains how the book gestated since 2018 especially its delay due to Covid-19. Thompson describes how she divided the book into geopolitics driven by energy supply particularly oil and gas and finance particularly the dismantlement of Bretton woods and democratic politics which cannot be separated from nation states. Of course, these largely benign conditions did not eliminate the disruptive capacity of some of the forces that began to move before the 1980s. The immediate turbulence generated by the Maastricht Treaty and the 1992–93 ERM crises bequeathed systemic problems: at the turn of the millennium, the EU was a multi-currency union that contained a Eurozone larger than Germany had ever intended with an offshore financial centre located in the wider Union. Quite clearly, the EU also had a long-term predicament centered around the relationship between Union-level treaties and national elections. In the United States, the fact that the 1992 presidential election was won on the lowest percentage of the popular vote since 1912 and the prolonged attempt by congressional Republicans to remove Bill Clinton from office by impeachment were early indications of the path the American republic was on towards weak losers’ consent.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century - Hardcover - AbeBooks

The year 2005 marked geopolitical turning points in the U.S., China, and Germany, among other nations. Oil could cut both ways, however, and was influential in the collapse of the Soviet Union (as was the Chernobyl disaster, discussed in my review of Serhii Plokhy’s book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. ) The high oil prices of the 1970s incentivised production of oil and gas from the North Sea, as well as additional output in Alaska and Mexico, and this extra production capacity reduced the ability of Opec to control prices. So too did the creation of oil futures contracts on US exchanges, which gave the holders the right to buy oil at an agreed price in the future. Faced with this, Saudi Arabia led Opec in production cuts in an effort to retain control over prices, but as Saudi Arabia’s income began to fall, it reversed course, pumping up production to secure market share, leading to a price crash in 1986. This hugely diminished oil revenues for the Soviet Union, reducing its capacity to finance domestic spending, adding another destabilising factor that led to the dissolution of the Soviet project in 1991. Russia re-emerged to play the Soviet Union’s role in energy supply internationally, particularly to Europe, complicated by the fact that pipelines ran through former countries of the Soviet bloc, such as Ukraine and Poland. That story is of course very much active today. I always try to give books a fair shake, but sometimes, it’s just not meant to be, and unfortunately, this was one of those times. I started it with enthusiasm (yes, I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to socio-political analyses), but ended up waving the white flag before reaching the end. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’In a search for a comprehensive explanation of the last decade’s disruption, this book starts from the premise that several histories are necessary to identify the causal forces at work and a conviction that these histories must overlap,” Thompson writes in her introduction. The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic. Deindustrialization, financial crises, mass unemployment, chaos in the Middle East, and rising inequality have shortened life expectancies, undermined social stability, and opened the door to demagogues and authoritarians. And that was before the pandemic killed tens of millions of people and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine displaced millions more and upended global commodity markets. Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and also Deputy Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of Oil and the western economic crisis (2017); China and the mortgaging of America (2010); and Might, right, prosperity and consent: representative democracy and the international economy(2008). Since 2015, Helen ha...

in the 21st century - Big Why 2005 was a major turning point in the 21st century - Big

This means that after having read it a few weeks ago, I find it hard to think of a main take-away in this book. Rather than clarifying the ginormous complexity by synthesizing its components in more accessible language, I feel more confused and anchorless than before. Then again, Thompson is not a political activist but an academic. For a book targeting a wider audience, I do believe a different approach could have been a better choice. Thompson’s explanation for the 2016 Brexit referendum suffers from similar flaws. That referendum, it must be remembered, was decided in a close vote that was only held because the Tories won an unexpected parliamentary majority the year before. And that election, it should also be recalled, was one in which European issues played almost no part. Instead, the supposed threat of Scottish independence was the decisive issue in key English constituencies. Moreover, according to the 2016 British Social Attitudes survey, only 22 percent of U.K. citizens wanted to leave the EU in 2015. But instead of treating the outcome as a fluke that needs to be explained by contingent circumstances, Thompson believes that it was a fundamental consequence of the United Kingdom’s place outside the euro.This is particularly the interpretation she provides for the tensions between the EU institutions and the increasingly restive national populations in Europe. National governments in the Eurozone have ceded control of monetary policy to the ECB, and have less incentive and flexibility to manage their economies. Their populations consequently react negatively when their governments seem not to be accountable for austerity programs and other financial governance matters that affect them. I first discovered Helen Thompson in the now defunct podcast 'Talking Politics' hosted by David Runciman. Runciman and Thompson conversed at an exceptionally high intellectual level, I found. If you're interested in a serious crash course in modern geopolitics by an authority that simply knows too much to be able to clearly convey it to laypeople (evidenced among other things by the number of sentences that start with a variant on "Unsurprisingly, ..."), this is for you. the destabilizing inflation and related unemployment of the 1970s when Middle Eastern oil producers used their market power to raise prices;

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century - Goodreads

The economic story begins in the 1970s and explains how the rise of the Eurodollar system and the decade's energy crises remade the monetary world and the European Union, and how the Federal Reserve and China's response to the 2007-8 crash in preventing an economic collapse let lose a succession of economic and energy problems that cannot now be resolved.As these plates spun, the financial markets appeared detached from the emerging geopolitical and economic risks. Monetary tightening might have ended NICE, but it would have next-to-no short-term effect on credit conditions for financial corporations. The Eurodollar markets had become their own world, detached not, since they offered various opportunities to politicians, from politics, but from the ability of central bankers to manage an economic cycle and disincentivize excessive risk taking. Only on 9 August 2007 did the mechanisms of the entire complex funding system on which banks depended dramatically break down. From that day, the international monetary and financial system ceased to function without systematic support from the American central bank.