Political Economy

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century explains the historical origins of the political shocks of the past decade: why politics has been so difficult, why energy and debt are such a large part of these difficulties, and how two rather different kinds of democratic crises exist ...in Europe and the United States.
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2019 was the last great year for the world economy. For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wante...d it. America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going. Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe. All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending. In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging. The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world - from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all - is about to change. A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence.
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The blue commons are our oceans- they feed us all, link our continents, provide a natural economy on coasts around the world and are a crucial part of our ecosystem. But in recent years the oceans have been plundered. They are currently undergoing an existential crisis that deman...ds a global response. Why have our oceans been so overlooked in the conversation about the climate catastrophe? This book exposes the corrosion of the blue commons through six trends - encroachment or destruction, enclosure, social forgetting, commodification, privatisation and colonisation. The commoners - mainly small-scale fisheries and coastal communities - have fought back, with some inspiring and positive results. It provides a road-map for reviving the concept of the blue commons, as belonging to us all, protected from plunder by businesses and nations seeking profit at the expense of everyone.
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Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared ...than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of a number of devloped countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and of economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to 'the science' often turn out to be mere magical thinking? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health and network science, Doom- The Politics of Catastrophe is a global post mortem for a plague year. Drawing on preoccupations that have shaped his books for some twenty years, Niall Ferguson describes the pathologies that have done us so much damage- from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. COVID-19 was a test failed by countries who must learn some serious lessons from history if they are to avoid the doom of irreversible decline.
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Exploring the lives of their earliest exponents, Christina Morina's book shows how Karl Marx's ideas were read, debated, adapted, and adopted in socialist movements across Europe in the years after his death, and how a theory of capitalisn grew into a political philosophy that sh...aped the history of the 20th century.
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