The New Age of Tragedy
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/04/new-age-tragedy-china-food-europe-energy-robert-kaplan-helen-thompson-john-gray
The post-Cold War moment, a 30-year period when globalization and free trade were orchestrated under the aegis of American supremacy, is ending. As the historian Anders Stephanson has written, “One could not deny that geopolitics reduced to a set of mopping-up operations was a historic achievement of US power.” Today, great-power rivalry, war and the competition for diminishing resources are old realities reborn, revenants of history that now define a present of increasing peril and uncertainty.
In The Tragic Mind (2023), the American correspondent, author and foreign policy adviser Robert D Kaplan argues that we must learn to think tragically to avoid tragedy. We need what he calls anxious foresight. The wisest among us fear disorder and anarchy as much as tyranny.
My take:
https://www.ut.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/Business/TBESpring2023_Final.pdf
Rising geopolitical risks and ongoing climate change imply that the lengthy period of good luck may have run its course. We may no longer have the good fortune of experiencing shocks that are small and infrequent. Naturally, this raises the likelihood that both output growth and infation will become much more volatile and a return to the Great Moderation-type dynamic may not be on the cards for the foreseeable future.
The post-Cold War moment, a 30-year period when globalization and free trade were orchestrated under the aegis of American supremacy, is ending. As the historian Anders Stephanson has written, “One could not deny that geopolitics reduced to a set of mopping-up operations was a historic achievement of US power.” Today, great-power rivalry, war and the competition for diminishing resources are old realities reborn, revenants of history that now define a present of increasing peril and uncertainty.
In The Tragic Mind (2023), the American correspondent, author and foreign policy adviser Robert D Kaplan argues that we must learn to think tragically to avoid tragedy. We need what he calls anxious foresight. The wisest among us fear disorder and anarchy as much as tyranny.
https://www.ut.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/Business/TBESpring2023_Final.pdf
Rising geopolitical risks and ongoing climate change imply that the lengthy period of good luck may have run its course. We may no longer have the good fortune of experiencing shocks that are small and infrequent. Naturally, this raises the likelihood that both output growth and infation will become much more volatile and a return to the Great Moderation-type dynamic may not be on the cards for the foreseeable future.