Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

by Helen Thompson Narrated by Kitty Kelly

Overview

Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s.



The twenty-first century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks. Their fallout has led central banks to create over $25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilized the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old
political fault lines in the United States.



Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories-one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies-and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption
in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Thompson's conceptual work is...elaborate...full of revelations." — Thomas König, Austrian Journal of Political Science

"The best economics book for contextualising the present." — James Grimshaw, Evening Standard

Kirkus Reviews

2022-02-09
An astute analysis of the purported breakdown of the once-liberal international order.

Thompson, a professor of political economy at Cambridge, begins with a geopolitical history focused on energy. As the 20th century began, oil was replacing coal as the driving force of military power. Though the U.S. had plenty of oil, the Western European great powers did not. During World War I, Britain and France made efforts to control the fading Ottoman Empire, but they required oil and money from the U.S. and ended the war in significant debt. American oil and money were pivotal to the outcome of World War II, but by the 1970s, the U.S. joined Europe in their dependence on oil from the Middle East. By 1974, the Soviet Union was the world’s leading oil producer. In recent decades, the development of fracking restored America’s global leadership, just in time for China, entirely dependent on imported gas and oil, to become the nation’s main rival. Already dominating in renewable energy manufacturing, China is poised to lead the energy wave of the future. Turning to economic history, Thompson writes that the end of the dollar-based Bretton Woods monetary order in the 1970s eliminated fixed exchange rates, soon to be followed by the end of government controls by the “neoliberalism” of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This produced a vast increase in debt, further problems with the world’s oil supply, multiple economic crashes in 2007 and 2008, and sharper geopolitical conflict. The author concludes with a sharp and disturbing evaluation of both American and European democracies. Although long proclaimed to be superior to other political systems, they have been historically reliant on the destabilizing idea of nationalism and vulnerable to economic crises. The years since 1970 have seen Americans obsessed with numerous misplaced notions about immigrants, susceptible to plutocratic tendencies that favor the wealthy, and “increasingly unresponsive to democratic demands for economic reforms that would increase the return to labor.”

Dense but lucid, insightful, and unsettling global survey.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178597941
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	03/24/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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