“A confluence that could propel a new paradigm” The End of Capitalism, or the Beginning?
On September 19, 2023, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, addressed the seventy-eighth General Assembly in apocalyptic terms. “Our world is becoming unhinged,” he declared. “Geopolitical tensions are rising. Global challenges are mounting. And we seem incapable of coming together to respond.” Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, mentioned the war in Ukraine and military coups in the Sahel, but the core challenges he highlighted were more systemic: inequality, rising debt levels, authoritarianism, a “dysfunctional, outdated, and unjust” financial architecture, and “the most immediate threat to our future: our overheating planet.” If the world didn’t tackle these issues quickly, Guterres warned, it faced the prospect of “a Great Fracture in economic systems and financial systems and trade relations.”1
The secretary-general wasn’t the only one issuing dire warnings. Earlier in the year, a report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), which hosts an annual conference of political and business bigwigs in Davos, Switzerland, said, “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks—inflation, costof-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare—which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced.” And these risks were being “amplified by comparatively new developments … including accelerating climate change, unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, [and] low global investment and de-globalization.”2 In a survey of its network of “thought leaders” in business, government, academia, and civil society, the WEF listed five statements about the coming decade and asked the respondents to pick the one that most closely resembled their views. The most commonly selected statement was “consistently volatile across economies and industries with multiple shocks accentuating divergent trajectories.”3
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