Hockey Sticks and Crosses

Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp in Polycrisis:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Two types of images are key to understanding current debates about economic globalization: the hockey stick chart, representing the stunning and inexorable growth of some phenomenon; and the cross chart, whose lines represent changes in relative power and prosperity.

There are good and bad hockey sticks, and the job of policy makers the world over is to harness the former while curbing the latter. But the domestic and international politics of addressing these hockey sticks is complicated by their intersection with distributive conflicts—which can be seen in the form of crosses.

In Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters, we identify a series of narratives that dominate Western debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization. These storylines are important because they offer different interpretations about what the problems are, how they came about, who is responsible, and what should be done. Here, we highlight some of the key hockey sticks and crosses on which these narratives rely.

No single narrative or image can capture the multifaceted nature of complex issues like economic globalization and the climate crisis. Understanding different perspectives and how they interact is crucial…

More here.