Antara Haldar at Project Syndicate:
According to the existential-risk researcher Luke Kemp, globalization has produced a planetary “Goliath.” Unlike Rome or Rapa Nui, today’s world is integrated through and through, which means that any new stressor – a climate shock, a pandemic, a financial crisis – can trigger a sudden, irreversible, global cascade. Worse, with seven of the climate scientist Johan Rockström’s nine planetary boundaries having been breached, Earth has already thrown down the gauntlet for our civilization.
Yet ruin is not destiny. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2022 book, The Dawn of Everything, challenged the deterministic view of civilizational evolution. Collapse is not a matter of fate, but a failure of imagination. Despite writing during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, within a century, technology could solve the “economic problem,” leaving humans free for the “art of life” as work commitments shrank to 15 hours per week and inequality receded.
The progressive journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book, Abundance, revives this sensibility.
More here.
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