Get Ready, A Bigger Disruption Is Coming

AS GLOBAL SUPPLY chains break, airlines slash flights, borders rise within nation-states, stock exchanges convulse with fear, and recession looms over economies from China to Germany, Australia to the U.S., we can no longer doubt that we’re living through extraordinary times.

- By Pankaj Mishra

What remains in question, however, is our ability to comprehend them while using a vocabulary derived from decades when globalization seemed a fact of nature, like air and wind. The novel coronavirus signals a radical transformation of the kind that occurs once in a century, shattering previous assumptions.

The last such churning occurred almost exactly a century ago, and it altered the world so dramatically that a revolution in the arts, sciences, and philosophy, not to mention the discipline of economics, was needed even to make sense of it.

The opening years of the 20th century, too, were defined by a free global market for goods, capital, and labor. This was when, as John Maynard Keynes famously reminisced: “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth.”

This maker, as well as consumer, of global capitalism, could invest “his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world,” according to Keynes. He could also “secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without a passport or other formality.”

Such an economically enmeshed world seemed to many the perfect insurance against war. A contemporary version of such optimism is Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, according to which no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants would go to war.