Making Sense of the Twenty-First Century: A Few Thoughts

While my academic writing on world affairs initially concentrated on security studies this early on led me away from the field's traditional subject matter toward the economics of the matter--and increasingly to economic questions as such.

It was simply where the action seemed to be (more obviously so in a time in which great power conflict was constrained and declining in comparison with the prior century).

And so I went on writing about the decline of growth rates since the post-war boom and especially the 2007 financial crisis, deindustrialization, financialization, the methods for measuring such developments, the associated economic models and ideologies, and even the social consequences of these troubles, from the erosion of the American middle class to the social withdrawal of the young.

Of course, the events of recent years have made it harder to overlook those more traditional emphases of international relations scholarship--with the result that I ended up writing about such topics as the shifting naval balance between the U.S. on one side and Russia and China on the other, the comparative military-industrial capacities of the U.S. and Russia, the contraction in size of the major West European military establishments, and the changing defense postures of Germany and Japan--and of course, the waning of what has commonly been called unipolarity.

In spite of that one should not mistake this for "security" replacing "economics." The unhappy trend of our economic life is, of course, strongly connected with the increased conflict we have seen in the international scene--though as yet few seem to have troubled themselves much about any linkages, not least because the "experts" so hastened to relegate the crisis of 2007 to the past.

The historian Adam Tooze, indeed, admitted to having shared the conventional wisdom when taking up the subject--only to, when publishing his book on that crisis and its aftermath a decade later, confess that he had since learned better. As Tooze came to realize through his researches the Great Recession was not past in 2018, and is not past now--while the shock of the pandemic, which remains ongoing, is not past either, one crisis merely piled atop another.

Alas, others not in a position to pursue scholarship such as Tooze does, or even properly equipped to cope with his very useful but also long, dense, book demanding more than the "eighth grade and under" reading level of even the college-educated, were aware of the fact all along--through the day to day experience of their own lives, which for many became decidedly more bitter than before.