Saved by Lael Johnson and
The Origins of Political Order
I outlined three enormous challenges for the Digital Age: rising inequality, massive environmental degradation, and the risks arising from major geopolitical change. These daunting challenges could overload our political institutions and provoke a devastating conflict. Such has been the pattern of the past. Surely the prime task of our age is to re
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
The emergence of the modern notion of sovereignty, along with trade, increased order, but the rise of nationalism and the erosion of the balance of power ultimately overwhelmed it and resulted in World War I. Similarly, World War II came about through failures of diplomacy, the reemergence of strident nationalism, the rise of protectionism, and a f
... See moreRichard Haass • The World
Xi likes to compare “China’s order” with “chaos in the West.” As well he might, for it’s a playbook the world has seen before. Leaders of the Axis powers, after several successful invasions in the late 1930s, were themselves astonished by the disunity of their vanquished opponents.
Neil Howe • The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End
My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable (AD... See more