Economics
![Adam Tooze - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001H6UIZI.jpg)
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy
"This book's great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis."-Robert Rubin, The New York Times Book Review
"Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books
Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed.
The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.
Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.
Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.
"Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books
Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed.
The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.
Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.
Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.
Editorial Reviews
"This book's great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis. . . . Whether we can overcome that incoherence and meet the challenges ahead while protecting the values at the heart of the American idea - freedom, pluralism, democracy - is the essential question posed by Shutdown."-The New York Times Book Review
"A seriously impressive book, both endlessly quotable and rigorously analytical. Tooze synthesises a huge volume of information to argue that we must prepare for a new wave of crises or risk being sunk by them. Hopefully, governments everywhere will heed his warning."-The Guardian
"Offer insights and frameworks likely to be of enduring value… To read Shutdown feels like sitting alongside the great professor while he feverishly collates an array of data and anecdotes, attempts to chronicle what is going on, his head fizzing with ideas about what it might all mean and where it might be leading."-Financial Times
"This is truly a picture of the global impact of the crisis; it covers the disruption in the financial markets, as well as the ins and outs of government policy. . . An impressively full account of the economic developments of the past 18 months."-The Economist
"A primer on the mechanics of a global financial panic, the techniques that central bankers deployed to contain it, and the political events that ensued. Laced through these taut synopses is a meditation on a grand historical question: Did 2020 mark the end of the world economic order as we'd known it since 1980? And if so, what precisely is taking neoliberalism's place?"-New York Magazine
"Tooze's book offers readers a comprehensive and smartly written summary of the economic impact of the coronavirus…Tooze briskly and expertly recounts the tense weeks in March 2020 [and] routinely compares the coronavirus shutdown to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, [which] happens to make for apt comparisons, as few previous economic and health disasters can match the scale and global reach of this pandemic." -Washington Post
"[Tooze's] writing demystifies the world before us, dispelling the cloud created b...
"A seriously impressive book, both endlessly quotable and rigorously analytical. Tooze synthesises a huge volume of information to argue that we must prepare for a new wave of crises or risk being sunk by them. Hopefully, governments everywhere will heed his warning."-The Guardian
"Offer insights and frameworks likely to be of enduring value… To read Shutdown feels like sitting alongside the great professor while he feverishly collates an array of data and anecdotes, attempts to chronicle what is going on, his head fizzing with ideas about what it might all mean and where it might be leading."-Financial Times
"This is truly a picture of the global impact of the crisis; it covers the disruption in the financial markets, as well as the ins and outs of government policy. . . An impressively full account of the economic developments of the past 18 months."-The Economist
"A primer on the mechanics of a global financial panic, the techniques that central bankers deployed to contain it, and the political events that ensued. Laced through these taut synopses is a meditation on a grand historical question: Did 2020 mark the end of the world economic order as we'd known it since 1980? And if so, what precisely is taking neoliberalism's place?"-New York Magazine
"Tooze's book offers readers a comprehensive and smartly written summary of the economic impact of the coronavirus…Tooze briskly and expertly recounts the tense weeks in March 2020 [and] routinely compares the coronavirus shutdown to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, [which] happens to make for apt comparisons, as few previous economic and health disasters can match the scale and global reach of this pandemic." -Washington Post
"[Tooze's] writing demystifies the world before us, dispelling the cloud created b...
Readers Top Reviews
Obs20GazzarianJeff K
An important read for those with some exposure to history and economics. When asked about the book I find that many are even more confused and complain that I am making covid and economics more complicated than it should be. I enjoyed Tooze's other books and he remains one of my favorite authors. It's always hardest to understand the present.
Orwellflash
Based on some of the negative comments, Tooze's intellectual rigor is not compatible with partisanship or a desire for simple explanations of complex phenomena. I am attracted to his work because of his rare gift for explication without reductionist distortion.
Alex Plainlater
Lucid, comprehensive, timely, well-written. Tooze does a great job of showing us what was right in front of our eyes, what we've all just lived through -- though most of us without thinking through the economic and political implications. His previous books about the impacts of WWI and of the subprime meltdown are important reference points for how we've responded to crises in modern times - sometimes competently, sometimes not, sometimes with a degree of egalitarian fairness, sometimes not. Shutdown is a brilliant case study in globalization.
RTMA MGary C. Marfin
Historian Adam Tooze presents his analysis of the global shocks triggered by the COVID pandemic. Tooze focuses on the efforts of Western governments to cope with the pandemic, and the resulting severe economic effects. Tooze also shows how unprepared most countries were, and how this created a devastating cascade of socioeconomic problems. On the plus side, Tooze tackles a wide variety of topics and countries, but this is also a weakness. Sometimes, it seems that Tooze loses sight of the "forest for the trees'" as the saying goes. I suspect that a book on this topic written a few years from now will have a more useful insights. I addition, I found the author's writing style to often be so turgid as to make reading unnecessarily difficult. Having read numerous books on social and physical science topics, I know that it is possible to present complex information in an understandable manner. Despite these criticisms, however, I still recommend this book because of the importance of the subject. The US and other countries will have to learn quickly how to prepare much better for the next pandemic, before another dangerous virus arrives at our shores.
Edouard Fernandez-Bo
A true history of present times : a brilliant and overarching view of the difficult economical and political challenges that we need to face
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Organized
Irresponsibility
Skeptics-and there have been skeptics from the start-like to point out that the remarkable thing about the Covid crisis is that we turned something ordinary into a global crisis. No matter what we do, people die, and the same people die of Covid as die normally-old people with preexisting conditions. In a normal year, those people die of flu and pneumonia. Outside the privileged core of the rich world, millions of people die of infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. And yet "life goes on." Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was, by the standards of historic plagues, not very lethal. What was unprecedented was the reaction. All over the world, public life shut down, and so too did large parts of commerce and the regular flow of business. All over the world this massive interruption of normality stirred, in various degrees, incomprehension, indignation, resistance, noncompliance, and protest. One need not sympathize with the politics of the objectors to acknowledge the historical force of their point. In a new and remarkable fashion, a medical challenge became a much wider crisis. Explaining how this might have happened not as the result of effete and overly protective political culture or as the result of a deliberate policy of repression, but as a result of structural tensions within early twenty-first-century societies, will help set the stage for understanding the crisis of 2020.
It is true that old people die, but what matters is how many and at what rate and from which causes. At any given moment, this rank order of mortality can be described in terms of a matrix of probabilities that has evolved over time and is held in place by medical possibilities, health economics, and the pattern of social advantage and disadvantage.
Table 1: Causes of Death
Total deaths Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (%) Noncommunicable diseases (%) Injury (%)
m m % % % % % %
1990 2017 1990 2017 1990 2017 1990 2017
Western Europe 3.86 4.16 4 5 90 91 6 4
United States 2.14 2.86 6 5 87 89 7 7
Latin America
and Caribbean 2.36 3.39 28 ...
Organized
Irresponsibility
Skeptics-and there have been skeptics from the start-like to point out that the remarkable thing about the Covid crisis is that we turned something ordinary into a global crisis. No matter what we do, people die, and the same people die of Covid as die normally-old people with preexisting conditions. In a normal year, those people die of flu and pneumonia. Outside the privileged core of the rich world, millions of people die of infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. And yet "life goes on." Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was, by the standards of historic plagues, not very lethal. What was unprecedented was the reaction. All over the world, public life shut down, and so too did large parts of commerce and the regular flow of business. All over the world this massive interruption of normality stirred, in various degrees, incomprehension, indignation, resistance, noncompliance, and protest. One need not sympathize with the politics of the objectors to acknowledge the historical force of their point. In a new and remarkable fashion, a medical challenge became a much wider crisis. Explaining how this might have happened not as the result of effete and overly protective political culture or as the result of a deliberate policy of repression, but as a result of structural tensions within early twenty-first-century societies, will help set the stage for understanding the crisis of 2020.
It is true that old people die, but what matters is how many and at what rate and from which causes. At any given moment, this rank order of mortality can be described in terms of a matrix of probabilities that has evolved over time and is held in place by medical possibilities, health economics, and the pattern of social advantage and disadvantage.
Table 1: Causes of Death
Total deaths Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (%) Noncommunicable diseases (%) Injury (%)
m m % % % % % %
1990 2017 1990 2017 1990 2017 1990 2017
Western Europe 3.86 4.16 4 5 90 91 6 4
United States 2.14 2.86 6 5 87 89 7 7
Latin America
and Caribbean 2.36 3.39 28 ...
