The title of global strategist Viktor Shvets’ book, The Twilight Before the Storm, aptly describes our current situation. On the one hand, Western societies are in the twilight of the long era of neoliberalism, dating back to the 1970s and characterised by financial deregulation, privatisation and faith in markets.
On the other hand, far from finding a new way forward, we are faced with multiple threats of social and economic collapse. The interaction of economic disruption, climate disaster, pandemics, and the breakdown of the old geopolitical order has been aptly described as a “polycrisis”. Influential economist Charles Goodhart recently warned, “the next 30 to 40 years are going to be very difficult.”
