Michael O’Sullivan - The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization

T HAT OUR WORLD IS CHANGING AT A TECTONIC LEVEL IS CLOSE TO UNDENIABLE , yet we often do not seem able to see beyond headline-grabbing events of recent yearsthe election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and new governments in Mexico and Italy, to name a few. These events simply represent the smashing of the old order; they are the detonators, the wrecking balls of the system that has grown up since the fall of communism.

The Levellingis about how the center of gravity in our world, societies, and economies is changing, the confusion those changes create, and the ideas that will help bring new structure to what is a disordered world. At the time of writing, the debate in countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, China, the United States, and Brazil is focused on uncertainty and the breakdown in well-established ways of doing things. Many people feel that their countries have strayed off the path to progress, and many more feel that the road ahead is an uncertain one.

My aim is to provide the frameworks and ideas that can help breathe new life into politics, policy making, and economic growth. They are not magic bullets but simply ways of focusing attention on fundamentally important issues, such as what makes a stable society and how to think through important political issues of the twenty-first century, including the role of intangible infrastructure in generating economic growth, the demise of international institutions, the rise to power of central banks, and the legal aspects of genetic engineering. The world we live in today, be the reader in Shanghai or Santiago or Stockholm, is very different from that of any other point in history. Forms of human interaction like social media didnt exist before. In economics, central banks have never before exerted so much influence on the world economy. In markets, the United States used to be the locus and architect of stability across emerging markets, either through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the US Treasury Department; now it is the provocateur of volatility. This time, as they say, is different.

There is also a sense that the cycles of the rise and fall of nations are repeating themselves and that, as over the past four hundred years, we are again grappling with basic issues such as the quality of public life, equality, and the workings of democracy. As a result, history can help prod todays debate in the right direction. It also provides ammunition for many scaremongers, and warningswith some reasonthat the world will soon revisit the bleak 1930s are now commonplace.

There is plenty in our history books to both inform and mislead us as to what might happen next to our societies. However, one period I am drawn to is the middle of the seventeenth century and its momentous events.