Can the word ‘polycrisis’ help us make sense of the post-COVID world? Historian Adam Tooze has his say

Adam Tooze, historian: Economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. That's why I think the polycrisis term has a real utility.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week, historian Adam Tooze analyses the state of the world and asks whether the word 'polycrisis' is a useful one to describe what's happened to us since COVID.

Adam Tooze: You cannot live through the experience of 2020 and not be quite profoundly shaken in your assumptions about what you can take for granted.

Robin Pomeroy: And if you felt that so much changed during the pandemic and since, and are struggling to make sense of it, you're not alone.

Adam Tooze: If you've been feeling confused and you've been feeling as though everything is impacting on you at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.

Robin Pomeroy: Climate change, superpower rivalry, economic uncertainty, polarized politics. These things didn't come out of nowhere. And Adam Tooze traces the evolution of today's polycrisis to a decade or so ago.

Adam Tooze: The unfolding of this current moment starts in 2008, which is simultaneously not just the financial crisis which we all remember, but also Putin's first aggression against Georgia. It is also the breakdown of the WTO in the Doha Round, it is setting the stage for the disappointment of the Copenhagen climate talks...

Robin Pomeroy: And the history we are living through today has its roots even further back in time.

Adam Tooze: The origin of our current moment lies 50 years ago, in the 1970s.

Robin Pomeroy: Find all our podcasts at wef.ch/podcasts. I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum and with Adam Tooze and his assessment of global challenges right now...

Adam Tooze: Look, there's a lot of stuff happening here all at once, and that precisely is what we're trying to wrap our minds around.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Reporter 1: Here's one many of you probably haven't heard: polycrisis.

Reporter 2: Polycrisis, which is the word of the moment and the word of Davos. It's essentially multiple global crises happening at once that knock into each other like billiard balls...

Robin Pomeroy: Yes, polycrisis has become a buzzword. We even mentioned it in the title of our Radio Davos episode that reported on the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report earlier this year. It was in the air at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting last month, where people were discussing the intertwined global issues of war, economic uncertainty, inflation, recession, the climate crisis, among others. But does that word really tell us anything new about the world we live in and the challenges we face?

In Davos, my colleague HyoJin Park snagged an interview with Adam Tooze. He's a history professor at Columbia University in New York and the author of books including Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, and is the co-host of the Foreign Policy podcast Ones and Tooze which, in its own description, covers ‘nearly everything’.

Adam had plenty of insights and opinions on the state of the world right now, how we got here and where we might be going. HyoJin started by asking Adam Tooze why he used the word polycrisis in some of his work.

Adam Tooze: So, I mean, it's worth clarifying. It's not my idea. It's an idea that was launched by a French theorist of complexity called Edgar Morin, and then it was picked up by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, in 2015, 2016, to describe the experience of trying to govern Europe when you had to deal with the Greek debt crisis, Putin's first aggression against Ukraine and the sort of rumblings of Brexit in the background and the refugee crisis in Syria spilling over into Europe.

And I think what he was trying to get at and why I think the term is still useful is this experience of not a single crisis with a single clearly defined logic, the financial crisis, and it's about mortgage backed securities and they're blowing up. But this coming together at a single moment of things, which on the face of it and really when you even dig into it, don't have anything to do with each other, but nevertheless seem to pile onto each other to create a situation in the minds of policymakers, business people, families, individuals. When we're thinking about the COVID crisis, for instance, that is overwhelming and that leaves us unable to cope and, you know, questioning our identity and finding it very difficult to decide what the ground is that we stand on because it's being destabilized from so many different directions at once.

And there are different versions of, I think, this experience, especially if you live in North America. If you live in the United States, Americans have been experience, certainly liberal Americans, I think conservatives feel it too, a kind of sense of national crisis that's quite comprehensive. But they read it as the experience of the American dream coming apart. Whereas I think the polycrisis concept captures this as a much more general experience. I wouldn't confine it to the last couple of years, Juncker said it started in '15/'16. I think you could make a good case that really the unfolding of this current moment starts in 2008, which is simultaneously not just the financial crisis, which we all remember. But also Putin's first aggression against Georgia. It is also the breakdown of the WTO in the Doha Round, it is setting the stage for the disappointment of the Copenhagen climate talks. And then on top of everything else, there was a swine flu epidemic in 2008/9. And so, in a sense, you already see there many of the elements of the current moment coming together. And the key things for me are finance, politics, if you like, the disruptions of American Democratic politics, with Sarah Palin being put on the GOP ticket in '08. So economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. And those four things, they don't reduce to a single common denominator. They don't reduce to a single factor. And that's why I think the polycrisis term has a real utility descriptively as much as anything else, because it's kind of hand-waving, of course, it's kind of arm-waving. It's going, look, there's a lot of stuff happening here all at once. And that precisely is what we're trying to wrap our minds around.

HyoJin Park, video producer, World Economic Forum: Some people might argue that this is just what happens at a late-stage capitalism, right? Like this is falling apart, end of a neoliberal era and whatnot. Why would you say that these things are not completely related to this one source?

Adam Tooze: I think that's a good question. I, in general, don't think that geopolitics reduces to capitalism. Capitalism supercharges geopolitics in important ways, but one does not reduce to the other. Nor do I think the democratic dysfunction and distemper in a simple way reduces to geopolitics. There's a wider array of cultural political forces at work, and clearly you could say that in a broad sense, modernization and the great acceleration of economic development from 1945 onwards gives us both climate change and zoonotic mutation and therefore pandemics. But it's a roundabout chain of causation that we're talking about there. And so in a sense, it seems to me, sure, OK, if you want to call this you know, a crisis of capitalism, you're then going to have to do all of the explaining that I've just done with policycrisis anyway. Right. You're not really gaining very much by saying, well, I have the magic bullet, which is the cause, because the amount of variation that by itself is explaining is too... it's not adequate enough. Take, for instance, the China factor. I mean, are we really convinced that the challenge posed by China to the United States and Western hegemony can be summarized in simply the words, well, capitalism produces into imperialist rivalry. Well, if you're a Leninist, maybe you feel satisfied with that explanation of the world. It doesn't seem adequate to me to describe what's going on here, which is why, quite deliberately, I would insist on this as being a distinct variable. The same for me goes when we go from the Anthropocene to some people like this idea of the Capitaloscene. That too seems to me to be a reduction of a set of processes which are more complex than simply capitalism. Capitalism may be one of the drivers here, but it doesn't by itself explain why we are seeing the pressures. We need to talk about urbanization. We need to talk about particular models of forced industrialization to actually get us to the chain of causation we're interested in. Put it this way: Nigeria is a thoroughly capitalist place. It's a bit player in the global CO2 equation. China is a weird state capitalist place and it's 28% of CO2. So for me that's a pretty clear indication of the fact that we need more than just that variable. This isn't to downplay economic growth driven by profit motives and capital accumulation as a major driver, but I just think it isn't going to serve our purposes in really allowing us to get... to wrap our minds around what's going on here.

HyoJin Park: So it's a bit reductionist.

Adam Tooze: It is profoundly reductive. Yeah, and it always has been. And that's why people like it, because it takes you from the complex to the simple, and then you feel good because you've reduced complex to simplicity. And what I'm saying is, if that was something that was generally attractive to do, one of the ideas in the polycrisis concept is that it's registering the fact that certain sorts of familiar reduction are no longer compelling. And that's a very nice... the way you've distilled that out, because that is indeed what's at stake here. If you're insisting that this is a polycrisis, you're saying we can reduce, but only so far to an end, which isn't one, isn't infinite, I'm not saying everything plays into this, but there is a finite number and it's larger than one of contending different sorts of forces which are acting on us. And unless we are willing to grasp that, we aren't going to understand... well, we're just going to be blindsided a lot of the time. Right now, for instance, it seems to me we're like goldfish about the pandemic. It's absolutely extraordinary how far down the agenda that has dropped, despite the fact that there's literally hundreds of millions of people getting sick in China as we speak.

HyoJin Park: You did draw out all these different components, you know, the political and the economic, financial. But if you were to paint the scene of what that looks like for us right now in these different categories, could you kind of set the scene for us?

Adam Tooze: So, I mean, what I would focus on first and foremost is the combination of the aftermath of the pandemic and ongoing. Right. If you actually want to understand what the backdrop to the inflation of 2021/2022 really was, if you wanted the destabilization of the world economy that we've been struggling with, you have to wind the clock back to 2020. And unfortunately, President Biden's promise that the pandemic is over is turning out not to be true, even in the United States. We have new variants that are ripping through the US population. We don't yet know the lethality, but we don't also know what variants might spiral out of that. So that for me is where I start. And you superimpose on that for instance the instability of the global financial system, the serious risks that are harboured within it as we raise interest rates and those radiate outwards from the core to the weaker members, the frontier markets, the emerging markets. And then you superimpose on top of that something which to go back to your earlier question really doesn't in any simple sense reduce to the logic of capitalism, which is the mad-dog aggression of Putin's regime in Moscow. This isn't you know... it's easy enough to understand why Russia would be discontent with the post-Cold War order. I mean, that's fairly self-evident. They lost. They don't like it. They've been telling us so really pretty consistently since the 1990s. It's something else to understand why you would want to take the risk of actually launching a full-scale conventional invasion of a fairly substantial neighbouring state, which is the reality that we've been confronted with. And so that, as it were, takes that geopolitical dimension which in the abstract and in general you might pull back to the uneven development of global capitalism and focuses it in a way which I think refuses that kind of analysis. So post-COVID, destabilization of the global economy, the inherent weaknesses of a highly leveraged, profit-driven capitalist system, piled on top of that, the shock of really to most people, unanticipated military aggression and in the background, public in the background, especially if you're in one of the more vulnerable poor countries of the world, notably in South Asia, the climate crisis, which is already at our door. So if you are in Pakistan, you know, fifth most populous country on earth, one third inundated at the end of last summer as a result of this extraordinary monsoon which followed weeks later on, you know, this incredible heat wave that ripped through South Asia over the summer. So those would be the elements, I think, of this crisis. And this is all happening within an ellipse, which is the ellipse of the relative stability of American politics in the current moment, which, as we know, could tip one way or the other quite dramatically in the coming months even. So that would be the way in which I would kind of parse this out.

HyoJin Park: And I think in the very beginning you did draw out clear lines that go farther back. Right. And you said that there were signs of this way farther back on. It's not like it's just happening now. So how does a policycrisis come about? What are some of the key drivers?

Adam Tooze: To my mind, the origin of our current moment lies 50 years ago in the 1970s. I mean, this is going to be the anniversary of 1973. This is really the moment where I think much of our modern configuration comes clearly into existence. And many of the first forecasts, whether it's, you know, new types of infectious disease or the Malthusian problematic of the Club of Rome report, really, you know, they date to this moment 50 years ago. In the nature of forecasts, it took a whole long while for those, as it were, threatening diagnoses to come true. And the key drivers there are, on the one hand, the disintegration of the classic gold standard-backed monetary system which opened up international finance in a really dramatic way, dawning multipolarity, of which the OPEC shock really made visibly clear and the humbling really of Western power. The multiplication, however, of that across the globe. This is the moment of America's defeat in Vietnam. It's the moment of the strategic compromise between America and China in the Cold War, which are harbingers of our current, more multipolar order. And as Club of Rome report and various types of epidemiological expertise was saying at the time, the dawning awareness that the miracle of economic growth which had, you know, really taken off in a dramatic scale after World War Two has a downside, so that a series of really very dramatic risks are not just merely exogenous anymore, but are being generated by the very success of our economic growth story. And that awareness really comes quite sharply into focus both on the, shall we say, resource environmental envelope side, but also on the pandemic disease zoonotic mutation side in the 1970s. And so that for me would be the moment where the modern polycrisis mode becomes visible, is first beginning to be articulated. If you take Edgar Morin, the French theorist who first coined the term, if you take his intellectual biography back, he's a classic 1970s environmental alarmist analyst. So there's a tightness to that chronology. It's also, not for nothing, the birth moment of WEF right. This is the moment where the idea of an organization like WEF as a mediator of global conflict and of new networks and the need for Europe to learn from the wider world acquires the attractiveness that it does. And so I think of organizations like WEF as really quite organic to this problem perception, as the Germans would say, you know, or crisis perception, there's an understanding that things are shifting in the world that require a new fora, new agencies, new patterns and new coalitions of stakeholders to be brought together. You know, how far and how successfully any organization has been able to do this over the long haul is an open question. If you think about the OECD, or OPEC or IMF, they've all faced huge challenges. But I do think in that respect we are children of that moment. I mean I'm in mid-fifties, so it's my generation writing its own history you could say, and I do think polycrisis does have an autobiographical, biographical, element. It goes into people's subjectivities in the Seventies and also the moment of the emergence of new identity politics. This is the moment of second-wave feminism, of the Black liberation movement, of identity politics really taking on its new form. And that too is part of what the polycrisis, if you think about it in cultural terms, certainly expands to include. If you think also then of the backlash politics that produces, if we think about a nightmare that's playing out in Afghanistan right now and you think about Afghanistan as a sort of hub for polycrisis in its own way, you think about those images, the haunting images of the emancipated population of Afghanistan in the 1970s and the violent way in which that has been basically ploughed under in the decades since. So I think that will be my like time grab. But it's one thing seeing the shape of something, it's another seeing its reality. And that's where the pandemic experience 2020, 2021, to my mind, is just the showstopper because we stop the world economy in its tracks. We've never done anything remotely like that before - a 15 to 20% hit to global GDP in a matter of weeks in the spring and literally in the days that followed the 2020 WEF meeting.

HyoJin Park: In the very beginning, you were talking about the feeling, the psychology of it and this feeling of loss of the American Dream, for example. So I kind of wanted to touch on this a little bit because I feel like the way that we experience it, especially people who are not analysts, we feel, oh, the economy is going downturn, so I'm going to take less risks. And it exhibits themselves in our behaviours. Right? I'm just wondering how you think that is being exhibited in our societies right now. Like how are people feeling it?

Adam Tooze: Well, we know that the COVID pandemic left a profound mental health crisis in its wake. I mean, it's one of the most powerful legacies of the shock. And in thinking about societal crisis and thinking about political crisis, you really cannot exaggerate the significance of psychology and social psychology, but also individual psychology. I'm personally I'm a total therapy head. Like, I can't navigate my life without it. It's just something I need essentially, that space for reflection, for a kind of honesty, for facing fears, for pulling yourself together, trying to pass through the different narrative straps that you have going on in your head. And that Chartbook is, for me, also a medium in which I do that. I like that form of publication precisely because it gives me a much wider canvas on which to just sift and work things through. And I think we do need those kind of media in this moment. And I think the pressure is rising. I mean, there are various politicized forms of this. If we think about the deep problematization of, you know, cis gender identities, for some people that is the urgent space in which this renegotiation of really quite profound identities is going on. But even if you're not caught up in that particular project, it does seem to me that you can't really have lived through... Again, I come back to it, you cannot live through the experience of 2020 and not be quite profoundly shaken in your assumptions about what you can take for granted, especially as a young person. It's all very well for somebody of my age to look at the world and say, well, know I can take a hiatus for 18 months. But I know from watching my daughter's experience of it that it's much more panic inducing if you don't actually know what the rest of your life is going to be like. Right? So there's no normality from which you're taking a break because you're 20 or 21 and you're trying to figure out what you do next. And you're basically just told to take a time out. And it's, this is a huge shock that is going to reverberate through global society, because as we know, especially in middle-income countries, notably in Latin America, there are literally tens and then globally hundreds of millions of young people who've been deprived of years of education effectively and not just classroom time, but socialization and everything that goes with that. So it's very dramatic. And unless we reckon with this polycrisis experience at all these levels, we are not doing it justice. And that too has an intellectual heritage that goes back to the 1970s. If you think about all of the left-wing psychoanalysis and psychiatry movement of that time which diagnosed madness not just as a personal condition, but as an effect of societal forces that are acting on people and they act on people in an incredibly dramatic way. So, no, that I think it's... people sometimes say, I mean, people have said this about polycrisis, you know, on Twitter, the knock is it's just the way of liberals to articulate their anxieties about the world. I say bring it on. I don't really see that as a criticism. Yes, exactly. We need a concept that describes that and is at least willing to address the connections between these elements. Because if we pretend that this is about realism, another term which gets bandied about right now, right, we are kidding ourselves about the complexity of defining what it actually means to be realistic about the current world. And it is a huge challenge to deal with your own fears, to deal with your own fantasies, to deal with the kind of conspiratorial, complex explanations that go around. Take an issue like the Nord Stream pipeline. Arbitrate for me the question of who blew it up and see how close to the boundaries of politics of conspiracy theory you get before you just kind of feel so uncomfortable about the whole question that you have to back away. But that's just take one or take Jan 6th. How far do we actually believe that the president at the time was involved in a large-scale coup attempt? How far is it sensible to talk in those kind of terms? How far do the assumptions we make at moments like that reflect a whole variety of inner personal pressures and anxieties, you know, your fundamental understanding of, you know, whether the American Republic, for instance, or what respectively, the Russian, the British or the American or the Polish Secret Service are or are not capable of doing, right? So these are they are emotional questions. They are also sort of questions of personal worldview. But we literally have to arbitrate quite simple, concrete, factual questions about the current global conjuncture on the basis of these kind of, this weird mixture of experience and emotion and fact and argument and logic. Right. So it's very... the time when these structures begin to melt, when all that's solid melts into air, our personal struggle to stabilize ourselves, to maintain a realistic position, becomes more and more difficult.

HyoJin Park: I think the other thing that I was noticing when I was reading your work, there's a sense of borderlessness, right? Climate crisis. There are no borders. The financial system in many ways it's so interconnected now internationally that the US will do something and we will feel it the other side of the world. But at the same time you can kind of feel the undercurrents of inequality of power. So it's not like everyone feels climate crisis the same way and we are very much a US-driven financial system, right? Everything is tied to the dollar. So how do you kind of think about the inequalities in terms of how the polycrisis impacts different regions differently? Or is it something that we are impacted universally?

Adam Tooze: No, it's absolutely differential at moments of crisis like that. I mean, there are differences within society. I was in Manhattan throughout the COVID shock in 2020 and it was evident that our highly sheltered lifestyle, you know, in a Columbia University apartment with all the Wi-Fi we could possibly need and three bedrooms was very different from that of, say, the woman who normally cleans our apartment, who's stuck at home with four kids and, you know, no adequate Wi-Fi access, and the kids are trying to get some kind of online schooling and it's a mess, right? That's within New York. And of course, the super-affluent just left the city. But then you amplify that out across the entire world and you are constantly, I think, trying to... from the vantage point that you view the world from and this, of course, entangles us all. And here we are. I'm speaking to you from Davos. You know, from a highly-specific position within this structure of inequality. Nevertheless, it's really incumbent on us, I think, to constantly stretch and try and find ways of encompassing the vast gradients and differentials that are there. So personally for me, it's really a bit of a mission to... though I'm no Africa specialist and I have really no, as it were, license to operate in that terrain academically, it still seems essential to constantly incorporate and explore through doing as much reading and research as I can the experience, say, of the you know, the three African success stories of the last decade, which are Ghana, Kenya and Ethiopia in the current moment. Because if you do apply that optic, what you see is that all three of them are in trouble. And the fact that they are all three in trouble poses, you know, very profound questions for how we think about this moment, because the US real-estate market may get through this fine and it may turn out that the eurozone doesn't blow up. But Ghana is having to renegotiate its debt, is looking for a 30% write down, and it is a pivotal success story for West Africa. It's the contrast to Nigeria. It's where you go if you're looking for a story that breaks Afro-pessimism. So that I think for me is, as it were... to constantly question what we think of as mainstream, what we think of as relevant, what we think of as the central narrative of the moment, and to check that against, as it were, other realities. And these are large, West Africa is going to be the demographic hub of the next 20 to 30 years. So it's not a question of small versus big. It's a question of salience, presence, where does it stand in the newspaper coverage? And we all know there are huge differentials between the coverage of different parts of the world. And so that's really become, for me, a bit of a personal kind of mission. Well, the grand way of putting it, but it's certainly something that I check in. It's kind of something I check in on myself, like, are you following that narrative? And I think it's important for folks to do that really consistently do it also to try and compose the regional logics that make sense. So to, you know, to figure out the South Asian dynamics that link the Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and Indian stories in complex ways so that these aren't individual cases, but they're understood as complex wholes or the West Asian crisis that has ripped through the Eastern Mediterranean, Syria, Iraq and so on. So that for me is a way of counterbalancing not just the experiential drift and the power drift, but also the way our minds in the West slide away from the, you know, this global reality that we face.

HyoJin Park: My next question has to be then what can we do? Like, how do we begin to untangle polycrisis? Is that what we have to do? Or is it like we reverse it? Like, what is it?

Adam Tooze: I don't think there's any reversing, I don't think there's any backing out. To my mind, I always end up with analogies which seem kind of trivial, but like it's like riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is an inherently precarious thing to do. The bike is inherently unstable. It should fall over, if it falls over you get hurt. On the other hand, if you learn how to ride it, it's God's gift. It was arguably one of the most radical inventions of the late 19th century and hundreds of millions of people all the way around the world experienced emancipation because of those two wheels and that chain. Right. And so it's fragile. It can break. It's something that came out of nowhere as a piece of invention. It opened the door to all sorts of other things. It requires skill to ride it, and if you ride it badly, you'll end up really badly hurt. And that to me is quite a good image for the challenge of modernity. You could also forget the bicycle and talk about the nuclear reactor, you know, incredibly dangerous, incredibly powerful. It's all down to who's running it and what the politics of running it are. And so that for me is the essence of our current situation. I'm a Keynesian liberal. And why Keynes matters to me is that he is one of the most interesting meta-theorists of how you deal with complex, entangled, what he would call just messes, problems which are much worse than they need to be as a result of failed political coordination. And he was somebody, an expert, a technician who was thinking within a democratic context in the face of the wake of World War One, you could say it was a polycrisis. I'd say it's a very different polycrisis from our current moment. And what's so interesting about his thinking is that he's trying to demarcate and arbitrate this question of which bits of the problem we should handle and how? So it goes to your question of what we should unwrap, what we should entangle and what not. Sorry, this is a strategic question in a entangled mess like this. And what is also interesting about Keynes is he has a politics of black boxing. So he's, generally speaking, a democrat in favour of trying to maintain democracy and it's functioning in a very fragile moment in the 1920s and thirties. But to do that what he thinks, is that you need to take certain problems off the agenda. So the problem of unemployment or the problem with excessively high interest rates around competitiveness can be addressed by economic policy. So what he's trying to offer is a set of technical fixes that allow you to take those issues off the board so that then you can concentrate the limited scope there is, the limited political capital, the building consensus of a functioning democracy on issues which are harder to resolve and where genuine political agreement is needed. And that seems to me to be a model for thinking about our current moment. So take again, let's go back to vaccines. Why that's so inspiring for me is not just that they're incredible creations of the human spirit, but they're also that black boxed, right. Put into something you just had into your arm. Right. And you have to persuade people to do it. And that requires politics. But once it's in there, it all is quite simple and it takes care of itself. And why do we need that? Because social distancing required far more discipline, far more complex economic and political arrangements than we could put in place. Now, would I prefer it if we collectively, really collectively were capable of organizing political solutions, democratically informed solutions to the major problems of the world? Yes. Do I think it's possible to solve most of the very big problems without that? No. But wherever possible, wherever there's something that we can take out of that incredibly fraught zone and produce a fix for it. Super cheap solar panels. Right. If they are something that's available to us. Well, we should talk about the slave labour issue and where they're coming from and what we feel about that and what kind of conditions we want to impose. But then, for heaven's sake, take the easy win, the cost curve, the learning curve that turns renewable energy from something that was unaffordable into the cheapest power source there is right now. And those sorts of solutions are ones that we, I think, eagerly need to grasp onto in a situation which is otherwise going to be we know it, let's face it, hugely challenging to our collective capacity to organize and to deliberate and to arrive at conclusions which are not just the right ones, but also democratically legitimate, conform to our understanding of justice and the rule of law. And so that's kind of for me as a general answer, the sort of politics that I would be interested in, not a naive techno-optimism because that's actually politics denial and simply saying, I believe all of the solutions are there so don't come with any difficult stuff. Right. We can't afford that at all. But wherever we can generate these kind of black boxed, ready made solutions for issues like, say, a pandemic, we should seize on them. And from that it follows that we should be, in a structural sense, spending vastly more money on enhancing our ability to produce those kind of fixes. One of the things that drives me crazy about techno-optimism is that if we were actually serious about it, we would be spending serious amounts of money on it. But the total global publicly funded energy research budget currently, according to the IEA, is smaller, is less than what American families spend on food and treats for their cats and dogs. Now, that to me says we're not serious about this techno fix, because if we were serious about the techno fix. I have a dog, I love my dog. But should we be spending more collectively on basic energy research? Why is there only just one fusion experiment that's reached the level that it did that got us all excited? We should have ten of those being pressed really, really fast. Will they work out? Can we guarantee they will? No, but are they all incredible endeavours of the human spirit that we ought to support for its sake anyway? Are those great jobs doing that kind of thing? Of course they are. So if we're going to spend money on this kind of thing, we should have science budgets, research budgets. Not in a purely instrumental sense but for these two reasons. A) they are inherently valuable as expressions of human creativity, and b) they are ways of addressing fundamental problems that we politically and through the fragile mechanisms of social and collective organization, are going to have an incredibly hard time fixing. So see what I mean? That's where for me there is no general perception of how to do this. But when you see those easy fixes, if there are any out there, we should we should absolutely go for them.

HyoJin Park: Politicians, people in power are always wondering like, okay, but there are so many different kinds of crises, like you were saying, and they're all interacting and the way that these organizations function is they're so siloed, right? And they work on one thing at a time, each of them, and they don't really talk to each other. And this is obviously a very big problem when we are facing such an intermingled problem. Do you have, I guess, a recommendation in that regard?

Adam Tooze: We should be cognisant of this as an issue and we should find fora in which these can be put together and balanced against each other as best we can. There isn't going to be a magic bullet for this, right? Because they are inherently irreducible. They're not like in our heads, how do we arbitrate the relative claims of the war, the pandemic and the climate crisis, for instance? Like as challenges, you're not going to be able to do that. But it seems to me that we do need to build that it is one of the challenges of the present moment. It has been for a long time. Arguably, if you think about the aftermath of World War Two, where they were trying to arbitrate an incredible range of domestic priorities, Cold War priorities, legacy justice issues for the survivors of the war, all had to be arbitrated in some of the big financial bargains that were done in the early 1950s. So you need governmental capacity to do this. And so in one answer to this is that we need to be acutely worried about the information asymmetries that exist out there in the world. And this has been one of the really striking things about the energy crisis in Europe right now and say the decisions, the incredibly difficult decisions the German government had to make in the course of 2022 about what priorities they were going to set in trying to deal with the risks associated with the gas being turned off and whether Germany would get through the winter. And that is precisely the sort of arbitration of complex multiple crises that you're addressing there. How do you do that? Well, your first and principle problem is you do not have the necessary information to hand to be able to even arbitrate what your trade-off curve is. You know, you can only pick a point... picking a point on a trade-off curve is hard enough, but if you do not know what the trade-off curve is, you're completely lost. And they didn't, they had no way of knowing. And the only people who could give them the information were highly interested parties like industrial corporations, like BASF, who were talking their book, because that's their job. Right? They have a fiduciary obligation to do that. And so one of the ways I think we need to work at that is by building institutional capacity and expertise that is cross-sectoral. So one of the things that's been happening in Germany right now is rather interesting, is a sustained conversation between the public health authorities who had to deal with the COVID crisis in 2020, 2021, and the Bundesnetzagentur, which is the agency which dispatches energy within the German system as to how they engage in public information campaigns about energy saving. And so that seems to me the kind of cross-sectoral learning that the current crisis moment really demands. They're not the same kind of problem, obviously, but in both cases, you have technical public bodies which are not party political, but are part of the government apparatus that are making decisions that affect people into their everyday lives. The level of your heating, whether you can send your kids to school and they are communicating with each other, expert to expert about the problems of effectively communicating in a democracy about those kind of risks. When is it safe to give people good news? When is it better to give them bad news? How do you structure good and bad news? That seems to me to be the kind of cross-sectoral learning that we just need to have much more of and all the time.

HyoJin Park: I promise this is my last question. For an everyday Joe, an everyday person. How should knowing about this concept help them? Like what should we do with this concept?

Adam Tooze: I think it's basically a kind of message of relief in a sense. If you've been feeling confused and you've been feeling as though everything is impacting on you all at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience. And if you've been having a hard time reducing all of this to a common denominator, then you know, join the club. In fact, it doesn't seem to be reducible to a common denominator. And if you have have been having odd thoughts about how, you know, your ability to insulate your house because you want to pursue an agenda of like climate neutrality is being foiled by the fact that all of the raw materials cost too much because supply chains are screwed up and because Vladimir Putin has started a war and that strikes you as weird. Well, that is the reality that we currently face. And so I think the purpose, the idea of the concept is presumably simply to make that experience of confusion, of the weird intersection of things which appeared to really not have anything to do with... why is it you know, what has my my problem with insulating my house got to do with the war in Ukraine? Well, this sort of concept opens up the threads through which you can begin to see the connections. If you just read a newspaper or watch the news, in a sense, you are presented with this collage and the collage begins to just look incoherent and crazy to the point where you begin to wonder whether you will actually sort of be able to any longer trust your own senses. And what the polycrisis concept says is, you know, relax. This is actually the condition of our current moment. And I think that's useful. Giving it a name, giving the sense a name. Right. It's an essential therapeutic kind of purpose. It's like, okay, here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called.

Robin Pomeroy: Adam Tooze was speaking to HyoJin Park. His podcast is called Ones and Tooze and if you like thought-provoking conversation and are interested in artificial intelligence - and who isn't? - why don't you seek out In AI We Trust, it's co-hosted by the Forum's head of AI Kay Firth-Butterfield. And don't miss Meet the Leader, the sister podcast to Radio Davos. They're all available on your podcast app of choice and at wef.ch/podcasts, where you can find more information and transcripts of all our episodes and join the conversation about podcasts on the World Economic Forum Podcast Club. Look for that on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was written and presented by me Robin Pomeroy with reporting by HyoJin Park and studio production by Gareth Nolan. We will be back next week. But for now, thanks to you for listening and goodbye.