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Our world is fractured, and our means of fixing it are in crisis. Two books written by eminent thinkers in finance and economics deliver a worrying prognosis: the systems shaping prosperity are broken. Neither, however, provides a realistic cure. This is not due to a lack of rigour, but because they miss a fundamental paradox between the freedom of ideals and action.In Permacrisis, Gordon Brown, Mohammed A. El-Erian and Michael Spence detail how we are living through an extended period of instability and insecurity—several crises converging to stage an existential threat. Martin Wolf ’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is also aimed at consequential convergence, specifically between the symbiotic twins of capitalism and democracy, now in a quarrel. ‘Today’s challenges’, he writes, ‘are beginning to look as significant as those of the first half of the twentieth century.’ Are we heading for a similar fate?
Mitch Ilbury (Mon,) studied this question.