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The notion that the Global South is affected ‘first and worst’ by global shocks they didn’t cause, namely climate change, is one of the cornerstones of leftist thought. But what if it’s not entirely true? What if, contrary to this tenet, it’s wealthy Western nations who have over-developed and lost their resilience in the process? This is the argument made by John Rapley in his latest book ‘Icarus Economics’. Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Rapley discusses how the West’s growth has reached certain limits, most notably those imposed by the natural world in which we are all embedded. Has a focus on the wrong kind of growth in the West reduced resilience to shocks from the natural world? Are the majority of us already in a recession, despite what GDP figures tell us? And what can the Global North learn from the Global South?
00:00 Intro
03:13 Icarus Economics: Flying Too Close to the Sun
06:48 Is the Global South Actually MORE Resilient?
09:02 Rich Isn’t Resilient
13:42 Pace Layers
15:32 The Doomed Attempt to Transcend Nature
19:45 How Ready Are We for the Next Shock?
24:08 The Cultural Revolution and China’s Preparedness
32:09 America’s Fake Growth and the Ceiling to Growth
37:10 Most People Are Already in a Recession
43:29 Surviving a Hurricane: Community as Resilience
48:53 The Rise and Fall of American Growth
51:16 How China is Preparing Students for AI
52:25 The Great Acceleration: 1948 – 1973
56:42 The Myth of Eternal Growth
1:05:08 The Question of Releasing Pensions
1:07:29 A Longer View of Time
1:11:50 We Need Political Leadership
1:15:43 What Makes a Good Politician?
1:18:28 Do Young People Have It Worse Today?
1:21:14 Opening a Bookstore: an Impossible Dream in the West
1:27:05 Modern Examples of Resilience
1:32:08 Resilience in the Ancient Roman Empire
Icarus Economics by John Rapley is available here: https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/icarus-economics/
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