Downstream: The Next Shocks Will Hit Wealthy Countries Hardest. Here’s Why w/ John Rapley

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🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 95 minutes

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Summary

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’.

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?

Transcript

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0:00.0	The presumption is that high GDP affluent, wealthy countries are those best placed to stand up to the challenges of the 21st century.
0:16.0	Whether it's climate change, pandemics, or even an equality, if we wanted to deal with it anyway,
0:21.6	these countries with accumulated wealth over decades and centuries can address challenges that poorer
0:27.3	countries simply can't. That's particularly true on things like climate change. As a result,
0:32.5	we get the claim that those countries most responsible for global warming are simultaneously
0:37.4	those best place to deal
0:39.2	with the consequences, poorer countries less so. And that's deeply unjust. But what if that
0:45.4	view was wrong? What if in fact our wealth, comparatively anyway in the West, was in fact a source
0:52.0	of fragility? What if being so wealthy was a vulnerability, an exposure,
0:57.7	a problem? That's a strange hypothesis you might think, and it's certainly very provocative,
1:03.4	but it's at the heart of a new book by John Rapley, Icarus economics, where rich economies are
1:08.1	struggling and how to fix them. Now, you might remember John
1:11.1	from a conversation we had not so long ago with a gentleman called Peter Heather. He co-wrote
1:16.8	a brilliant book called Why Empires Fall with Peter. That is on this channel. If you're
1:23.5	to watch it, you're more than welcome to do so. This is a brilliant accompaniment to it. We often talk about the decline of the West on this show. We're doing it today, but with a twist. John Rappley, welcome to Downstreet. It's good to be with Yaron. We had a great conversation a couple of years ago. We did. I enjoyed it immensely.
2:01.8	So did I. It was one of my faves. I think that's got maybe 600,000 views. Oh, wow. I'm flattered. It wasn't just you. It was also your colleague, Peter Heather. Peter Heather is a bit of a genius. Why empires fall? Correct. And you're obviously, well, not obviously, for people who haven't watched that, you're coming from political economy of development.
2:01.8	He's a historian of antiquity.
2:03.9	And together you had this fantastic, rather short, pithy book
2:07.8	about the lessons that we might learn in the West
2:11.4	from the demise of ancient Rome in the fourth century.
2:14.5	Yeah.
2:15.0	And it happened purely by haphastas.
	...

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