Shutdown/Confronting Leviathan
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2021
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re back from our summer break with David, Helen and Adam Tooze exploring what the pandemic has revealed about politics, economics and the new world order. From Covid crisis to China crisis to climate crisis: how does it all fit together? And what comes next? Adam’s new book is Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. Plus David talks about his new book based on series one of History of Ideas: Confronting Leviathan.
Talking Points:
The term ‘lockdown’ can be misleading. Many aspects of the response were not top-down.
- Most of the reduction in mobility predated government mandate.
- The financial markets made huge moves and central banks then had to step in.
- The popular response cannot be separated from the actions of the state.
The term ‘shutdown’ better captures the pandemic’s impact on the economy.
- Huge parts of the productive economy literally ground to a halt.
- It seems like central banks learned something from the last crisis.
- Is there still a realistic prospect of normalization? Adam and Helen are skeptical.
Is there such thing as democratic money?
- If so, then democracy has changed.
- The condition of possibility for the freedom of action of central bankers is a political vacuum.
- Parts of the left see an opportunity in monetary politics.
The entire monetary order in China is political, but there was a debate within the regime over stimulus.
- The conservatives won out.
- Some Western financial leaders used this to push back against central bankers in their own countries.
The Republican party is becoming increasingly incoherent.
- Some, such as Mnuchin, emphasize the structural necessity of some kind of continuity.
- Others, such as Jay Powell, argue that the priority is confronting China.
- There is an ongoing de-centering from the West in a dollar-based world.
The U.S.-China competition has changed.
- We have moved from a realm of competition over GDP growth rates to a much starker contest involving hard power.
- The tech sanctions are a sovereignty issue, not just an economic issue.
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Adam’s new book, Shutdown
- James Meadway on neoliberalism
- Rudiger Dornbusch, Essays (1998/2001)
- Quinn Slobodian on right-wing globalists
- Perry Anderson’s review of Adam’s work, and Adam’s response
- Marx’s Capital Volume 1
- Helen’s book, Oil and the Western Economic Crisis
- Daniela Gabor on macrofinance
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is Talking Politics. |
| 0:14.5 | We are back from our summer break and we are delighted to be back. |
| 0:18.6 | Today, Helen Thompson, Adam Toos and I are going to be talking |
| 0:22.9 | about what we've learned about politics, economics and the world order during 18 months of |
| 0:28.8 | pandemic. Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, which has its own weekly podcast. |
| 0:41.8 | Recent episodes include Dominic West, reading Patrick Lee Furmore, a mini series of encounters with the lives and voices of women in medieval literature and an interview with me about Peter Thiel, the subject of my latest LRB piece. |
| 0:57.2 | Just search for the LRB podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:19.3 | For this conversation, Helen and I were joined on Tuesday from New York by Adam. |
| 1:25.8 | We're talking about his new book, Shutdown, but as with any conversation between Adam and Helen, this one goes in all sorts of different directions, |
| 1:29.7 | but we started with the question of the title of his book. Adam, you're definitely not a |
| 1:36.3 | lockdown sceptic by any means, but you are skeptical about some of the ways in which we frame |
| 1:41.3 | lockdown and the language of lockdown, the idea that it was |
| 1:44.7 | or is this coercive top-down form of politics and government, and it misses all the ways in which |
| 1:51.5 | what we've been through in the last 18 months, a lot of it has been bottom up and governments have |
| 1:56.5 | been reacting. And so your book is shut down, not lockdown. Just take us through the difference, |
| 2:01.7 | shutdown and lockdown. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I think there are some places in the world |
| 2:06.6 | where the language of lockdown is entirely appropriate and it would be, you know, it would be |
| 2:10.6 | scandalous in a sense to put that in question. I mean, if you look at South Africa, for instance, |
| 2:15.3 | in the townships there in the spring of 2020, there was, |
| 2:19.0 | you know, really the deployment of armed force in India likewise. And, you know, even within |
| 2:23.9 | in the West or the global north, you know, there's a huge difference between the way in which |
| 2:29.4 | the social distancing and so on was handled in a city like New York, where it was basically peer pressure. |
... |
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