Long Now Foundation | Henry Farrell | The Complex Aftermath of Globalization @longnow | Uploaded September 2023 | Updated October 2024, 18 hours ago.
Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization.
The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as climate change, economic inequality, food security, supply chain vulnerabilities, democratic weakness and mass migration emerge from the interdependent choices of people and governments in a global system without any global rulers.
In a complex interdependent world, is the only way forward to accept these complexities, and try to work with them? That is the challenge that the US now faces – moving from the simple imagined futures of the past to a more entangled and realistic vision of our planet's future.
Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a 02022- 23 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Farrell is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. He is author of The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation (with Abraham Newman), Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, and Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (with Abraham Newman). Farrell has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Monthly, The Boston Review, Aeon, New Scientist, and The Nation and is co-founder of the popular academic blog, Crooked Timber.
Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization.
The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as climate change, economic inequality, food security, supply chain vulnerabilities, democratic weakness and mass migration emerge from the interdependent choices of people and governments in a global system without any global rulers.
In a complex interdependent world, is the only way forward to accept these complexities, and try to work with them? That is the challenge that the US now faces – moving from the simple imagined futures of the past to a more entangled and realistic vision of our planet's future.
Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a 02022- 23 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Farrell is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. He is author of The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation (with Abraham Newman), Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, and Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (with Abraham Newman). Farrell has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Monthly, The Boston Review, Aeon, New Scientist, and The Nation and is co-founder of the popular academic blog, Crooked Timber.
