Everyone has someone who made them feel inadequate in lockdown, whether it was a neighbour who grew tomatoes in their window box, one of those Twitter people who learned three languages between March and May, or just a friend who didn’t feel the need to get drunk every night. For me, that person was Adam Tooze.
While I was struggling to teach long division to my kids and begging editors for deadline extensions, he was – seemingly effortlessly – being a voice of sanity on social media; writing an improbable number of lengthy articles about how Covid-19 was rewiring the world economy; coherently explaining the long-term consequences on multiple podcasts; and sending a regular email newsletter, which discussed China, the EU or Vasily Grossman with equal felicity. As if that wasn’t enough, he was also – it turns out – writing a book.
Tooze is a professor at Columbia University, and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy is his fourth book. He specialises in analysing how the high-level, seemingly technocratic decisions of central bankers and finance ministries drive history in a way few people understand.
His last book, Crashed, analysed the financial crisis and showed how largely overlooked aspects of the response – particularly the “swap lines” between the US Federal Reserve and other central banks – proved crucial to its long-term consequences. That book was published within a decade of the crisis, and at the time seemed daringly contemporary, since few historians will tussle with events so close to the present day. Compared with Shutdown, however, it was ancient history. This book analyses events that were occurring as he wrote about them.
Tooze approaches economics from a liberal Keynesian perspective and, as a US-based Briton who grew up in Germany, is proudly cosmopolitan. He does not hide his opinions – not least, about the foolhardiness of Brexit – so he will presumably be accused of the usual things by the usual people, but Shutdown is a seriously impressive book, both endlessly quotable and rigorously analytical. Tooze synthesises a huge volume of information to argue that we must prepare for a new wave of crises or risk being sunk by them. Hopefully, governments everywhere will heed his warning.
The core of his analysis is that this is the first crisis of the Anthropocene – the epoch of significant human impact on the planet or, as he calls it, “an era defined by the blowback from our unbalanced relationship to nature”. We have been consuming too recklessly, and eventually the planet was always going to bite back. With Covid-19, the result of humans getting too close to viruses previously safely contained in wild animals, that finally happened. The wonder is only that it took so long. “For the last century we have been riding our luck,” Tooze writes.
He tells the story of the crisis chronologically, and roams the world freely as he follows the virus from China to Italy to the United States, picking out examples to reveal how unprecedented its impact has been. Traffic at Heathrow Airport dropped to levels last seen in the 1950s, the US stimulus was the largest ever, economic output dropped more quickly than had ever been recorded.
The scale of government intervention was so huge that he calls it a revolution, but he also points out that it was a strange one. Conservative administrations everywhere were taking radical measures long demanded by politicians of the left, and were egged on in doing so by the usual guardians of orthodoxy in the World Bank and IMF. But they were doing so not to build a new society, but to preserve the old one. The result is paradoxical: they wanted to support the market, and used the full power of the state to do so; central bankers justified their interventions by the need to maintain the integrity of financial markets, as if that were a more legitimate aim than improving people’s lives.
For progressives, this is depressing. The state can still use its powers to do huge things but it can apparently only use them in the service of the powerful and the wealthy. As soon as their crisis is over, those powers will be put back in their box.
Tooze insists that this would be a mistake. By virus standards, Covid-19 isn’t that bad, but just look at the damage it’s done. We need to be prepared for the next crisis, because it will be worse. Failing to act will condemn us to more deaths, more shutdowns and more expense, so we need to start preparing now. It is a message encapsulated in a line from John Maynard Keynes, spoken in 1942 in the depths of the last crisis as complete as this one, and which Tooze quotes more than once: “anything we can actually do, we can afford”. There’s something hopeful in that.
• Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World Economy, is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
