Why the West’s elites invented a permacrisis

Our desperate rulers are clinging on to a dying world
War, climate change, economic stagnation, political polarisation — there seems to be no shortage of crises these days. Indeed, the situation is so perilous that the rarely hysterical Financial Times last year named “polycrisis” one of its words of the year, defining it as “a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”. The concept was initially popularised by Adam Tooze and has since been endorsed even by the World Economic Forum. The UN, for what it is worth, prefers to talk of “overlapping crises”.