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Conclusion

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Six Crises of the World Economy
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Abstract

This chapter reviews the major themes of the book. The present world economic system is unstable and prone to crises that have brought significant disarray to the world economy about once per decade over the past half century. When the world economy is “healthy”, that is growing at a rate of a few percentage points per year, the continous expansion of production pushes the Earth system toward ecological disasters of different types. “Healthy” economic growth also favors the expansion of government arsenals and military forces, and increases the risk of war. Though changing the economic and political organization of the world is obviously not an easy task, the alternative likely implies continued evolution toward catastrophic outcomes even before the end of the present century.   

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Field & Taylor (2018), Is capitalism working? A primer for the twenty-first century.

  2. 2.

    Boulding (1966), “The economics of the coming spaceship earth,” in Jarret, ed., Environmental quality in a growing economy, 3–14; Ward & Dubos (1972), Only one Earth: The care and maintenance of a small planet; Georgescu-Roegen (1971), The entropy law and the economic process; Hubbert (1987), “Exponential growth as a transient phenomenon in human history”, in Strom, ed., Societal issues, scientific viewpoints, 75–84.

  3. 3.

    Einhorn (2020), “A ‘crossroads’ for humanity: Earth’s biodiversity is still collapsing”, New York Times, September 15, A.10; BBC News (2020), “Mass deaths of migratory birds reported in New Mexico”, September 16; Chappell (2023), “An unusually high number of whales are washing up on US beaches”, NPR, February 5.

  4. 4.

    Speth (2008), The bridge at the edge of the world, and Tanuro (2014), Green capitalism provide deep insights on the economic aspects of the environmental crisis in general and climate change in particular.

  5. 5.

    Spash (2010), “The Brave New World of carbon trading”, New Political Economy 15(2), 169–95; Tapia & Spash (2019), “Policies to reduce CO2 emissions: Fallacies and evidence from the United States and California”, Environmental Science & Policy 94, 262–266; Tapia (2019a), “Fairy tales about climate change”, The Brooklyn Rail, March; Tapia (2019b), “Why 3508 economists are probably wrong”, The Brooklyn Rail, May. See also Appendix C in this book.

  6. 6.

    Rappeport (2022), “World faces high risk of recession, I.M.F. warns”, New York Times, October 12, B1.

  7. 7.

    Chen et al. (2023), “Are layoffs imminent?”, New York Times, February 21, B1; Rappeport et al. (2023), “Moving quickly to avert a financial avalanche”, New York Times, March 14, A1, A12.

  8. 8.

    Cassidy (2023), “Even the experts don’t really know where inflation and jobs are headed”, The New Yorker, February 28.

  9. 9.

    Morgan (2019), “Recovering Tinbergen”, De Economist 167, 283–295.

  10. 10.

    Koopmans (1941), “The logic of econometric business-cycle research”, Journal of Political Economy 49(2).

  11. 11.

    Gregory, Head & Raynauld (1997), “Measuring world business cycles”, International Economic Review 38(3), 677–701.

  12. 12.

    Adichie (2014), We should all be feminists.

  13. 13.

    Roy (2020), “The pandemic is a portal”, The Financial Times, April 3.

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Correspondence to José A. Tapia .

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Tapia, J.A. (2023). Conclusion. In: Six Crises of the World Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38735-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38735-7_10

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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