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Are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon?

This is an informative piece by James Meadway about an issue I would dearly like to understand: are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon? This has enormous sociological implications for how we understand the political economy of higher education and social change more broadly, particularly if recurrent exogenous shocks continue to be implicitly framed as contingent fringe events to be practically negotiated with rather than systematically grappled with. It also effects life planning because frankly I’m going to prioritise career advancement much more than I otherwise would if my income is going to recurrently crash by 10-20% every few years. It also raises immense strategic issues for UCU at a point when it is stuck in a strategic impasse which leaves the repertoire of recent years feeling even more like banging our head against the wall repeatedly until we bleed.

This is the case which James is making, which I find immensely plausible as someone who spent five years on a large project on the social ontology of social change, but which I lack the economic expertise to really assess in its own terms:

This time round, the problem is inherently worse: the environment is now intruding into macroeconomic life in a way it hasn’t previously. The presence of environmental effects isn’t unknown to economics: infamously, in 1875 William Stanley Jevons attempted to demonstrate that sunspots were responsible for the business cycle, to (rather tellingly) “scepticism and barely-suppressed ridicule.” For the hundred or so years since, basically stable global environmental conditions meant it was possible to ignore any systematic and regular link from ecological “shocks” to the macroecoomy: it made sense to tread natural disasters as just that, disasters that were unpleasant and costly but that, since they were infrequent, would not force a reconsideration of the model. This was never quite accurate: recent empirical research has shown that “high temperature shocks” over 1961-2014 are associated, globally, with higher inflation. But it was good enough for most purposes, at least in terms of the degrees of accuracy macroeconomic models are supposed to operate with. This is increasingly not going to apply: periods of local stability, brief periods over which models can appear to work, will dominated over time by global instability, resulting from the environmental instability – which the conventional models, by design, cannot account for.

https://jamesmeadway.substack.com/p/inflation-and-the-anthropocene-a

There’s obviously a privilege in regarding this as a change. Much of the world has lived with recurrent exogenous shocks, contrary to the predictability of a middle-class english childhood and the ontological security it affords. But what’s at stake here will be the growing unavoidability of these shocks, even for the most privileged; as well as the cultural, political and psychic ramifications of ontological security being recurrently shattered for most from all sides on a regular basis, leading to the necessity of subsequently patching it up and the political interests involved in leading that process. It’s easy to see for example how ‘the border’ becomes an even more poignant object and the politics of exit becomes ever more powerful. But how will the multibillionaires keep their security forces on side if the financial system collapses? The increasingly elusive character of stability, further receding just as we feel we’ve grasped it, will be a powerful psychic driver of fascist impulses.

Which does make me wonder, having returned to Fromm over Christmas, how much of the roots of this lie in the liberal individual’s having mode, both its initial contribution to the climate crisis and the expectation that ‘security’ was something that could be ‘had’ in the first place. Everyone we love will die, everything we care about will end, either before or after we ourselves do. It seems increasingly obvious to me that the existential challenge (the only one really) is finding a way to live a good life which looks that reality in the face and prioritises the good we can do and the joy we can find in spite of it. The avoidance strategies which otherwise consume our lives will become decreasing possible under these conditions: “periods of local stability, brief periods over which models can appear to work, will dominated over time by global instability, resulting from the environmental instability”.

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