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Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy
FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021'A complex story, which Tooze tells with clarity and verve... The world is unlikely to be treated to a better account of the economics of the pandemic' The TimesFrom the author of Crashed comes a gripping short history of how Covid-19 ravaged the global economy, and where it leaves us nowWhen the news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow in COVID-19's wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked, and even gold was sold.In a matter of weeks, the world's economy was brought to an abrupt halt by governments trying to contain a spiralling public health catastrophe. Flights were grounded; supply chains broken; industries from tourism to oil to hospitality collapsed overnight, leaving hundreds of millions of people unemployed. Central banks responded with unprecedented interventions, just to keep their economies on life-support. For the first time since the second world war, the entire global economic system contracted.This book tells the story of that shutdown. We do not yet know how this story ends, or what new world we will find on the other side. In this fast-paced, compelling and at times shocking analysis, Adam Tooze surveys the wreckage, and looks at where we might be headed next.'A seriously impressive book, both endlessly quotable and rigorously analytical' Oliver Bullough, The Guardian
384 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2021
225 people are currently reading
3358 people want to read
About the author
Adam Tooze
55 books770 followersAdam Tooze is a British historian who is a professor at Columbia University. Previously, he was Reader in Modern European Economic History at the University of Cambridge and professor at Yale University.
After graduating with a B.A. degree in economics from King's College, Cambridge in 1989, Tooze studied at the Free University of Berlin before moving to the London School of Economics for a doctorate in economic history.
In 2002, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History. He is best known for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the Wolfson History Prize for 2006.
After graduating with a B.A. degree in economics from King's College, Cambridge in 1989, Tooze studied at the Free University of Berlin before moving to the London School of Economics for a doctorate in economic history.
In 2002, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History. He is best known for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the Wolfson History Prize for 2006.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 186 reviews
December 31, 2021
Tooze is the most brilliant historian/econ observer out there. I've read all of his books and I could not wait for this book to come out once I heard he was writing it! Imagine writing a whole book and getting it published while everything was happening? And it covers ALL the countries--not just the US. It's such a valuable resource and it is so insightful--the epilogue of this book got stuck in brain ever since I read it and it's still there bumping around and hitting a lot of my previously-held beliefs and breaking a few of them.
September 27, 2021
Adam Tooze’s career began with a dissertation on the history of statistics and its entanglement with the expansive statebuilding projects of modernity. In some sense all his books since have, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned themselves with the ways in which modern technocracies construct themselves through and in knowledge production, and the unhappy relationship between these institutions and expanding popular politics.
When writing the earlier part of his oeuvre, Tooze developed a detailed understanding of modern society and its theory. This work culminated in 2018 with the publication of Crashed, which really put him on the map as a respectable analyst of contemporary society. With his previous books about international development and world system construction during the world wars or of the economic rationality of the nazi regime, Tooze had created a fresh outlook which made his touch on modern issues resonate with many people, my self included. He began receiving more and more invites to visit podcasts, and became a regular on various publications ranging from the London Review of Books to Foreign Policy. This process only further escalated with the beginning of the corona crisis, when Tooze became akin to a living Adriane’s thread through the labyrinth of societal chaos for many.
Much of Tooze’s audience consists of the technocratic elites he writes about. Nonetheless, Crashed represented a departure from his previous books in that politics was ever present in it. Much of Crashed was spent articulating the abject failure of elites to deal with crises of their own creation, and how these crises severely disrupted the lives of ordinary people. Tooze’s book yet remained an account fundamentally from the perspective of the contours of power. Perry Anderson had the following to say about this approach:
“In [Tooze’s works], a ‘situational and tactical’ approach to the subject in hand determines entry to it in medias res, dispensing with a structural explanation of its origins [...]] the overarching theme is the dynamism of American power as skeleton key to the twentieth century. In both, the political standpoint is, as self-described, that of a left-liberalism.”
It is clear that Anderson’s review has deeply haunted Tooze ever since it’s publications. The last reference in Tooze’s book is to Anderson’s review and embedded in a chapter which explicitly attempts to answer his left-wing critics. The chapter unfortunately feels relatively improvisational and hurried, lacking the careful intertwining and reflection on the interconnections characteristic of Tooze’s previous work. It is something slapped on for his more philosophical audience and to legitimize the project of the book, which Tooze has often called a sequel to Crashed.
Shutdown itself is more or less a compendium of interesting numbers and anecdotes without rigorous second order coherence (which is understandable for a book about an event which is hardly a year old, especially written by an intellectually honest historian). But one cannot help walking away from it missing the breadth and depth of Tooze’s previous books, the intellectual energy of which made him the beloved contemporary commentator he has become. What Shutdown represents is a defeat of Tooze the theorist and historian of modernity at the hands of Tooze the commentator and writer for The New York Times. We may only hope that the former returns some day.
When writing the earlier part of his oeuvre, Tooze developed a detailed understanding of modern society and its theory. This work culminated in 2018 with the publication of Crashed, which really put him on the map as a respectable analyst of contemporary society. With his previous books about international development and world system construction during the world wars or of the economic rationality of the nazi regime, Tooze had created a fresh outlook which made his touch on modern issues resonate with many people, my self included. He began receiving more and more invites to visit podcasts, and became a regular on various publications ranging from the London Review of Books to Foreign Policy. This process only further escalated with the beginning of the corona crisis, when Tooze became akin to a living Adriane’s thread through the labyrinth of societal chaos for many.
Much of Tooze’s audience consists of the technocratic elites he writes about. Nonetheless, Crashed represented a departure from his previous books in that politics was ever present in it. Much of Crashed was spent articulating the abject failure of elites to deal with crises of their own creation, and how these crises severely disrupted the lives of ordinary people. Tooze’s book yet remained an account fundamentally from the perspective of the contours of power. Perry Anderson had the following to say about this approach:
“In [Tooze’s works], a ‘situational and tactical’ approach to the subject in hand determines entry to it in medias res, dispensing with a structural explanation of its origins [...]] the overarching theme is the dynamism of American power as skeleton key to the twentieth century. In both, the political standpoint is, as self-described, that of a left-liberalism.”
It is clear that Anderson’s review has deeply haunted Tooze ever since it’s publications. The last reference in Tooze’s book is to Anderson’s review and embedded in a chapter which explicitly attempts to answer his left-wing critics. The chapter unfortunately feels relatively improvisational and hurried, lacking the careful intertwining and reflection on the interconnections characteristic of Tooze’s previous work. It is something slapped on for his more philosophical audience and to legitimize the project of the book, which Tooze has often called a sequel to Crashed.
Shutdown itself is more or less a compendium of interesting numbers and anecdotes without rigorous second order coherence (which is understandable for a book about an event which is hardly a year old, especially written by an intellectually honest historian). But one cannot help walking away from it missing the breadth and depth of Tooze’s previous books, the intellectual energy of which made him the beloved contemporary commentator he has become. What Shutdown represents is a defeat of Tooze the theorist and historian of modernity at the hands of Tooze the commentator and writer for The New York Times. We may only hope that the former returns some day.
September 22, 2021
"Anything we can actually do we can afford."
-John Maynard Keynes
All written history is by definition abridged. Written history is a summary of primary sources, or educated assumptions, or filling in the gaps where archival sources are locked away or lost. This is a history "in media res", or 'in the middle of things', by Tooze's own explanation. It is a history of the year 2020, and a first attempt to describe the events of the previous crises, to be expanded on or written over later. The book is written in a rough chronological order, compiling news stories and some historical or sociological analysis, as well as a primer on monetary and fiscal policy responses. For what it is, it is worth spending time here.
The events of 2020, in Tooze's analysis, were a ‘polycrisis', or the sum of multiple crises. Tooze uses the word "neoliberal", which is fraught with multiple competing definitions. Another broad term, yet one more apropos, is the "anthropocene" crisis, one defined by the extent of humankind's reshaping of the natural environment and networks of transportation and communication - and one where the repercussions of such networks had not yet been fully realized. "For the last century, we have been riding our luck", he warns. One fears the results of modern vaccine technology were not available and so rapidly deployed.
As an economic historian, Tooze focuses on the monetary and fiscal responses by governments and other organizations to the crisis. This includes, but is not limited to, results of lockdowns, stimulus, and the shocks of global demand. The scale of policy response to the epidemic was a "revolution", but a strange one. To give an example - the CARES Act, passed in March 2020, was the largest single economic stimulus package in the history of the United States, dwarfing the response to the 2008 financial crisis as part of the ARRA Act. For a country that had a confusing patchwork of a welfare system, sending universal payments to every individual who had submitted a tax return was a revolutionary move.
I recall reading a year ago, with some anxiety, that Secretary Treasury Steven Mnuchin was quoted as warning Republican senators that unemployment would spiral to 20% if nothing was done. I had little faith in Congressional action at the time. Yet something was done. And all this done under the capricious whims of the Trump administration, which whipped between denial of the virus and the possibility that Trump might torpedo the whole deal. For want of a nail, the whole crisis might have ended very differently. For want of a nail -- if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination -- if the lockdown had been instituted a few weeks earlier, if vaccines were not as effective as they were -- if, if, if. The response was quick, improvised, a papering over of previous flaws, and could have been much much worse.
And yet for the revolutionary nature of the policy response, Tooze is pessimistic about the aspects for long-term change, for how much of these reforms may last beyond 2021. The response is "a confused and ill-shapen monster, a policy regime somewhere on the spectrum between Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde". International institutions proved to be paper tigers, or unequipped in the face of a broader crisis. The World Health Organization, as it turns out, has an annual operating budget smaller than the Johns Hopkins University, and provided by a bodge of token contributions from national governments and private charitable foundations. Tooze borrows from the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, who discussed “organized irresponsibility”. That is, larg organizations having a plan for everything but no capability to deploy it as rapidly as was needed. The capacity of the state to act beyond has been hollowed out.
His prognosis of the European Union, mirroring that in his book on the 2008 crisis "Crashed", is worse.
Tooze takes a bullish view of China. He writes of the immediate policy response, of the harsh and immediate lockdowns, and of party intellectuals "loyal to their party’s political project". The party-state acted in a more severe and more immediate way than pluralistic democracies did, and in his view, it is a harsh study in contrasts. Yet China has its own crises -- the unfolding real estate crisis and accumulation of state and provincial debts draws its own anxiety. More books will need to be written on the slow lurch from the past crisis, the crisis still roiling in those parts of the world -- or parts of specific countries -- that are not yet vaccinated sufficiently, and where the feedback loop of trade and supply shortages still roils.
-John Maynard Keynes
All written history is by definition abridged. Written history is a summary of primary sources, or educated assumptions, or filling in the gaps where archival sources are locked away or lost. This is a history "in media res", or 'in the middle of things', by Tooze's own explanation. It is a history of the year 2020, and a first attempt to describe the events of the previous crises, to be expanded on or written over later. The book is written in a rough chronological order, compiling news stories and some historical or sociological analysis, as well as a primer on monetary and fiscal policy responses. For what it is, it is worth spending time here.
The events of 2020, in Tooze's analysis, were a ‘polycrisis', or the sum of multiple crises. Tooze uses the word "neoliberal", which is fraught with multiple competing definitions. Another broad term, yet one more apropos, is the "anthropocene" crisis, one defined by the extent of humankind's reshaping of the natural environment and networks of transportation and communication - and one where the repercussions of such networks had not yet been fully realized. "For the last century, we have been riding our luck", he warns. One fears the results of modern vaccine technology were not available and so rapidly deployed.
As an economic historian, Tooze focuses on the monetary and fiscal responses by governments and other organizations to the crisis. This includes, but is not limited to, results of lockdowns, stimulus, and the shocks of global demand. The scale of policy response to the epidemic was a "revolution", but a strange one. To give an example - the CARES Act, passed in March 2020, was the largest single economic stimulus package in the history of the United States, dwarfing the response to the 2008 financial crisis as part of the ARRA Act. For a country that had a confusing patchwork of a welfare system, sending universal payments to every individual who had submitted a tax return was a revolutionary move.
I recall reading a year ago, with some anxiety, that Secretary Treasury Steven Mnuchin was quoted as warning Republican senators that unemployment would spiral to 20% if nothing was done. I had little faith in Congressional action at the time. Yet something was done. And all this done under the capricious whims of the Trump administration, which whipped between denial of the virus and the possibility that Trump might torpedo the whole deal. For want of a nail, the whole crisis might have ended very differently. For want of a nail -- if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination -- if the lockdown had been instituted a few weeks earlier, if vaccines were not as effective as they were -- if, if, if. The response was quick, improvised, a papering over of previous flaws, and could have been much much worse.
And yet for the revolutionary nature of the policy response, Tooze is pessimistic about the aspects for long-term change, for how much of these reforms may last beyond 2021. The response is "a confused and ill-shapen monster, a policy regime somewhere on the spectrum between Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde". International institutions proved to be paper tigers, or unequipped in the face of a broader crisis. The World Health Organization, as it turns out, has an annual operating budget smaller than the Johns Hopkins University, and provided by a bodge of token contributions from national governments and private charitable foundations. Tooze borrows from the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, who discussed “organized irresponsibility”. That is, larg organizations having a plan for everything but no capability to deploy it as rapidly as was needed. The capacity of the state to act beyond has been hollowed out.
His prognosis of the European Union, mirroring that in his book on the 2008 crisis "Crashed", is worse.
Tooze takes a bullish view of China. He writes of the immediate policy response, of the harsh and immediate lockdowns, and of party intellectuals "loyal to their party’s political project". The party-state acted in a more severe and more immediate way than pluralistic democracies did, and in his view, it is a harsh study in contrasts. Yet China has its own crises -- the unfolding real estate crisis and accumulation of state and provincial debts draws its own anxiety. More books will need to be written on the slow lurch from the past crisis, the crisis still roiling in those parts of the world -- or parts of specific countries -- that are not yet vaccinated sufficiently, and where the feedback loop of trade and supply shortages still roils.
July 10, 2024
A useful book that looks to track the outbreak and spread of Covid and how this affected the world economy.
There are a good number of statistics and some charts to help show this as the virus took hold in Wuhan and then to all four corners of the earth. Some good chapters on the approach to vaccines and vaccination [funding models, research, nations' priorities and distribution].
Naturally, with any study looking at Covid and the world economy, much of the book covers national strategies and responses to shutdowns/lockdowns and aspects such as furlough and stimuli programmes [notably the costs and durations].
However, there were some large gaps for me in a book about a global economy shutting down because of Covid. For example, Tooze covers shipping in fewer than a couple of pages. Given the impact shipping has on world trade and economies, to not discuss the impact on shipping availability and rising costs, crew availability, goods distribution and logjams at ports and the queues - or alternatively, the absence - of ships is a big loss to the wider story. This is not just container ships but raw materials [coal, oil, wood, minerals, etc.), and perishable foods [grain, fruit, meats) and how these impacted trade areas such as oil terminals and pipelines, cold chain storage creating gluts and shortages in the wrong areas. All of these impacted supply, demand, and costs that, in turn, drove prices and, as such, contributed to inflation.
It is also worth noting that Adam Tooze is a centre left admirer, whereas right and populist-right governments get little positive comments. Likewise, I felt China especially was not explored in greater detail as to their conduct at ground-zero from November/December 2019, and then how this clouded or exacerbated economic difficulties in the first twelve months from March 2019.
Overall, it is a book that provides much with weaknesses and gaps that sees me rate it as a good 3-star read.
There are a good number of statistics and some charts to help show this as the virus took hold in Wuhan and then to all four corners of the earth. Some good chapters on the approach to vaccines and vaccination [funding models, research, nations' priorities and distribution].
Naturally, with any study looking at Covid and the world economy, much of the book covers national strategies and responses to shutdowns/lockdowns and aspects such as furlough and stimuli programmes [notably the costs and durations].
However, there were some large gaps for me in a book about a global economy shutting down because of Covid. For example, Tooze covers shipping in fewer than a couple of pages. Given the impact shipping has on world trade and economies, to not discuss the impact on shipping availability and rising costs, crew availability, goods distribution and logjams at ports and the queues - or alternatively, the absence - of ships is a big loss to the wider story. This is not just container ships but raw materials [coal, oil, wood, minerals, etc.), and perishable foods [grain, fruit, meats) and how these impacted trade areas such as oil terminals and pipelines, cold chain storage creating gluts and shortages in the wrong areas. All of these impacted supply, demand, and costs that, in turn, drove prices and, as such, contributed to inflation.
It is also worth noting that Adam Tooze is a centre left admirer, whereas right and populist-right governments get little positive comments. Likewise, I felt China especially was not explored in greater detail as to their conduct at ground-zero from November/December 2019, and then how this clouded or exacerbated economic difficulties in the first twelve months from March 2019.
Overall, it is a book that provides much with weaknesses and gaps that sees me rate it as a good 3-star read.
June 6, 2023
My second book by the author and perhaps my last.
Shutdown would have been a far more profound and valuable work if Tooze had questioned his foundational assumptions and basic premises a little more thoroughly.
After all, once one has assumed the reality of angels and witches, a very clever case can be argued for how many of them can crowd onto the point of a needle or what role torture plays as a prelude to burnings at the stake.
I find some of the same issues and problems that plagued me with his previous book, Wages Of Destruction, a fascinating subject covering the German economy leading up to and including WWII and the myriad of methods that Hitler and the Nazis manipulated a country’s economy and some of the tools that they used to pull it off with surprising efficacy.
So, without summarizing ideas in the book (some of which I find absolutely, irritatingly debatable) or repeating the premises on which Tooze bases his work (for that, you read the book, you don't need the opinions of some reviewing nerd), I'm just going to go with why it gets 3*, not more…structure and style.
(Forgive the cheesy similes and metaphors that follow).
The author paints with a big brush. He is obviously highly intelligent, has a lot of stamina for researching his subject matter, chooses immensely interesting, important topics, covers a lot of ground and attempts to present The Big Picture.
The main problem for me with Tooze is this: he runs wide, but not deep; defines the outline of the terroritory, yet neglects the contextual material to help us understand; describes but does not explain. He takes his time to build his house without surveying the foundations upon which he builds.
Without negotiating with his readers or showing us the money, he attempts to buy our attention on the cheap. He wants us to take the car, sight unseen, without a test drive, not even an opportunity to kick the tyres.
As suggested above, the author has taken things for granted that ought to be questioned. I can’t imagine this as just simple intellectual laziness or dishonesty. For instance, how has the statistical evidence regarding illness and deaths from COViD, hospitalisations, vaccine procedural efficacy, etc. been collated with so much conviction without referring to analysis of comorbidities present or relating to the similarities and statistics of previous epidemics?).
In the end, the reader is left with a feeling that he has been played out along a journey of intellectual chaos, meandering from point to point, from campground to campground, without having had a substantial meal. We thought we had eaten, but when we look down, our stomachs remain empty.
Tooze scales an immense & dangerous mountain here without personally risking its hazards. Nor does he bother leaving the handholds, trail lines or crampons necessary for us to securely follow or apprehend him.
After closing this book, I am haunted by an uncomfortable feeling that I am almost as ignorant as I ever was.
Shutdown would have been a far more profound and valuable work if Tooze had questioned his foundational assumptions and basic premises a little more thoroughly.
After all, once one has assumed the reality of angels and witches, a very clever case can be argued for how many of them can crowd onto the point of a needle or what role torture plays as a prelude to burnings at the stake.
I find some of the same issues and problems that plagued me with his previous book, Wages Of Destruction, a fascinating subject covering the German economy leading up to and including WWII and the myriad of methods that Hitler and the Nazis manipulated a country’s economy and some of the tools that they used to pull it off with surprising efficacy.
So, without summarizing ideas in the book (some of which I find absolutely, irritatingly debatable) or repeating the premises on which Tooze bases his work (for that, you read the book, you don't need the opinions of some reviewing nerd), I'm just going to go with why it gets 3*, not more…structure and style.
(Forgive the cheesy similes and metaphors that follow).
The author paints with a big brush. He is obviously highly intelligent, has a lot of stamina for researching his subject matter, chooses immensely interesting, important topics, covers a lot of ground and attempts to present The Big Picture.
The main problem for me with Tooze is this: he runs wide, but not deep; defines the outline of the terroritory, yet neglects the contextual material to help us understand; describes but does not explain. He takes his time to build his house without surveying the foundations upon which he builds.
Without negotiating with his readers or showing us the money, he attempts to buy our attention on the cheap. He wants us to take the car, sight unseen, without a test drive, not even an opportunity to kick the tyres.
As suggested above, the author has taken things for granted that ought to be questioned. I can’t imagine this as just simple intellectual laziness or dishonesty. For instance, how has the statistical evidence regarding illness and deaths from COViD, hospitalisations, vaccine procedural efficacy, etc. been collated with so much conviction without referring to analysis of comorbidities present or relating to the similarities and statistics of previous epidemics?).
In the end, the reader is left with a feeling that he has been played out along a journey of intellectual chaos, meandering from point to point, from campground to campground, without having had a substantial meal. We thought we had eaten, but when we look down, our stomachs remain empty.
Tooze scales an immense & dangerous mountain here without personally risking its hazards. Nor does he bother leaving the handholds, trail lines or crampons necessary for us to securely follow or apprehend him.
After closing this book, I am haunted by an uncomfortable feeling that I am almost as ignorant as I ever was.
January 30, 2024
Very good, but petition for Tooze to finally write a book about China.
September 26, 2023
Was 2023 too soon to read a book about the economic ramifications of COVID-19 during 2020? Was 2021 too soon to write one? I'm not really sure of the answer to either question. Tooze admits to writing Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy as coping mechanism for lockdown, which I respect. At the time he was supposed to be working a completely different book but understandably struggled to focus on it. I found the blow-by-blow narrative of the pandemic's progress a compelling and stressful reminder of 2020. For much of that year I was limiting my news access in order to function as a person, so didn't know a lot about what was going on in the world economy. Thus I found Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy informative as to the policy choices of central banks, the IMF, and governments outside Europe. However it is such recent history, written in the midst of events, that it inevitably resembles reportage rather than history. Tooze acknowledges that he cannot put events in context when they've only just happened. Nonetheless, his analysis is insightful, particularly when discussing the actions of central banks and the paradoxically similar radicalism of centrist, hard right, and left wing governments.
I mean, Marx's answer would be NOPE. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy serve as an enraging reminder that in 2020 the richest got even richer, the poor died of covid in their thousands, and there was no transformative economic change to speak of. Perhaps it won't look that way in seven, fifteen, or thirty years time, by which time perhaps I'll be able to read a book on the topic without taking it personally. This one provoked more of an emotional than intellectual response.
The scale of government interventions was so large in 2020 as to prompt comparisons to models of war finance. Central bank bond buying was the functional twin of fiscal policy. But as tempting as the idea may be, we cannot travel back in time to the days of postwar Keynesianism. And that is certainly not the ambition of twenty-first century bankers, who are far from revolutionary. Their practice is that of the Bismarkian conservatives in the second half of the twentieth century: 'Everything must change so that everything remains the same.' In 2020, at least as far as the financial system is concerned, manegerialism once again prevailed, but it was less an exercise in all-powerful technocratic manipulation than a scrambling effort to preserve a dangerous status quo. 'Too big to fail' has become a total systemic imperative. The effect is to underwrite successive rounds of escalating debt-fueled speculation and growth. Can it go on? There is no fundamental macroeconomic limit that anyone can discern. The question rather is whether technocratic governance can keep up and whether society and politics can handle it. Can it be democratised? If not, can it at least be legitimated? And can we find ways to absorb or offset the inequalities that this growth model produces? The full force of those questions was first recognised after 2008. After 2020, they still awaited an answer.
I mean, Marx's answer would be NOPE. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy serve as an enraging reminder that in 2020 the richest got even richer, the poor died of covid in their thousands, and there was no transformative economic change to speak of. Perhaps it won't look that way in seven, fifteen, or thirty years time, by which time perhaps I'll be able to read a book on the topic without taking it personally. This one provoked more of an emotional than intellectual response.
December 11, 2021
According to Adam Tooze himself, Shutdown is an attempt to extend the Crashed universe into the era dominated by COVID-19. This is an extremely ambitious project, especially given how magisterial its predecessor was. So how do the two books compare? To me it seems that Shutdown would have been a far better book if Tooze had ten years of time and the benefit of hindsight which comes with writing a book that deals with historical, instead of present, topics. Shutdown at times reads like a collection of essays assembled together. Perhaps calling it incoherent would be an exaggeration, but there is definitely some room for improvement in that regard. It is, nonetheless, a great book full of interesting statistics and original analysis. Just like Tooze’s other works, the breadth of topics and countries that it covers is truly impressive. In the rest of the review, I will try to briefly cover some of the themes that I found most fascinating in the book.
One has to start with the deluge of shocks that the pandemic created. Even before the pandemic, the world’s “matrix of life and death” was appalling and unequal enough. Rich countries could afford to spend nearly 50 times more than poor countries on health, and they have clear results to show for it. Whereas life expectancy is over 80 in a rich country like Japan, the average Nigerian lives for 55 years. These disparities are not limited to geographical borders either. The odds of life and death are not evenly distributed along class and race lines within nations; Black Americans are far more likely to suffer from lead poisoning than their white counterparts. While 27% of Low-income men in Germany die before turning 65, the rate is 14% for the richest men in the country. So why are these obscene inequalities tolerated? Why don’t we react as dramatically to all these unnecessary deaths as we did to the pandemic?
I would personally argue that we should. Nonetheless, part of the reason for the different intensity of responses has to do with the un-linearity of the risk that pandemics pose. The number of victims for most causes of death follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution; It is highly unlikely that the number of deaths from cancer doubles in a short of period of time. The logic of exponential spread of viruses is different, however. If no action is taken, there really is no upper limit to the number of possible infections. In other words, societies accept death, but not disorderly and unpredictable amounts of it.
Looking at other historical pandemics, the intensity of our collective response to COVID-19 is striking. We decreased our economic activity so severely that 95% of countries experienced a simultaneous recession. In comparison, during the spread of the Spanish flu, a far more deadly virus, that number was 70%. What explains the difference? The reason has mostly to do with our relative prosperity compared to the past. We simply can afford to sacrifice higher levels of economic output for the sake of public safety. This is more so for richer nations.
The shape of the economic shock was relatively similar worldwide. A simultaneous supply shock and demand shock took place. As production tanked, incomes decreased, and so did people’s consumption levels. An unusual feature of the recession that ensued was the degree of its impact on the service sector. Usually, manufacturing is more prone to cyclical downturns, but this was a once-in-a-generation event; As social distancing measures became more prevalent, the economic damage was concentrated in sectors like tourism and indoor dining. This led to a change in the composition of demand away from services towards durable goods. The implications of that shift are still (as of December 2021) with us in the form of supply bottlenecks and higher inflation.
What was the policy response to these economic shocks? In the realm of monetary policy, it was mostly a re-run of 2008. Asset purchases (QE), swap lines, “whatever it takes” to inject liquidity into financial markets. The impetus for this approach was the crisis of March 2020 in the US Treasuries market, the backbone of the global financial system. Downturns tend to trigger a flight to safety. The price of risky equities are expected to go down, and the price of bonds are supposed to increase. In a world where the “global savings glut” is a permanent reality, safe financial assets are invaluable to investors. It has to be noted that the safe status of T-bills has nothing to do with US fiscal discipline. It is, instead, a function of the depth of its market. There are more than $15T worth of US Treasury bonds in circulation. The range of the participants in the market is so broad that there should always be market participants willing to buy and sell. In the topsy-turvy world of March 2020, however, both sets of prices plunged. This could have been disastrous, as lower bond prices would push up interest rates and thwart the recovery. But why was this happening?
It turns out that in a general dash for cash, not everyone could sell at once. A sizable portion of foreign holders needed dollars to pay back their obligations, and at some point, there were not enough buyers to facilitate that trade. That in turn pushed bond prices down, putting the entire global financial system in peril. That compelled the Fed to not only utilise the entire 2008 crisis-fighting toolkit, but also roam into unchartered territories and make unprecedented asset purchases, backstopping the entire corporate bond market for instance.
But the response was not limited to monetary policy. Use of fiscal policy was needed to help the people affected by the economic turmoil. Around one-fifth of European workers were furloughed. States would risk their legitimacy if they did not provide assistance during such a profound crisis. As a result, the scale of the fiscal response was historically unprecedented. Around $17T worth of fiscal stimulus was injected into the global economy, with a third of that solely coming in from the US. Generous unemployment benefits and stimulus checks meant that disposable income of American household actually increased in 2020. The story was more or less the same in the developed world, with the average fiscal stimulus standing at 8.5% of GDP. But developing countries were not able to spend such sums of money. Bond markets are far less tolerant of them doing so, and would force punitive financing costs upon them if they chose to act like advanced economies. As a result, COVID-related government spending packages averaged 4% and 2% of GDP for middle income and low-income countries, respectively.
As insignificant as they might look, even those figures are considered exorbitant for developing countries. Perhaps the most interesting part of Shutdown is where Tooze discusses the “emerging market toolkit” that allowed developing countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa to enact both QE and fiscal stimulus with relatively few repercussions. The toolkit rested on three pillars. First, it was essential to issue government debt in the local currency, and not dollars, to decrease the adverse impact of a stronger dollar on financing costs. It was also necessary to build large foreign exchange reserves and use them to moderate (but not stop) the pace of local currency depreciations; as rapid falls in the exchange value can result in overshooting and force the central bank to raise interest rates, which would slow down growth. Last but not least, capital controls were at times necessary to decrease the pace of devaluations and control hot capital flows. Countries that did not follow this pragmatic approach faced serious risks. A case in point is Erdoğan’s Turkey, which violated the toolkit by vainly attempting to peg the exchange rate of the lira at an unsustainably high level, and increasingly borrowing in dollars, reaching 60% of total government debt. As a result, the lira has lost almost 40% of its value in 2021 and inflation stands at 20%.
A superficial look at the massive government aid spending in both advanced and emerging economies might suggest that this is the end of neoliberalism, defined by Tooze as the tendency to depoliticize distributional issues. This to miss the point, however. These measures, while not exactly compatible with the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, are fundamentally conservative in their aims. This is the Bismarckian logic of “everything must change for everything to stay the same” at work. Far from being a return to the heyday of social democracy, the condition of possibility for these developments is the utter defeat of the working-class movement, and its radical political representatives. It is precisely because workers no longer have that much leverage vis-à-vis capital to demand higher wages, and politicians like Sanders and Corbyn are not there to spook the financial markets by taxing the rich and enacting a Green New Deal, that governments can spend freely and technocratic central bankers can inject endless amounts of liquidity into the economy without fearing about serious inflation.
It would be fitting to end the review by mentioning in China. Tooze makes it very clear that it is impossible to assess our world today without considering the geopolitical and economic consequences of the rise of China. Whether it is the spread of zoonotic diseases, or ambitions to curb global carbon emissions (30% of which comes from China), the integration of China in the globalized world economy means that the fate of humanity is ever more linked to the CCP’s latest actions. With the failure of most western nations to contain COVID-19, the pandemic has further strengthened Beijing’s hand. Being the largest consumer of raw materials like iron ore, oil, and coal, China’s rapid bounce-back from the pandemic positively impacted the economic fortunes of many commodity-producing nations. Although Shutdown does not discuss it, the crucial question is if the recent troubles in the overleveraged Chinese real estate sector (which accounts for an exorbitant 28% of Chinese GDP) are a sign of things to come, pointing to China facing the middle-income trap. It remains to be seen if the Chinese growth model based on relocating poor rural workers to booming urban areas is unsustainable or not. It would not be an overstatement to say that the future of the international order hinges on that question.
One has to start with the deluge of shocks that the pandemic created. Even before the pandemic, the world’s “matrix of life and death” was appalling and unequal enough. Rich countries could afford to spend nearly 50 times more than poor countries on health, and they have clear results to show for it. Whereas life expectancy is over 80 in a rich country like Japan, the average Nigerian lives for 55 years. These disparities are not limited to geographical borders either. The odds of life and death are not evenly distributed along class and race lines within nations; Black Americans are far more likely to suffer from lead poisoning than their white counterparts. While 27% of Low-income men in Germany die before turning 65, the rate is 14% for the richest men in the country. So why are these obscene inequalities tolerated? Why don’t we react as dramatically to all these unnecessary deaths as we did to the pandemic?
I would personally argue that we should. Nonetheless, part of the reason for the different intensity of responses has to do with the un-linearity of the risk that pandemics pose. The number of victims for most causes of death follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution; It is highly unlikely that the number of deaths from cancer doubles in a short of period of time. The logic of exponential spread of viruses is different, however. If no action is taken, there really is no upper limit to the number of possible infections. In other words, societies accept death, but not disorderly and unpredictable amounts of it.
Looking at other historical pandemics, the intensity of our collective response to COVID-19 is striking. We decreased our economic activity so severely that 95% of countries experienced a simultaneous recession. In comparison, during the spread of the Spanish flu, a far more deadly virus, that number was 70%. What explains the difference? The reason has mostly to do with our relative prosperity compared to the past. We simply can afford to sacrifice higher levels of economic output for the sake of public safety. This is more so for richer nations.
The shape of the economic shock was relatively similar worldwide. A simultaneous supply shock and demand shock took place. As production tanked, incomes decreased, and so did people’s consumption levels. An unusual feature of the recession that ensued was the degree of its impact on the service sector. Usually, manufacturing is more prone to cyclical downturns, but this was a once-in-a-generation event; As social distancing measures became more prevalent, the economic damage was concentrated in sectors like tourism and indoor dining. This led to a change in the composition of demand away from services towards durable goods. The implications of that shift are still (as of December 2021) with us in the form of supply bottlenecks and higher inflation.
What was the policy response to these economic shocks? In the realm of monetary policy, it was mostly a re-run of 2008. Asset purchases (QE), swap lines, “whatever it takes” to inject liquidity into financial markets. The impetus for this approach was the crisis of March 2020 in the US Treasuries market, the backbone of the global financial system. Downturns tend to trigger a flight to safety. The price of risky equities are expected to go down, and the price of bonds are supposed to increase. In a world where the “global savings glut” is a permanent reality, safe financial assets are invaluable to investors. It has to be noted that the safe status of T-bills has nothing to do with US fiscal discipline. It is, instead, a function of the depth of its market. There are more than $15T worth of US Treasury bonds in circulation. The range of the participants in the market is so broad that there should always be market participants willing to buy and sell. In the topsy-turvy world of March 2020, however, both sets of prices plunged. This could have been disastrous, as lower bond prices would push up interest rates and thwart the recovery. But why was this happening?
It turns out that in a general dash for cash, not everyone could sell at once. A sizable portion of foreign holders needed dollars to pay back their obligations, and at some point, there were not enough buyers to facilitate that trade. That in turn pushed bond prices down, putting the entire global financial system in peril. That compelled the Fed to not only utilise the entire 2008 crisis-fighting toolkit, but also roam into unchartered territories and make unprecedented asset purchases, backstopping the entire corporate bond market for instance.
But the response was not limited to monetary policy. Use of fiscal policy was needed to help the people affected by the economic turmoil. Around one-fifth of European workers were furloughed. States would risk their legitimacy if they did not provide assistance during such a profound crisis. As a result, the scale of the fiscal response was historically unprecedented. Around $17T worth of fiscal stimulus was injected into the global economy, with a third of that solely coming in from the US. Generous unemployment benefits and stimulus checks meant that disposable income of American household actually increased in 2020. The story was more or less the same in the developed world, with the average fiscal stimulus standing at 8.5% of GDP. But developing countries were not able to spend such sums of money. Bond markets are far less tolerant of them doing so, and would force punitive financing costs upon them if they chose to act like advanced economies. As a result, COVID-related government spending packages averaged 4% and 2% of GDP for middle income and low-income countries, respectively.
As insignificant as they might look, even those figures are considered exorbitant for developing countries. Perhaps the most interesting part of Shutdown is where Tooze discusses the “emerging market toolkit” that allowed developing countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa to enact both QE and fiscal stimulus with relatively few repercussions. The toolkit rested on three pillars. First, it was essential to issue government debt in the local currency, and not dollars, to decrease the adverse impact of a stronger dollar on financing costs. It was also necessary to build large foreign exchange reserves and use them to moderate (but not stop) the pace of local currency depreciations; as rapid falls in the exchange value can result in overshooting and force the central bank to raise interest rates, which would slow down growth. Last but not least, capital controls were at times necessary to decrease the pace of devaluations and control hot capital flows. Countries that did not follow this pragmatic approach faced serious risks. A case in point is Erdoğan’s Turkey, which violated the toolkit by vainly attempting to peg the exchange rate of the lira at an unsustainably high level, and increasingly borrowing in dollars, reaching 60% of total government debt. As a result, the lira has lost almost 40% of its value in 2021 and inflation stands at 20%.
A superficial look at the massive government aid spending in both advanced and emerging economies might suggest that this is the end of neoliberalism, defined by Tooze as the tendency to depoliticize distributional issues. This to miss the point, however. These measures, while not exactly compatible with the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, are fundamentally conservative in their aims. This is the Bismarckian logic of “everything must change for everything to stay the same” at work. Far from being a return to the heyday of social democracy, the condition of possibility for these developments is the utter defeat of the working-class movement, and its radical political representatives. It is precisely because workers no longer have that much leverage vis-à-vis capital to demand higher wages, and politicians like Sanders and Corbyn are not there to spook the financial markets by taxing the rich and enacting a Green New Deal, that governments can spend freely and technocratic central bankers can inject endless amounts of liquidity into the economy without fearing about serious inflation.
It would be fitting to end the review by mentioning in China. Tooze makes it very clear that it is impossible to assess our world today without considering the geopolitical and economic consequences of the rise of China. Whether it is the spread of zoonotic diseases, or ambitions to curb global carbon emissions (30% of which comes from China), the integration of China in the globalized world economy means that the fate of humanity is ever more linked to the CCP’s latest actions. With the failure of most western nations to contain COVID-19, the pandemic has further strengthened Beijing’s hand. Being the largest consumer of raw materials like iron ore, oil, and coal, China’s rapid bounce-back from the pandemic positively impacted the economic fortunes of many commodity-producing nations. Although Shutdown does not discuss it, the crucial question is if the recent troubles in the overleveraged Chinese real estate sector (which accounts for an exorbitant 28% of Chinese GDP) are a sign of things to come, pointing to China facing the middle-income trap. It remains to be seen if the Chinese growth model based on relocating poor rural workers to booming urban areas is unsustainable or not. It would not be an overstatement to say that the future of the international order hinges on that question.
September 11, 2021
Adam Tooze's new book, like the three previous books, is a history of political economy during the moments of capitalism's most extreme outliers: moments of crisis and accompanying grand experiments. Through those moments, a new status quo is constructed; always international in scope. Unlike the previous books, Shutdown looks at the current moment rather than more or less distant crises. Similar themes recur: failures of international diplomacy, plans undercut by material obstacles and domestic political intransigence, the expansion and increased gravity of finance, a reshuffling of international power relations and alliances. 2020 could mark a definitive end to several historical periods: the US hegemony that stretches back to WW1, the more recent global regime of neoliberalism and austerity. But it didn't represent a victory for the left; instead "everything must change so everything can stay the same."
Unlike many contemporary books, this one doesn't end with an implausible laundry list of solutions (books by leftists usually advocate for programs that could address the problems identified by the author but are utopian in scale and don't usually address the political obstacles that face a left still mired in defeat; ones by liberals offer the kinds of policy plans that one can imagine passing in a handful of liberal cities but are so dinky as to pale in comparison to the scale of the problem). Instead, Tooze narrates the crisis, identifies the social forces at play, and laments the misleadership that blocks the level of international cooperation necessary (how could it be that no major country, who spent 2020 spending historically unprecedented amounts of money, was willing to fork over the pocket change to vaccinate everyone?!?). I really appreciate this approach, even when it makes it tough to totally wrap your head around the author's ultimate perspectives and allegiances.
In addition to being a creative thinker and a detailed and thorough researcher, Tooze is also a really great writer. This feels like a necessary read to understand how the world is today and how it got that way. And it's a pleasure to read, not at all a chore.
Unlike many contemporary books, this one doesn't end with an implausible laundry list of solutions (books by leftists usually advocate for programs that could address the problems identified by the author but are utopian in scale and don't usually address the political obstacles that face a left still mired in defeat; ones by liberals offer the kinds of policy plans that one can imagine passing in a handful of liberal cities but are so dinky as to pale in comparison to the scale of the problem). Instead, Tooze narrates the crisis, identifies the social forces at play, and laments the misleadership that blocks the level of international cooperation necessary (how could it be that no major country, who spent 2020 spending historically unprecedented amounts of money, was willing to fork over the pocket change to vaccinate everyone?!?). I really appreciate this approach, even when it makes it tough to totally wrap your head around the author's ultimate perspectives and allegiances.
In addition to being a creative thinker and a detailed and thorough researcher, Tooze is also a really great writer. This feels like a necessary read to understand how the world is today and how it got that way. And it's a pleasure to read, not at all a chore.
Read
February 3, 2025DAS Corona Buch
Nebenbei eine Einführung in "International Finance" die detailierter war als erwartet
Nebenbei eine Einführung in "International Finance" die detailierter war als erwartet
October 3, 2022
I’ve found “Shutdown”, by Adam Tooze, a very vivid account of the economic and political impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a very colored snapshot, data-rich analysis of the turmoil caused by the economic shutdown (also providing a good explanation on why there was little room to avoid protecting people at all cost, by sacrificing economic activity). This book also provided an insightful and thoughtful analysis of the big shift of central banks’ role during the pandemic, which made them “asset buyers of last resort”. However, at certain points, it was very hard to maintain focus with all the data being provided through the text and I’ve found it easy to loose track of the main subjects of certain chapters. Nevertheless, it still a marvelous book, like “Crashed” before it.
March 18, 2024
Du denkst beim Begriff „Repo-Markt“ an einen deutschen Sonderpostenmarkt?? Criiiinge
totlach 🤣
krank was so alles hinter den kulissen abging während wir bananenbrot gebacken und among us gezockt haben
totlach 🤣
krank was so alles hinter den kulissen abging während wir bananenbrot gebacken und among us gezockt haben
September 30, 2021
Problematic and troubling technocratic narrative
The "problematic and troubling" is NOT about the material in the narrative. It's not about "all shall bow before Xi Jinping." Rather, the narrative itself (including Tooze's take on China and COVID) is what's problematic and troubling. And, like British new leftist Perry Anderson's take on Tooze's "Crashed," I speak from several degrees to his left, albeit here in America, not the UK. But, I'm not close to a Trumpist, contra other low reviewers.
A deeply problematic book.
By page 11, Tooze is describing Dems’ Green New Deal as though it were pristine and unsullied, rather than a watered-down ripoff of the Green Party’s original. If a centrist mag like Atlantic or a left-center (but moving a bit more left) site like TNR (can’t remember which one) could report this, why can’t Tooze have it?
Especially since he doubles down on this story. And does so mulitiple times.
Probably because it would spoil his narrative.
The narrative? With a plasticine definition of “neoliberalism,” the main narrative by page 30 seems to be that neoliberalism can stretch to fit anything, just as much as his definition of it. The ergo that comes from that is that, if neoliberalism got anything wrong before, a better version of it will fix things in the future.
Also by page 30, he downplays the more baleful parts of neoliberalism in the west (inequality gap grows) and globally (increased climate change by carbon and other pollution being exported to places with less regulation and increased exploitation of workers, especially minorities like China’s Uyghurs).
In other words, we’ve got a book written by a technocratic neoliberal celebrating the “pragmatic” work of most central banks and using that pragmatism to underpin his plasticine.
Other problems, some bigger, arise after that.
The first and foremost is Tooze’s assumption that China controlled COVID as well as it claimed it controlled it. Even before he makes this claim / accepts this assertion, he’s undercut it by talking about Chinese restrictions on COVID-related information leaving the country. (As I write up this review, per Worldometers, China claims less than 5K COVID deaths, a number that’s laughable. It reports fewer total cases than Rwanda, also laughable.) We also have good evidence that larger nations of East Asia, like Vietnam, haven’t controlled COVID as well as they have claimed, or as their reflexively anti-American parroters in the West have claimed. Then, there’s the related vaccine issue. China’s is worse than anything developed in the West. And, the most Westernized Asian nation, Japan, was a flop on distributing Western vaccines.
In the last full chapter of the book, Tooze really jumps the shark, with his claims about efficaciousness of the Chinese and Russian vaccines.
Sinopharm has much less study than Western vaccines. Plenty of news stories note this. They also note that inactivated virus vaccines may have less potency than mRNA or adenovirus jabs. Tooze ignores all of this. He also ignores that China had reported only relatively limited clinical trial data.
Sputnik V? Production problems. It’s why WHO never approved it. And, its clinical trial data was so bad to leave open the question of data manipulation.
Also ignored.
Now, more details on some of this only came out after Tooze's book, but some of this information was out there last year, or at the start of this. And, if he didn't have a chance to know of this, he shouldn't have made the claims he did. (Amazon has a pub date of Sept. 7, 2021, to be precise, so that largely removes even that excuse.)
And, on this, with me already seeing this as a three-star book, it fell to two stars.
There was one final failure in the conclusion. Tooze talks about the “huge East-West gradient” in dealing with COVID. Of course, he bases this on accepting Chinese data, or lack if it, at face value, and ditto for Vietnam and some other nations. At the same time, he ignores the clusterfuck response of one major East Asian nation, Japan. He also ignores that at least one “Western” nation, New Zealand, did generally quite well.
Beyond all of this, some of his tangents, like Middle Eastern rivalries becoming more exacerbates, aren’t really even tangentially connected to COVID.
If this is a “grand narrative,” which he calls it, then it’s a dime-novel version of one.
And with that, I not only recommend against reading this book, but as with select other authors, I recommend against reading Tooze in the future, period. His lack of engagement with COVID facts, especially vis-a-vis Beijing, is troubling.
The "problematic and troubling" is NOT about the material in the narrative. It's not about "all shall bow before Xi Jinping." Rather, the narrative itself (including Tooze's take on China and COVID) is what's problematic and troubling. And, like British new leftist Perry Anderson's take on Tooze's "Crashed," I speak from several degrees to his left, albeit here in America, not the UK. But, I'm not close to a Trumpist, contra other low reviewers.
A deeply problematic book.
By page 11, Tooze is describing Dems’ Green New Deal as though it were pristine and unsullied, rather than a watered-down ripoff of the Green Party’s original. If a centrist mag like Atlantic or a left-center (but moving a bit more left) site like TNR (can’t remember which one) could report this, why can’t Tooze have it?
Especially since he doubles down on this story. And does so mulitiple times.
Probably because it would spoil his narrative.
The narrative? With a plasticine definition of “neoliberalism,” the main narrative by page 30 seems to be that neoliberalism can stretch to fit anything, just as much as his definition of it. The ergo that comes from that is that, if neoliberalism got anything wrong before, a better version of it will fix things in the future.
Also by page 30, he downplays the more baleful parts of neoliberalism in the west (inequality gap grows) and globally (increased climate change by carbon and other pollution being exported to places with less regulation and increased exploitation of workers, especially minorities like China’s Uyghurs).
In other words, we’ve got a book written by a technocratic neoliberal celebrating the “pragmatic” work of most central banks and using that pragmatism to underpin his plasticine.
Other problems, some bigger, arise after that.
The first and foremost is Tooze’s assumption that China controlled COVID as well as it claimed it controlled it. Even before he makes this claim / accepts this assertion, he’s undercut it by talking about Chinese restrictions on COVID-related information leaving the country. (As I write up this review, per Worldometers, China claims less than 5K COVID deaths, a number that’s laughable. It reports fewer total cases than Rwanda, also laughable.) We also have good evidence that larger nations of East Asia, like Vietnam, haven’t controlled COVID as well as they have claimed, or as their reflexively anti-American parroters in the West have claimed. Then, there’s the related vaccine issue. China’s is worse than anything developed in the West. And, the most Westernized Asian nation, Japan, was a flop on distributing Western vaccines.
In the last full chapter of the book, Tooze really jumps the shark, with his claims about efficaciousness of the Chinese and Russian vaccines.
Sinopharm has much less study than Western vaccines. Plenty of news stories note this. They also note that inactivated virus vaccines may have less potency than mRNA or adenovirus jabs. Tooze ignores all of this. He also ignores that China had reported only relatively limited clinical trial data.
Sputnik V? Production problems. It’s why WHO never approved it. And, its clinical trial data was so bad to leave open the question of data manipulation.
Also ignored.
Now, more details on some of this only came out after Tooze's book, but some of this information was out there last year, or at the start of this. And, if he didn't have a chance to know of this, he shouldn't have made the claims he did. (Amazon has a pub date of Sept. 7, 2021, to be precise, so that largely removes even that excuse.)
And, on this, with me already seeing this as a three-star book, it fell to two stars.
There was one final failure in the conclusion. Tooze talks about the “huge East-West gradient” in dealing with COVID. Of course, he bases this on accepting Chinese data, or lack if it, at face value, and ditto for Vietnam and some other nations. At the same time, he ignores the clusterfuck response of one major East Asian nation, Japan. He also ignores that at least one “Western” nation, New Zealand, did generally quite well.
Beyond all of this, some of his tangents, like Middle Eastern rivalries becoming more exacerbates, aren’t really even tangentially connected to COVID.
If this is a “grand narrative,” which he calls it, then it’s a dime-novel version of one.
And with that, I not only recommend against reading this book, but as with select other authors, I recommend against reading Tooze in the future, period. His lack of engagement with COVID facts, especially vis-a-vis Beijing, is troubling.
May 30, 2022
Not as strong as Tooze's other narratives, but still pretty good.
To succumb to the easy critique, I think it was written too early. Tooze is very good at detailing polycrisis, as is very clear here, but much of the greatness of The Deluge and Crashed was tracing the evolution of those crises out a big. I think the one year timeframe here, while allowing for the dramatic confluence of 2020, just misses too much - the supply chain disruption and inflation started up just a few months after the book's release and would've certainly been a very worthwhile section, for the most obvious example.
Still enjoyed it, and it did allow for a different perspective and the strong linkages between regions and events that Tooze is very good at.
To succumb to the easy critique, I think it was written too early. Tooze is very good at detailing polycrisis, as is very clear here, but much of the greatness of The Deluge and Crashed was tracing the evolution of those crises out a big. I think the one year timeframe here, while allowing for the dramatic confluence of 2020, just misses too much - the supply chain disruption and inflation started up just a few months after the book's release and would've certainly been a very worthwhile section, for the most obvious example.
Still enjoyed it, and it did allow for a different perspective and the strong linkages between regions and events that Tooze is very good at.
September 21, 2021
One of the best COVID books I've read.
Went into great detail on the widespread effect that the virus has caused throughout the world.
Great book on the world economic impacts.
Also detailed the virus' ground zero.
4.7/5
Went into great detail on the widespread effect that the virus has caused throughout the world.
Great book on the world economic impacts.
Also detailed the virus' ground zero.
4.7/5
August 26, 2024
Another belter from Adam Tooze. Much like his book on the 2008 crash this one does a majestic job of tying together the financial, economic and political spheres and making sense of these extremely/purposefully obtuse worlds. The majesty here is in tying all these together with the unique challenges of 2020… furlough, vaccine purchase and rollout, and the rise of globalised and powerful China. As he sums up nicely in the conclusion:
“either we take seriously the need to build more sustainable and resilient economies and societies and equip ourselves with the standing capacities necessary to meet fast moving and unpredictable crises, or we will be overwhelmed by the blowback from our natural environment”
in 2008 and 2020 we had the dollar to fall back on, will the same still be true in a world 10 years from now dominated by China??
“either we take seriously the need to build more sustainable and resilient economies and societies and equip ourselves with the standing capacities necessary to meet fast moving and unpredictable crises, or we will be overwhelmed by the blowback from our natural environment”
in 2008 and 2020 we had the dollar to fall back on, will the same still be true in a world 10 years from now dominated by China??
September 21, 2021
Adam Tooze's work never fails to impress. His story-telling talent combined with multi-dsicplinary insights have produced many noteworthy "recent" histories. Over the long-term, this book whilst well-worth the read, will fall into the category of being an interesting immediate perspective on the outbreak and initial impact of the pandemic, but has been written too close to events to constitute a more thoughtful piece contributing to a deeper understanding of this unprecedented global crisis.
December 26, 2021
I wish I had kept a journal since the start of the pandemic. In January, cases in China were barely a blip on my radar. Instead, we were going to war with Iran? Pete, then Bernie, then Biden were going to be the nominee? Impeachment would dominate the 2020 election?
As confirmed cases started spreading into Europe in February and March, my friends decided to shift a long-planned trip from France to England. Then, as some friends arrived early to visit me in Oxford, America implemented travel bans. We scrambled to get flights home. I sprinted through packing, rushed goodbyes, and cancelled flights, with the creeping acknowledgment that I would not be returning anytime soon. I remember feeling immense joy in landing in NYC and being randomly selected by TSA, a sure sign of home. From Massachusetts, I remember the thought of a lock down and social distancing as foreign, but likely only something that would occur for a couple of weeks. Since summer 2020, though, my day-to-day beliefs of the pandemic (almost always wrong) and my memory of the experience have mushed together.
I fear that our personal and collective memories will be selective and misrepresented in the years to come. One could likely fit the pandemic into any social, economic, or political narrative they want. The collective memory itself will be hard to reconstruct at each stage of the pandemic and for each group (I can't imagine being a parent or a kid right now!), but it will be even harder to derive the correct lessons both for how we should structure our politics and economy in normal times and how we should prepare for future crises.
As always, I find Adam Tooze insightful and able to see the forest through the trees. The book was written before 2021, before Delta, before Omicron, before whatever is next. It feels lacking in the present for that reason, but it also better captures what 2020 was like and what governments across the world did. It's comprehensive, insightful, and contextualized, treating COVID both as a novel crisis for the world and recognizing how its impact was shaped by the world preceding it.
((Much of his writing on global financial markets still goes quite over my head and I need a crash course on this))
As confirmed cases started spreading into Europe in February and March, my friends decided to shift a long-planned trip from France to England. Then, as some friends arrived early to visit me in Oxford, America implemented travel bans. We scrambled to get flights home. I sprinted through packing, rushed goodbyes, and cancelled flights, with the creeping acknowledgment that I would not be returning anytime soon. I remember feeling immense joy in landing in NYC and being randomly selected by TSA, a sure sign of home. From Massachusetts, I remember the thought of a lock down and social distancing as foreign, but likely only something that would occur for a couple of weeks. Since summer 2020, though, my day-to-day beliefs of the pandemic (almost always wrong) and my memory of the experience have mushed together.
I fear that our personal and collective memories will be selective and misrepresented in the years to come. One could likely fit the pandemic into any social, economic, or political narrative they want. The collective memory itself will be hard to reconstruct at each stage of the pandemic and for each group (I can't imagine being a parent or a kid right now!), but it will be even harder to derive the correct lessons both for how we should structure our politics and economy in normal times and how we should prepare for future crises.
As always, I find Adam Tooze insightful and able to see the forest through the trees. The book was written before 2021, before Delta, before Omicron, before whatever is next. It feels lacking in the present for that reason, but it also better captures what 2020 was like and what governments across the world did. It's comprehensive, insightful, and contextualized, treating COVID both as a novel crisis for the world and recognizing how its impact was shaped by the world preceding it.
((Much of his writing on global financial markets still goes quite over my head and I need a crash course on this))
February 28, 2024
Listening to it felt like a relatively decent summary of 2020-2021. It felt odd to relive it. I feel like I haven't learned so many new things from the book, but also it feels like I haven't fully integrated everything that happened and that I haven't yet fully arrived in 2024. I really like the phrase "writing in media res" that Tooze often uses.
September 24, 2021
I now realize I should have read the title with a bit more care....while I was reading, I was surprised at the heavy emphasis of the book on the financial goings on during covid but after re-reading the title (and seeing the dollar sign in the name), it makes perfect sense :)
That said, this really was an in-depth look at what was going on during the covid pandemic + a bit of background explanation for some of the pieces of info that needed it. I now have a much better idea of what, how and when, though being completely honest, the financial stuff went a bit over my head. Fascinating, but I would not claim to now understand it - my ignorance is just a bit lessened :)
That said, this really was an in-depth look at what was going on during the covid pandemic + a bit of background explanation for some of the pieces of info that needed it. I now have a much better idea of what, how and when, though being completely honest, the financial stuff went a bit over my head. Fascinating, but I would not claim to now understand it - my ignorance is just a bit lessened :)
March 4, 2022
This was a frustrating read — at times engaging and insightful but way too often it came across as unfocused or rushed. The good bits made the mediocre ones all the more frustrating.
I’ve been following Tooze’s work for quite some time now but this was my first time reading a longer work of his. As expected, “Shutdown” doesn’t lack sharp economic analysis grounded in geopolitical detail. I only wish that the former were a larger part of the work in proportion to the latter. The first 20-25 percent or so of the book is mere exposition — a meticulous reenactment of the first weeks of 2020 and of the initial responses to the pandemic. While it undoubtedly serves a purpose (and there is a lot to be learned about responses in some parts of the world which tend to be ignored by anglophone media), at times it just made me think “when is this going to end?”. Although the narrative gives place to more meaty content at last, the point sadly persists throughout the book.
And while the analysis (viz the subject matter itself) can be genuinely interesting and the writing gets engaging in the discussion of the FED’s and ECB’s response, the political challenges in the developing world and elsewhere, I couldn’t help but think that the book missed one round of edition. At nearly 400 pages, Tooze finds himself starting to make the same points over and over again without adding many new insights somewhere around the middle of the text. The chaos of the Trump administration; the inadequacy of the American state; the paradigm shift at international monetary institutions; the spooky rise of China; the failures of NextGen EU. For how often those concepts come up, they are rarely (if ever) comprehensively analysed, dissected, reviewed. It’s a shame, because the subject matter merits a more detailed treatment and I don’t think it’s Tooze’s inability to deliver that stifled such analysis. It’s rather the rushed-ness of the book, and the chronological structure which inhibits the emergence of any deeper conclusions.
He also quite obviously has his ideological leanings and seems to sometimes fall into the trap of looking at the recent economic interventionism through rather artificially rose-tinted glasses. I'm not saying that his position is bad — I simply think that he fails to make a case for it, taking the virtues of QE and big state spending for granted.
There might be a solid book inside “Shutdown”, but to me, it seems like it is surrounded by some 150+ surplus pages.
I’ve been following Tooze’s work for quite some time now but this was my first time reading a longer work of his. As expected, “Shutdown” doesn’t lack sharp economic analysis grounded in geopolitical detail. I only wish that the former were a larger part of the work in proportion to the latter. The first 20-25 percent or so of the book is mere exposition — a meticulous reenactment of the first weeks of 2020 and of the initial responses to the pandemic. While it undoubtedly serves a purpose (and there is a lot to be learned about responses in some parts of the world which tend to be ignored by anglophone media), at times it just made me think “when is this going to end?”. Although the narrative gives place to more meaty content at last, the point sadly persists throughout the book.
And while the analysis (viz the subject matter itself) can be genuinely interesting and the writing gets engaging in the discussion of the FED’s and ECB’s response, the political challenges in the developing world and elsewhere, I couldn’t help but think that the book missed one round of edition. At nearly 400 pages, Tooze finds himself starting to make the same points over and over again without adding many new insights somewhere around the middle of the text. The chaos of the Trump administration; the inadequacy of the American state; the paradigm shift at international monetary institutions; the spooky rise of China; the failures of NextGen EU. For how often those concepts come up, they are rarely (if ever) comprehensively analysed, dissected, reviewed. It’s a shame, because the subject matter merits a more detailed treatment and I don’t think it’s Tooze’s inability to deliver that stifled such analysis. It’s rather the rushed-ness of the book, and the chronological structure which inhibits the emergence of any deeper conclusions.
He also quite obviously has his ideological leanings and seems to sometimes fall into the trap of looking at the recent economic interventionism through rather artificially rose-tinted glasses. I'm not saying that his position is bad — I simply think that he fails to make a case for it, taking the virtues of QE and big state spending for granted.
There might be a solid book inside “Shutdown”, but to me, it seems like it is surrounded by some 150+ surplus pages.
May 11, 2022
When it's not regurgitating recent headlines this book is mostly baffling. Very far from insightful analysis of his other books. It literally ends with the author saying that Republicans in America are just wreckers and idiots and that's why all the good people are supporting Democrats.
June 17, 2022
The author is a well known and prolific scholar who combines history and economics in ways that are interesting and engaging to a broad audience (at least as these sorts of books go). The topic is the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world economy, focusing on 2020, the first year of COVID. The title captures what is so strange and interesting about the pandemic - that the economies of the developed world and much of the developing world literally shut down and stopping functioning across a wide array of businesses. For those who never appreciated the central position of dynamism in economics, the pandemic provided a stark example, as whole economies appeared to just slow down and nearly stop. There are few if any parallels to COVID just on disease-related terms (the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu perhaps) but I know of few attempts for coming to grips with the economic impacts of a plague like COVID.
The macro economy is complex and highly abstract, especially at the global level. Professor Tooze navigates this terrain well, especially through the dense thicket of international finance. A natural comparison is the effects of COVID-19 and the business disruptions around the 2008 financial crises. Throughout, the analysis is sharp, interesting, and readable. The references are good so that those who want to go deeper are able to.
I am normally suspicious of instant history, but I will make an exception for this book. I have not even used up all of the mega pack of coffee filters I purchased early in the lockdown, but those early days in March and April 2020 seem distant. Reading Shutdown, I was struck by how much happened around the virus, almost on a daily basis. You then throw in the other crises of 2020 from BLM to the elections to the aftermath of the elections and it is understandable why 2020 commemorative cards are not likely to sell well. A book like Tooze’s book brings it all back - and this is just for the first year of the crisis. Given the omnipresent coverage of the pandemic in the media in real time and the huge number of studies of it online, that a book like Shutdown permits some reflection is something I never would have expected from an economic historian.
The book is well worth reading and I highly recommend it.
The macro economy is complex and highly abstract, especially at the global level. Professor Tooze navigates this terrain well, especially through the dense thicket of international finance. A natural comparison is the effects of COVID-19 and the business disruptions around the 2008 financial crises. Throughout, the analysis is sharp, interesting, and readable. The references are good so that those who want to go deeper are able to.
I am normally suspicious of instant history, but I will make an exception for this book. I have not even used up all of the mega pack of coffee filters I purchased early in the lockdown, but those early days in March and April 2020 seem distant. Reading Shutdown, I was struck by how much happened around the virus, almost on a daily basis. You then throw in the other crises of 2020 from BLM to the elections to the aftermath of the elections and it is understandable why 2020 commemorative cards are not likely to sell well. A book like Tooze’s book brings it all back - and this is just for the first year of the crisis. Given the omnipresent coverage of the pandemic in the media in real time and the huge number of studies of it online, that a book like Shutdown permits some reflection is something I never would have expected from an economic historian.
The book is well worth reading and I highly recommend it.
January 3, 2025
An analysis of the economic shock brought about by covid and how the world responded to it. More or less, what were previously considered radical measures such as providing unlimited dollar liquidity and 0 interest rates were utilized by the Fed and central banks to stabilize the system, utilizing the tools first developed in the 2008 crash. Key takeaway is that these radical measures were used to further increase the wealth of the rich, while the biggest losers were low income countries who neither received any financial or vaccine relief. China with its state capacity came out as the strongest winner, while the EU struggled to show a strong showing like china or the US because of its lack of coherent policy structure, instead being weakened by the squabbling of its constituent nation states. The UK’s terminal decline became readily apparent, and the US’ preeminence as the financial backbone of the world became readily obvious.
Tooze does not believe in a systematic analysis of crisis, and instead believes in following the protagonists in their actions as they took them, and concluding from there. Yet systematic themes become apparent in his retelling of the covid crisis - the unequal global system, the value of human beings inly being considered as long as they serve as gdp units, and the continuing adherence to neoliberal ideology of enriching and empowering actors, even when the previous policies promoted by such ideology seemed completely unable to deal with the crisis. The ip rights given to bio pharmaceutical companies for the vaccine when their research was heavily govt funded, the increased govt subsidies and upholding of the big actors in the market when the market crashed - they all show that without organized labour as a counter-veiling balance, transfer of wealth from public to private hands even increases in times of crisis.
Tooze does not believe in a systematic analysis of crisis, and instead believes in following the protagonists in their actions as they took them, and concluding from there. Yet systematic themes become apparent in his retelling of the covid crisis - the unequal global system, the value of human beings inly being considered as long as they serve as gdp units, and the continuing adherence to neoliberal ideology of enriching and empowering actors, even when the previous policies promoted by such ideology seemed completely unable to deal with the crisis. The ip rights given to bio pharmaceutical companies for the vaccine when their research was heavily govt funded, the increased govt subsidies and upholding of the big actors in the market when the market crashed - they all show that without organized labour as a counter-veiling balance, transfer of wealth from public to private hands even increases in times of crisis.
December 31, 2024
Great blow-by-blow account of the political economy of the Covid crisis, covering about a year from early 2020 to early 2021. Well-written and thoroughly researched, and surprisingly fun to read.
First book by Tooze I've read, and if this is supposed to be his worst one, I'm excited to read his other books, because this was a great read. Sure, its a bit hard to grasp any big-picture takeaways beyond things we already kind of knew ("it was a crazy economic shock to the global economy", "Western governments and institutions unleashed unprecedented spending"), but it still felt very worthwhile to get such a wide array of facts and figures and analysis of events and meetings and arguments, all packaged together like this. If there is one single thing that stands out, its just how leagues ahead China was in responding to the pandemic and its aftermath; and conversely, how the West very nearly made a bad situation absolutely apocalyptic.
First book by Tooze I've read, and if this is supposed to be his worst one, I'm excited to read his other books, because this was a great read. Sure, its a bit hard to grasp any big-picture takeaways beyond things we already kind of knew ("it was a crazy economic shock to the global economy", "Western governments and institutions unleashed unprecedented spending"), but it still felt very worthwhile to get such a wide array of facts and figures and analysis of events and meetings and arguments, all packaged together like this. If there is one single thing that stands out, its just how leagues ahead China was in responding to the pandemic and its aftermath; and conversely, how the West very nearly made a bad situation absolutely apocalyptic.
October 15, 2022
As a a bit of a Tooze-head, I was a bit disappointed by the first 90% of this book. While it was a head-spinning recitation of facts and figures, mostly financial, from the first 12 months of the pandemic, the analysis that I had come to expect from Crashed and Wages of Destruction was mostly missing. It also ran into the pitfalls of writing a historical narrative while the event is still unfolding - China’s decision to continue pursuing COVID-zero and the supply shocks and inflation of 2021-22 are massive parts of the pandemic story, and their absences from the narrative are glaring. However, the book was redeemed in certain respects by the conclusion, which packs more analysis into 15 pages than were contained into the previous 290, some of which (monetary tightening, violent escalation in major regions of the world economy) look especially prescient in October 2022.
January 13, 2022
Tooze’s previous book, “Crashed”, is one of the best pieces of modern history I’ve ever read. It’s highly economically literate, and it’s breathtaking in scope.
The book “Shutdown” is… less so. It is a collection of facts about government deficits, central bank interventions, and other policy decisions made during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dates, stats, and political characters are then thrown together and mixed into several poorly connected narratives about the environmental movement, the rise of China, and the demise of the US.
At the end of the book, Tooze acknowledges that the book is being written from before the close of the pandemic and that, as with any history, his narrative is likely to be overtaken by events and rewritten by later historians. In this case, as readers, I think we might have been better off waiting.
The book “Shutdown” is… less so. It is a collection of facts about government deficits, central bank interventions, and other policy decisions made during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dates, stats, and political characters are then thrown together and mixed into several poorly connected narratives about the environmental movement, the rise of China, and the demise of the US.
At the end of the book, Tooze acknowledges that the book is being written from before the close of the pandemic and that, as with any history, his narrative is likely to be overtaken by events and rewritten by later historians. In this case, as readers, I think we might have been better off waiting.
January 9, 2024
Having not read any of his books before, I’ll be honest and say it’s not what I expected. It gets very technical and very wordy, without much breakdown or rest if you’re new to the language or finding it hard to keep up. That’s probably to be expected with a book about the financial system, but I did still find it a challenge.
It’s also not 100% a book about Covid, which I understand some context is needed both historical and forward looking - but it also does get very political at times. It sort of feels like just talking about national or global economies or governments for the sake of it, rather than it really being necessary for understanding.
Combine that with the jumping of timeframes & language involved, makes it a hard read. Maybe a reread will help it sink in but I don’t see myself doing that any time soon. I think other authors are able to write about complex events involving lots of timeframes and people in a way which is easier to follow.
It’s also not 100% a book about Covid, which I understand some context is needed both historical and forward looking - but it also does get very political at times. It sort of feels like just talking about national or global economies or governments for the sake of it, rather than it really being necessary for understanding.
Combine that with the jumping of timeframes & language involved, makes it a hard read. Maybe a reread will help it sink in but I don’t see myself doing that any time soon. I think other authors are able to write about complex events involving lots of timeframes and people in a way which is easier to follow.
January 9, 2022
Amazing retelling of the year 2020: Adam Tooze dramatically walked me through the period from start of the pandemic until president Biden’s inauguration at beginning of 2021. Great to be reminded that reading news does not make you know anything except disjoining facts; without a framework of intellectual references, and years of growing a peer network, one gets lost anyway and misses the main points. Covid was my first adult crisis, and although deeply affected by it in many ways, without Mr Tooze’s effort my understanding would have remained bare. If interested in current affairs, economics, the US, EU, China and their confrontations, one stands to gain from reading this volume.
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