This paper emerges out of a series of blogs that we jointly posted on SPERI Comment between 30 January and 18 July 2013. They sought to set out and link together the different aspects of SPERI’s intellectual agenda. The blogs attracted a certain amount of attention and discussion and are gathered up here into a single argument for ease of access.
In the paper we claim that the current era in which we are living is best labelled ‘The Great Uncertainty’ and suggest, by deliberate use of this term, that the present conjuncture is being shaped by a remarkable, and hugely challenging, coalescence of three major processes of structural change occurring simultaneously and interacting in all manner of complicated ways.
They can be distinguished analytically as follows:
• Financial crisis: a largely Western crisis brought about by neoliberal excess and now rendering the resumption of economic growth a severe conundrum for the US, Japan and nearly all major European economies and a problem at least for the rest of the global economy;
• Shifting economic power: the recent intensification of longstanding movements in the locus of economic power in the world characterised by the rise of countries like China, India, Brazil and several others too;
• Environmental threat: the eventual realisation that climate change is both real and accelerating and is now asking the most serious questions about the on-going viability of traditional notions of economic growth and indeed the good society itself.