Reviews

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It by Mike Mariathasan, Ian Goldin

kellen's review

challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

It took 16 years for the bubonic plague to spread from China to Italy in the 14th century. It only took a few days for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to spread from Wuhan to Rome, and less than three months for it to reach 140 other countries. 

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the complexity of globalization in the 21st century. The global system for the exchange of goods and services, skills, information, and people creates unprecedented social and economic opportunities. It also amplifies significant systemic risks. We are experiencing the acute impact of one with COVID-19, and there are similar vulnerabilities in financial, supply chain, infrastructure, environment, and social systems.

In The Butterfly Defect (Princeton, 2014), Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan explore the system dynamics and interdependencies of globalization in the 21st century. Economists by training, they show how globalization has made it increasingly difficult to account for the consequences of individual actions, a central governance mechanism in many important institutions. This uncertainty coupled with global interconnectedness—both physical and virtual connections—increases the risk of large shocks like COVID-19.

This year kicked off a new decade—a decade of promise and, clearly, peril. And despite the great advances we made in technology and medicine over the last two centuries, we are the same fragile, biological creatures we have always been, and the only way we have any hope of thriving in the 21st century is if we acknowledge the complexity of our connected world.

Review originally published in Manifold.