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Since the first industrial revolution, exponential gains in economic complexity have accrued in tandem with unprecedented levels of innovation and wealth generation. While a trillion isolated individuals could never build an airplane, let alone put a human on the moon, a far smaller number of interacting agents who specialize and trade can, given the right incentives, produce a dizzying array of massively complex products. Complex products, and the complex sets of capabilities on which they rest, emerge from deep divisions of labor driven by competition within the market economy. This is why the first direct policy implication of the field of economic complexity has been for countries and regions to specialize into more complex economic activities (Hausmann et al., 2011; Balland et al., 2019; Hidalgo, 2021). Supporting economic upgrading by building complex capabilities is a superior development strategy to chasing the ability to produce high-priced goods. Commodity prices can shift rapidly with changing market conditions, regulations, and customer preferences. Developing the capabilities to create and produce complex products is a viable path to secure long-run growth as these capabilities tend to evolve in self-reinforcing processes of recombination, rewarding most of those actors, firms, and places that are already embedded in networks of complex activity.

One unfortunate consequence of the growth and concentration of economic complexity is rising levels of inequality. By their nature, more complex systems also tend to be more unequal. Preferential attachment, compounding, self-reinforcing feedback loops, and multiplicative processes that are inherent to complex adaptive systems increase inequality. As a result, some individuals, organizations, and places will occupy privileged positions in which they can leverage larger parts of an economy’s structure and accumulate most of the benefits. Others will be much less fortunate, either because they have the wrong skills, they are located in the wrong place, or they face other factors that prevent them from engaging in economic activities. In our modern world, inequality is striking. Walmart’s Walton family leverages labor structures, Warren Buffet leverages capital, and digital platforms leverage code and media to secure and expand dominant economic positions. This is consistent with earlier innovation research which points at the uneven distributional effects of technological revolutions or advancements (e.g., Perez, 2013) and suggests a need to find new ways to govern capitalism in order to avoid the concentration of economic and political power to the detriment of society (Giuliani, 2018). These ideas echo recent empirical research showing how technological giants handling and generating highly complex knowledge in domains such as ICT and artificial intelligence have built knowledge monopolies from innovations and exclusive access to data (Rikap and Lundvall, 2020), while others have raised concerns about the geographic distributional imbalances caused by high tech companies’ concentration of monopoly rents (Feldman et al., 2021). These monopolies create fat-tailed distributions and challenge existing (cohesion-oriented) social structures. The imbalances and inequalities generated by growing complexity require new policy responses to generate equitable returns and secure futures for all.

The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic which emerged in central China in late 2019 and at the time of writing continues to rage across the world highlights the Janus face of twenty-first-century globalization, underpinned by open international borders and deregulated global trade and finance. While globalization has substantially increased the wealth of nations and has facilitated unprecedented mobility and convergence across societies, it has also substantially increased vulnerability and sensitivity to systemic disruption, precisely because of hyperconnectivity. The contemporary integration of global relationships and systems in economics, finance, infrastructure, transport, ecology and health sets the twenty-first century apart from previous eras. Thus, pandemics can create global system shocks. When the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020, most national governments were underprepared, despite epidemiologists having warned for decades that epidemics will become more frequent because of the interconnected problems of globalization, population growth, inequalities and climate change.94

Applying the SD diagnostic framework, we first examine COVID-19 in its wider systemic context.

Under such conditions, it is perhaps not surprising that great power rivalry between the US and China has intensified, almost to the extent of the struggle for global supremacy between the US and the USSR, albeit with more of a regional focus. Hence, David Shambaugh (2018, 85) has pointed out that despite their deep interdependence and elements of cooperation, the world’s two major powers are increasingly locked in a “comprehensive competitive relationship,” made explicit by the labeling of China and Russia as “strategic competitors” and “revisionist powers.” Nuclear weapons can be seen as the ultimate expression of power politics, and regional actors are prominent proponents. Russia and the US have the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, China’s complement ranks third, and North Korea has become only the ninth nuclear deterrent-enabled state in the world (Arms Control Association 2021). Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan could go nuclear virtually overnight, only refraining from doing so because of the shelter of the US nuclear umbrella.

In addition, so dramatic have been the impacts of controversies surrounding the administration of US President Donald Trump and its aftermath, that the American democratic polity can be viewed as being in crisis rather than a shining city on the hill, and therefore American soft power contributes less in terms of leadership resources in the region. President Trump’s attacks on international organizations (IOs), institutions, and multilateral treaties, revealed their limitations, raising the specter of the US walking away from any treaty, agreement, or institution that it considers not to be in the interests of US citizens. This turning away by the US has been particularly acute in the East Asian region, where only bilateral diplomacy could hold the attention of the previous president, and even then, only sporadically.

You can’t trade with someone you’re at war with. So, the more two countries trade, the more costly a war between them will be, and the less likely they should be to fight. This argument is appealing for a few reasons. First, it makes intuitive sense. Second, it looks like it fits the data well, at least for the post-war period. Since WWII, international trade has grown dramatically while the rate of international conflict has fallen.

This theory also benefits from some seemingly-strong empirical support. Two prominent proponents, Bruce Russett and John Oneal, have produced a number of books and papers that show increased economic interdependence, usually measured as the value of bilateral trade between two countries divided by a country’s GDP, reduces the chance of war between two countries. More specifically, in a 2003 paper they report that “increasing economic interdependence from the 10th to the 90th percentile reduces the risk of a fatal dispute by 32 percent.” At that time, the volume of US-China trade was just below the 90th percentile for their data, and the authors conclude that the growth of US-China trade reduced the chance of conflict by 27%.

Washington and Brussels have been at odds over trade since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and ended trade negotiations between both sides of the Atlantic. Trump has said that Europe is “possibly just as bad as China” when it comes to trade and called it a “brutal” trading partner.

However, despite U.S. threats over new tariffs on Europe and the latter’s willingness to retaliate, analysts are not expecting a trade war between the economic giants for several reasons.

Through the first half of this year, it looked as if the IIJA and a series of presidential orders to federal agencies would constitute the entirety of the federal response to the climate crisis. It's not that these things are unimportant quite the contrary. However, they're hardly what's needed to respond in a just, timely, consistent manner to the climate crisis and its consequences.

Moreover, executive orders can be as easily erased by the next president as they were issued by the current one. President Donald Trump promised to reverse all of President Barack Obama's climate-related directives, including his signature Clean Power Plan, early in his administration. Biden promised that on Day 1 in office,4 he would reverse most of Trump's climate-related orders. They were promises both men were easily able to keep.

First and foremost, any military conflict between the two would quickly turn nuclear. The US thus finds itself in the same situation that it was in vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Taiwan could easily become this century’s tripwire, just as the ‘Fulda Gap’ in Germany was during the Cold War. But the same dynamic of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that limited US–Soviet conflict applies to the US and China. And the international community would do everything in its power to ensure that a potential nuclear conflict did not materialise, given that the consequences would be fundamentally transnational and—unlike climate change—immediate.

A US–China conflict would almost certainly take the form of a proxy war, rather than a major-power confrontation. Each superpower might take a different side in a domestic conflict in a country such as Pakistan, Venezuela, Iran or North Korea, and deploy some combination of economic, cyber and diplomatic instruments. We have seen this type of conflict many times before: from Vietnam to Bosnia, the US faced surrogates rather than its principal foe.

LCRs are able to involve local producers and labor in the implementation of oil and

gas projects, to create multiple (indirect) effects through the regional inter-industry linkages.

The work of revitalizing the long-struggling heartland industrial regions isn’t just a U.S. project, though; rather, it’s of vital importance on both sides of the Atlantic.

As the United States makes unprecedented investments in its industrial heartland, the U.K. government has pursued its own agenda to “level up” the country’s left-behind regions. The European Union has acted similarly, seeking to improve its regional structural adjustment and cohesion policies, whose main task is to support the economic well-being of regions whose development is lagging behind. The OECD is also developing road maps and inventories on successful regional transformations to inform policy decisions in this area.

Ironically, the US – long seen as the villain in this area – has increasingly come to view itself as a victim of China’s agricultural subsidies. The level of support the US provides to its agricultural producers has been consistently below the OECD average and falling over time (OECD, 2017). Since the Uruguay Round, and the Brazil cotton dispute, the US has reformed its own farm programs, shifting towards less trade-distorting forms of support. The US’s producer support declined from 21% of gross farm receipts in 1986–88 to 9% in 2014–16, with the proportion provided in the most trade-distorting forms of support falling from 51% to 33% (OECD, 2017). Yet now, the US finds its chief market and competitor, China, moving in the opposite direction. Today, as one negotiator stated, China is ‘comprehensively outspending them in a way the US can’t respond to because of its fiscal limitations and its WTO limits on production-linked spending’. 3 From the US’s perspective, to quote one of its former negotiators, not only are China’s subsidies ‘distorting world markets but they have become significantly more trade-distorting than subsidies in developed countries’ and ‘the US, as the biggest agricultural exporter, suffers most from these distortions’. 4

The worst-case scenario would be that it would be like 1940, only without a raging World War. Keep in mind that by 1940, before the introduction of penicillin, deaths from infectious diseases in the US had been reduced by 90% from their 19th century levels [1]. This reduction was entirely due to the provisions of clean food, water, and vaccines. We have (or should have) better systems for delivering these public health goods than we did 75 years ago.

But there is never going to be a post-antibiotic era. Antibiotic therapy will continue to be effective most of the time. If antibiotic therapy is informed by rapid microbiology testing, then it will be effective nearly all of the time. Very few bugs are, or will be, pan-resistant and untreatable by antibiotics. Even the worst superbugs—MRSAs, CREs, ESBLs, and now MCR-1s—are almost always susceptible to at least one clinically useful antibiotic (XDR TB is the most troubling exception to this rule).

Areas that are most likely to be affected are developing countries which usually provide services and materials to middle- and high-income countries. Many of the people who live in low-income countries could be forced to leave their homes in search of safety and fertile lands, resulting in the loss of cultural identity as well as possible economic and political instability in other areas.

Acknowledging soil for what it is and recognising the irreplaceable role it plays can help us change the way we care for it which is something that needs to happen now.

It’s a humble, if one-sided goal. But what’s often in the crosshairs of activists is the philosophy of the planting system — the “dreaded” monoculture.

Row crops are a relic, say self-styled pundits in the sustainability debate.

Although the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 sent a shockwave through the markets and economy, another recent near-collapse of the U.S. economy happened on September 16, 2008. This is the day the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck”—the value of the fund’s holdings dropped below $1 per share.1

Panicked investors withdrew billions from money market accounts where businesses keep cash to fund day-to-day operations.2 If withdrawals had gone on for even a week, and if the Fed and the U.S. government had not stepped in to shore up the financial sector, the entire economy would likely have ground to a halt. Trucks would have stopped rolling, grocery stores would have run out of food, and businesses would have been forced to shut down.

A recent World Bank report, Revising Public Agricultural Support to Mitigate Climate Change, finds that agriculture subsidies have the potential to address food security and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Agriculture currently accounts for 25 percent of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the Word Research Institute (WRI). But by 2050, the WRI expects the global population to increase by 2.2 million people. Researchers believe this will increase food production by 50 percent and drive up GHG emissions.

30×30 would not curb the damage industrial-scale farming does. If the economic model that enables it does not change, it may even worsen its impact. Restricting land use may raise food prices, artificially inflate the value of land, and encourage further overuse of chemicals and harmful crop and livestock breeding practices to increase production. This would have devastating consequences for smallholder farmers who produce more than 30 percent of the world’s food and tend to use more sustainable practices than industrial farms.

America’s food supply must be protected from extreme weather like droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The government has a role in ensuring food production during wars, recessions, and other economic crises. Food production is more important to the nation’s welfare than other business products.

Farms are susceptible to commodity price dips. Commodities traders determine the prices on an open exchange. They trade futures contracts that promise to buy or sell at an agreed-upon price on a specific date. Farmers can take their chances on what the price will be when it’s time to harvest. They can lock in a price with a futures contract.8 Either way, they are betting that their costs will be lower than their future revenue.

An end to farm subsidies would not mean an end to farming in the U.S. Prices of farmland would decline, allowing some farmers to remain in business, and we would reshuffle production to those crops that American farmers most efficiently produce.

Instead of a politics-as-usual debate over a trivial 3.5 percent decrease in agricultural subsidies, policymakers should reconsider why the federal government subsidizes agriculture at all. It hurts the world’s poor, makes food prices higher for consumers in the U.S., and the benefits don’t accrue to small farmers. Of course politicians don’t debate ending farm subsidies because it would eliminate one type of “food”—the pork congress members get to dole out.

In 1967, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the best albums ever made. One of its hit songs was titled "Getting Better," and part of the chorus goes like this:

I've got to admit it's getting better

Without question, the journey from subsistence economies to modern livelihoods is not an easy one and moving from the farm to the city does not guarantee a better life, at least in the short term. But the last two centuries offer ample evidence that by just about every metric of human health, freedom, and material well-being, urbanisation, industrialisation, and agricultural modernisation are processes that have been overwhelmingly positive for humans.

Moreover, as a leading proponent of rewilding, we hope that Monbiot will think a bit harder about where all those rewilded landscapes in which, he hopes “nature is allowed to do its own thing, in which it can be to some extent self-willed, driven by its own dynamic processes” are likely to come from. On a planet of 7, going on 9 billion people, agricultural modernisation and intensification are clearly the most plausible path to leaving more of the Earth to nature.