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Opinion | From Donald Trump’s government shutdown to Brexit chaos, is a pattern emerging of women restoring order?
- Andrew Sheng says climate change and human inequality are the urgent problems political and business leaders should be focusing on. With male leaders ineffectual, and worse, the rise of women offers some hope
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Two years after the election of Donald Trump as US president and the UK referendum on Brexit, we have the bizarre events of a US government shutdown over building a wall at the border with Mexico and the British prime minister’s proposals for Brexit being overwhelmingly rejected.
Walls and votes are hurdles that we need to overcome, but the biggest obstacle is a mental one – how do we prepare ourselves for a phase of chaos?
As Douglass Carmichael, adviser to the Institute for New Economic Thinking, says in his forthcoming book “GardenWorld”, “The conventional thinking is that the problems facing the world are simple road bumps, and after that, life will go back to business as usual.”
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But the road ahead may be washed away by flash floods, bombed by terrorists, collapsed by an earthquake or built to go nowhere. Our existential crises are climate change and human inequality leading to nuclear war, but many of us feel helpless about how to address them.
The World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Risk Report asked whether the world is sleepwalking into a crisis, noting that “we are drifting deeper into global problems from which we will struggle to extricate ourselves”.
The report’s Global Risk Perception Survey, which covers 1,000 stakeholders, reveals an interesting pattern. In 2009, the top global risk in terms of likelihood and impact was “asset price collapse”.
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