Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

Extract

“At the expense of anything?” rejoined Lady Carbury with energy. “One cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule.”

—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)

Facile criticisms of Adam Tooze's new book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, present themselves at once. It suffers by comparison to Tooze's masterpiece, The Wages of Destruction (2006)—easily one of the best historical works of the last two decades, a huge and original take on the economy of Nazi Germany, its geopolitics and political economy alike forged in reaction to the example of Fordist America, its war aims destined to fail because of an increasing deficit in the “balance of resources” vis-à-vis the Allies.