The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time.

Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Our guest this weekend, Adam Tooze, brings his analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis.

In Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. 

The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time.

Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Our guest this weekend, Adam Tooze, brings his analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis.

In Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are.