Dozens of countries will hold national elections in 2024, in what many view as a kind of plebiscite on the postwar global order. The likely rejection of that order in favor of populist leaders should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers to heed the message that no economy exists outside the society that created and sustains it.
CAMBRIDGE – In 1944, as World War II neared its end, the exiled Hungarian economic sociologist Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation, a treatise that focused on the dangers of trying to separate economic systems from the societies they inhabit. Eighty years on, Polanyi’s warnings about a market economy unleashed from human needs and relations may prove prescient. In fact, the future that he foretells bears a strong resemblance to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the doctor’s creature runs amok and eventually turns on its creator.
CAMBRIDGE – In 1944, as World War II neared its end, the exiled Hungarian economic sociologist Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation, a treatise that focused on the dangers of trying to separate economic systems from the societies they inhabit. Eighty years on, Polanyi’s warnings about a market economy unleashed from human needs and relations may prove prescient. In fact, the future that he foretells bears a strong resemblance to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the doctor’s creature runs amok and eventually turns on its creator.