Megathreats
Welcome to the apocalypse marketplace. The shelves are sparse, largely owing to the unravelling of global supply chains and an inability to grow crops in a climate-ravaged world. As a valued customer you are awarded the choice between meat that has died from an undisclosed zoonotic disease, or humanitarian supplies plundered from a conflict zone. Experience of the most recent pandemic, alongside the fleeting media salience of international affairs, prompts to you choose the latter. You checkout via the automated machine that displaced you from your job, only to find that runaway inflation means the weekly state benefit doesn’t make ends meet.
As abhorrent as this fictional scenario is, it reflects a dystopian future that is more plausible than you might like to imagine. ‘We’re sleepwalking into disaster’, Nouriel Roubini described the imperilling magnitude of the ‘megathreats’ humanity faces. Harbingers of this impending apocalypse permeate our everyday lives, from the cost of living crisis to extreme weather events. They are symptoms of a broader polycrisis, which is comprised of ‘megathreats’ that promise to unravel life as we know it. In a world still awakening from the slumber of pandemic, it is alarming to find a new nightmare already dawns. As Roubini writes in his book, ‘We totter now on a precipice, the ground shaking beneath us’.
Megathreats
Roubini defines megathreats as urgent and ‘severe problems that could cause vast damage and misery and cannot be solved quickly or easily’. The roots of this crisis run deep into worldwide systems and cultures, Roubini writes. However, he points to a marked departure from the relatively ‘golden’ post-war period between 1945 and 1980. In 1970, debt as a share of global GDP was roughly 100%. In 2021 it reached 350%, with an advanced economy average of 420%. These burgeoning unsustainable debt levels are compounded by the implicit debt of pension and healthcare systems in advanced economies with ageing demographics. Added to this are rising interest rates and the risk of stagflation, pushing the global economy towards currency meltdown and financial instability.
These economic woes serve to widen income inequality and provide fertile ground for populist politics. As an increasing share of people feel their interests are marginalised by the global economy, rhetoric advocating deglobalisation gains more traction. The insatiable appetite artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to have for automating jobs promises to sow further seeds of discontent. Moreover, the potentially disruptive influence of this novel technology on national security is pervasive enough to balkanise global trade, accelerating deglobalisation and the Sino-American decoupling. Meanwhile, as the cold war becomes icier, temperatures on the planet continue to rise. Inaction on climate increases the likelihood of another pandemic, exacerbating global inequality as countries recover from Covid-19 at differential rates.
Learning to Live on High Alert
Encountering megathreats reveals that they are implicitly tethered to our way of life, and the way they manifest incrementally makes them even more difficult to redress. Adding complexity is that oftentimes, the historical choices that spawned the megathreat were originally considered solutions to contemporary problems. By the time they emerge as megathreats, they have grown to such scale and severity that they encourage individual apathy. For instance, I can trace climate change back to the Industrial Revolution, and attempt to repent for my contribution to it. However, by the time a Climate Emergency is declared I lack the power to address it at the scale necessary to instigate real change. The intractability of so many ‘crises’ causes the term to lose its currency, and it becomes easier to sleepwalk through them. As a way to counter this, ‘We must learn to live on high alert’, Roubini writes in his book.
Living on high alert requires us to take a holistic worldview because megathreats are entangled. They intersect and reinforce each other in a ways that multiply their threat and can make efforts to redress one counterproductive. Roubini spoke about net zero climate pledges to demonstrate this quagmire. Net zero ambition emerged from the 2015 Paris Agreement as part of the multilateral effort to keep temperature rise below the two degree threshold. A major component of this ambition involves the phase out of carbon-intensive energy, prompting firms to invest less in their fossil fuel capacity to avoid the issue of ‘stranded assets’.
The quandary emerges when considering the economic and technical factors that have hindered alternative energy sources accounting for this loss of supply. This created an ideal situation for an authoritarian leader to take advantage of, as Putin did with the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As already rising energy prices skyrocketed, heavily indebted governments spent billions supporting customers and derailed their climate ambition by green lighting more fossil fuel projects. Whilst fossil fuel companies made staggering profits, those at the bottom of the income ladder were unceremoniously pushed into a winter of discontent.
‘A World Adrift’
In this context, the simple act of taking a meter reading is akin to witnessing a series of megathreats unfold in real time. It is an uncanny experience because the more pronounced they become in our daily lives, the more costly and difficult they are to redress. We recognise that humanity is unwittingly moving towards a ‘slow motion train wreck’, Roubini commented. A 2021 report by the National Intelligence Council shared this pessimistic outlook in five possible futures for 2040: ‘Tragedy and Mobilisation’, ‘A World Adrift’, ‘Separate Silos’, ‘Competitive Coexistence’, and ‘Renaissance of Democracies’. These predictions are redolent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where reality is manufactured around a stability conditional upon spheres of exclusion and an absence of meaning.
Avoiding this collapse demands nothing less than what Roubini described as ‘a quantum regime change’. To address the root causes of megathreats in a timely manner, global structural change is necessary. However, given the current geopolitical depression, Roubini was doubtful about how forthcoming this cooperation would be. Despite this, the discussion pointed to some potential solutions. Particularly important is ensuring that technology innovations, such as AI solutions for the green transition, are directed towards achieving a confluence of worker protection and increased productivity. Carefully orchestrated economic policy could work in tandem with this trillion dollar revolution, encouraging higher rates of growth that could alleviate the debt problem. To support this, it would be critical to reassess many of the tenets of political doctrine, such as taxing the winners of this transition. This systems-thinking approach could engender a set of responses which reinforce one another and counterbalance the destructive force of megathreats.
A Brave New World
Roubini’s musings, terrifying and enlightening in equal measure, illustrate that we still have a window of opportunity within which to act. The contemporary economic and geopolitical structures that provide a degree of security against the perennial threats to humanity are collapsing beneath our feet. However, this unravelling also brings forth an unprecedented impetus for change. The megathreats of our century comprehensively jeopardise all aspects of lived reality, down to a personal and cellular level. AI, climate change and pandemic all pose a direct threat to our basic human rights, confronting us with our vulnerability. As the certainties we once took for granted hollow out and crumble, the constructed nature of reality reveals itself, enabling a conversation about the foundations we choose to build our Brave New World upon.
Roubini’s book identifies and disentangles the complex challenge that we face with astounding clarity. To avert a dystopian future, we must first understand the nature of the megathreats we face, in order to tackle them with greater effectiveness and meaning. Grappling with their magnitude can make reality seem stranger than fiction, but Roubini reminds us that ‘we are authors of our own fate’. Rather than sleepwalk into disaster, his work awakens us so that we might narrowly sidestep a nightmarish fate.
