The Possible Futures Series, the first part of our collaboration with the Social Science Research Council, gathers together leading social scientists to address the significance of the global economic crisis in a series of short, accessible books. Each volume takes on the past, present, and future of this crisis suggesting that it has an informative history, that the consequences could be much more basic than the stock market declines, and that only fundamental changes — not fiscal band-aids — can head off future repetitions.
CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, James Kenneth Galbraith, Manuel Castells, Nancy Fraser, Rogers Brubaker, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Vadim Volkov, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, and Fernando Coronil.
Volume I, Business as Usual
The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian
Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, Business as Usual shows how the current financial crisis was made possible by both neoliberal financial reforms and a massive turning away from manufacturing things of value to make profits from trading financial assets. In original essays, the contributors establish how the Great Recession is related to crises of the past, and yet why this meltdown was different. The volume concludes by asking whether the crisis — despite its severity — contains seeds of a new global economy, what role the US will play, and whether China or other countries will rise to global leadership.
Volume II, The Deepening Crisis
Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian
Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to global governance. Environment, global security, ethnicity and nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in relationships between the world’s richer and poorer countries, efforts to strengthen global institutions, and dificulties facing states trying to create stability for their citizens.
Volume III, Aftermath
A New Global Economic Order?
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian
The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream
economic predictions, as well as the vulnerability of the world’s richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China, India, Brazil, and other counties are growing faster than Europe or America and have weathered the crisis better. Is their growth due to following conventional economic guidelines or to strong state leadership and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic to the question of which countries will grow in comind decades, as well as the likely conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic cooperation.
