If you’re wondering how we got into this mess, Viktor Shvets explains it well in his new book, The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured 1930s to Today’s Crisis Culture – How to Avoid a World on Fire.

Macquarie Bank’s New York-based strategist says we are living through the consequences of a Fujiwara Effect, where two or more cyclones join together to form one big one.

The three cyclones in his narrative are: Neoliberalism, financialisation and the information age.

I interviewed him at length about the book last week, and he told me: “We are currently at the precipice of the most profound disruption … the fourth major turning point that in a matter of decades will reshape every human society as profoundly as anything that’s happened since at least the 15th century.”

First, Shvets sees neoliberalism as an outcome of Baby Boomers’ longing for freedom and independence, “coloured by their naivete regarding the ability of the free market to offer efficient answers to almost any need – from the provision of medical services to execution of justice, satisfying a multitude of competing, and often contradictory, demands of independent consumers from social security to running research labs and fast trains”.

But as Viktor writes in his book: “the greatest irony of the most ardent proponents of neoliberal ideas (is) that their theories – though wonderfully modelled – failed to reflect how human societies work”.

People will never tolerate this volatility in their life, they will never tolerate the inequalities and if they don’t find the right answer from existing parties, they will start looking at extremes.

Second, technology is disintermediating both capital and labour, altering the function and meaning of both.

Shvets quotes a McKinsey study that found what’s happening is 300 times the scale and 10 times the speed of the Industrial Revolution,........

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