The world has always known chaos. But the 2020s are a different kind of chaos, with one risk-disruptive crisis after another, from COVID, supply chain woes, and war in Ukraine to inflation, waning confidence in banking and the capital markets, climate impacts, domestic political polarization, and more. As each new crisis unfolds, none of the previous crises have gone away — and before we can fully diagnose the crisis that has just emerged, we’re onto the next one.
We are in a state of persistent crisis, with no sense of how we’ll escape. Some have termed this the era of “permacrisis” — a newborn word for our “extended period of instability and insecurity.”