Adam Tooze documents these convergent crises in his fast-paced and highly readable book Shutdown, asking whether they signal the ‘death knell of neoliberalism’. For him, the pandemic above all uncovered the deficiencies of existing government policies, such as disaster preparedness and safety-net provisions, that represented a form of ‘organized irresponsibility’ in favour of markets. In taking extraordinary economic measures to respond to the pandemic, governments shifted the Overton window on the role of the state and their adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy. Within this general theme, Tooze deftly weaves in details like the statistical value of an American versus European life ($10 million and $3.6 million), the magnitude of the pandemic’s recession (Britain’s worst in three hundred years), and the uneven growth in fiscal spending between high- and low-income countries (8.5 versus less than two per cent).

The book’s ambition is both its weakness and its strength despite an uneven coverage of wide-ranging topics, which occasionally distract from the main thesis. While Tooze frames his narrative with the idea of multiple crises, the pandemic is his deus ex machina, and he devotes the first four chapters to describing the state of international health policy, the emergence of the coronavirus, and the initial responses in China and Western nations. The global coverage is also consistent with the book’s subtitle, ‘How Covid shook the world’s economy’, contrasting the positions of populist leaders such as Trump, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Britain’s Johnson, and Mexico’s López Obrador against East Asian and western European regimes all in real time. However, Tooze does not sustain this analysis in later sections and instead turns his focus to US financial markets and policymakers. While it is undeniable that the US dollar and treasury bonds are lynchpins of the international economy, would non-American readers be interested in specific pieces of legislation or esoteric fiscal and monetary policies for nearly a quarter of the book?

Tooze does identify the international implications of several policy innovations that were used to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, such as the adoption of heterodox central-banking tools in emerging markets as well as quantitative easing in developed ones. These examples suggest, however, that the pandemic was less a calamitous shock to neoliberalism and free markets than an amplification of pre-existing trends covered in his earlier book Crashed (2018). It was Japan in 2001, not the United States in 2020, that pioneered the use of quantitative easing, and the flexibility in denominating debt in developing countries’ own currencies was a lesson learned from upheavals such as the 1997 Asian financial crisis. While Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which posits that governments can monetise their own currency-denominated debt with few inflationary impacts, has recently become more prominent, it remains unproven in the medium run. As the Japanese experience shows, MMT may not be effective or sustainable for advanced economies with structural constraints like an ageing and shrinking workforce, which Tooze does not address.

Given the amount of detail about monetary policy, it is surprising to see much less coverage on the health aspects of the pandemic, such as vaccine policy. Despite a chapter on the race to develop vaccines, there is little elaboration about the use of novel mRNA technology, the negotiations between governments and pharmaceutical companies, the inequality in access by ability to produce or pay, vaccine hesitancy, or the communication of health safeguards. Is neoliberalism supported or undermined when governments subsidise private firms to produce public goods like vaccines without requiring that the intellectual property be made available? Does Jerome Powell deserve more hero worship than Anthony Fauci for reassuring their audiences, the salient difference being that one spoke to corporate élites, the other to the wider public?

Even less discussed is the relationship between the pandemic (and its response) and climate change, which is arguably one of the main failures of neoliberalism. Tooze states early in the book that ‘climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand’ and mentions six times the concept of the Anthropocene, i.e., the geological epoch of humans’ impact on the environment. His argument in connecting infectious disease to environmental degradation is indirect and relies on the assumption that strong government responses to the former can be used for the latter. The green agenda had made progress in 2020 in both Europe and China, such as their respective announcements of carbon neutrality by 2050 and 2060, but how these relate to ideological changes among policymakers due to the pandemic is not obvious. Whether Americans would have elected as their president Joe Biden, given his stronger position on environmental policy, is also unknown amid a pandemic that shifted voter priorities.

This interpretation of causality, that the pandemic changed the scale of policy intervention, is one that can only be tested with time. Tooze makes both brave pronouncements and some misfires by writing a book about a pandemic before it has ended. While he suggests that the economic contraction in Latin America presages a new lost decade, more recent forecasts have since estimated that the region will grow by 5.2 per cent this year. Similarly, the bellicose language used by government leaders to justify their extraordinary responses to the pandemic indicates that they expect public spending will taper once the war is over. Will the world see an ideological revolution, perhaps unified by a sense of purpose or recognition of an ability to tackle big problems, or a return to pre-pandemic normality? Or is there a middle ground in which existing institutions do not collapse but adapt and are resilient to challenges like those in the past year? This is an open question that Tooze leaves with his readers: ‘We ain’t seen nothing yet.’