Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 31 July 2026
With the movie The Odyssey now in our cinemas, I decided to dip into Eric Cline’s book 1177BC; the Year Civilization Collapsed. While not specifically about the Greco-Trojan War, the book focuses on that period bordering on prehistory as one of a few major pivot points of the human experience on Earth.
In referencing 2020, however, Cline displayed a not uncommon naivete among historians in relation to a non-specialist (for them) topic or period. In the forward to the 2021 edition of 1177BC, Cline says in relation to an article he saw in The Guardian of 6 Feb 2020 (Humanity under threat from perfect storm of crises – study) by Fiona Harvey. The article begins: “The world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the existence of humans”.
We note that the date of the article, 6 Feb 2020, was in the week that Covid19 was first becoming a known problem in Europe. The article didn’t mention the new coronavirus, though; in large part because it referred to a study undertaken in 2019.
Referring to Harvey’s short article, Cline noted that the referenced study “had concluded that there are a number of principal emergencies facing us today: climate change with weather extremes; species loss; water scarcity; and a food production crisis. What was particularly worrisome, she said, is that “the combination of all … is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity”.
This summary seems remarkably tame to us today, just seven years later. From a 2026 perspective, the 2019 metaphorical weather bomb was at most a ‘perfect storm in a teacup’. Indeed, 2019 was the least problematic year this century for the global economy. Even the terrorist attacks in Christchurch and Colombo – with Muslims being either victims or perpetrators – were in 2019 mere echoes of the tensions mid-decade, focussed on Syria and Iraq. The world was essentially at peace in 2019 (Afghanistan notwithstanding); people were confidently making expansive plans about their futures, and quietly making progress on decarbonisation.
Cline, writing in 2021 during the Delta wave of Covid19, concurred with Harvey, only adding the overblown Covid19 pandemic into the mix. Thus 2020 was his candidate to rival 1177BC.
Nowadays we can look back and see that the Covid19 pandemic was – in the sweep of human history – relatively tame in both its demographic and economic impact. And that countries like Sweden which argued against overhyping that event were broadly correct. The important but still understated story was the role of immunity, in both its initial absence and in the eventual global immunisation (largely through Omicron) which put an end to that fear episode.
A similar novel coronavirus pandemic had ravaged the world in the early 1890s, when the world economy was also highly globalised, but not even many epidemiologists know or knew much about it. That ‘Russian Flu’ was not as bad an event as the later ‘Spanish Flu’. And the Spanish Flu has rarely been cited as a turning event in human history; even though it probably was, given its likely contribution to the outcome of World War One. The numbers of people whose deaths were attributable to the global influenza epidemic of 2016-2018 was close enough to those attributed in 2020-2022 to Covid19; at least in the ‘Global North’.
2026 a Storm an Order of Magnitude more ‘Perfect’ than 2019
This year’s ‘perfect storm’ is, I would argue, at least ten times stormier than that of 2019. But I wouldn’t use that hackneyed storm metaphor to describe this year, because we can easily imagine 2027 to be worse. And 2028 or 2029 or 2030 to be worse again, especially given the hype coming out of Europe about an existential war taking place in or around those years.
As well as today’s obvious threats which did not feature in Harvey’s report, the four which were mentioned – climate extremes, species loss, water scarcity, food security – are all substantially aggravated in 2026, though generally less remarked upon (except in the immediate throes of the news cycle, as in the Spanish fires). Today’s bigger threats – including but not only these four – have largely become normalised, including the biggest threat of all, the threat of nuclear war. (See my Reckless Complacency meaning the End of Nuclear Deterrence, Evening Report and Scoop, 25 July 2026.)
In 2026 we chatter more about interest rates and government debt, and talk as if misframed ‘inflation’ is the biggest threat of all. Such macroeconomist micro-doom chatter is largely an aggravating displacement activity, prose we can cite if or when we – rich as well as poor – go down with our own Homeric Titanic (see the connection to Greek mythology here in Dark Titanic Powers and the Origins of Humanity); or, perhaps more aptly, the Lusitania.
In 2019, interest rates and inflation and inflationary expectations were all very low. Indeed, those were the days, Fiona Harvey’s article notwithstanding. We should learn the lesson about what was right with our world in 2019, rather than what was wrong with it.
Today’s escalated threat to humanity of geopolitical war is greater than the threats to humanity arising from failure to defeat and unseat adversaries such as Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian. Rather the conduct of military stalemates – forever wars – is more than undoing the efforts of many of the rest of us to preserve the world and to secure food and water supplies.
Mars, seemingly, is trying to turn Earth into Venus. The angry western Gods of 1177BC remain part of the western mindset. The present efforts of those entitled humans with access to more dollars than sense, even if unsuccessful, may well result in a historical turning point to rival 1177BC. Cline was correct to note that “the combination of all [threats] … is amplifying the risks of each”. So much more so today than in distant 2019 or 2020.
And I haven’t mentioned AI once! Until now. That’s the other – other than the ‘cost of living’ – obsessive point of chatter today. How could the cost-of-living be anything but high when so many of our resources are being deployed to gaslight our planet and all its species? And when such trumped-up stupidity is being amplified by our software.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.