Our third economic crisis in rapid succession and an unhinged USA mean the time is ripe for major change. But if it is going to be positive change, the left have some important lessons to learn. Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think-tank in Scotland.

Cross-posted from Common Weal I was asked at question week – is this the moment? Is this the sudden chance to change what needs changed? Is this a 1945 or 1979 moment?

My answer was ‘no, not quite, hold on for a minute’. I think it might be helpful to explain that – in large part to warn that we can very easily screw this moment up again. So why is this moment ripe for ‘inflection-point change’?

I could just write ‘because we’re about to be in our third economic crisis in just over 15 years’ and leave it at that, but it is more than that. The European economic model is not working and that is bringing down its social and democratic model. At the same time, the US is in an omni-crisis which isn’t yet being acknowledge.

I don’t want to overstate the pace of what is happening but I do want to highlight the trajectory – the US is in a ‘what do we really sell the world?’ crisis because an awful lot of it looks like optional expenditure compared to what China is selling. The electorate is massively polarised politically, and its leadership has alienated its key allies too many times and as a result we are moving away from the Dollar as global reserve currency. Perhaps above all, globalised neoliberal petro-capitalism is no longer working.

It is supposed to generate wealth and then redistribute it, but only half of that is happening. It is supposed to drive ever-rising productivity when it is actually driving ever-rising price gouging. And it is supposed to be based on a frictionless global economic system that stopped being frictionless a while ago.

All of this is teetering on top of two shaky pillars. One is the AI bubble and the other is the Iran War. If the former bursts or the latter drags on (or if it has already dragged on too much and sets off an economic domino topple) we might find ourselves in a worrying and unprecedented situation.

In fact, as Larry Elliot neatly argues here, AI could create a massive global crisis in capitalism whether it doesn’t work (and we get an AI-bubble collapse that sinks the financial system) or if it does (and sudden mass layoffs everywhere get into a doom loop of reduced consumer demand, reduced profits and so more layoffs). And that’s just the basics. There are a dozen other things that could blow up any minute.

So the need for change has never been clearer. But does that mean it will come? The evidence of the past is that the answer is ‘not when you think’, and it’s once again because humans are daft.

There are all sorts of patterns of human behaviour which swing back and forwards between two poles in reaction to each other. For example, in a crisis (your ocean liner is sinking) people tend to first be selfish, then show enormous solidarity, then break off and start looking after the self again, then start to think of others again. The panic makes us prioritise survival.

Then we feel bad and realise our survival is tied up with everyone else’s. Then after a period of time we fail to save everyone so we become selfish again. Then, when we’ve saved ourselves we feel guilty so our minds return to saving others.

Humans are not brilliant at quickly arriving at a sweet-spot compromise and tend to overreact in both directions. Something similar happens in social crises. Think of the financial crisis of 2008.

First, we’re queuing at banks to try and save our own money. Then we’re absolutely furious and demanding that whoever made us wait panicking in that queue should be punished. The politicians articulate this emotion and we go ‘yeah’ and get back to looking after ourselves.

Then gradually we realise they weren’t punished and so we start to want the whole bloody system changed. But that takes too long, and we have to get on with our lives, so we forget and get into a day-to-day self-focus – and the moment passes. What very seldom happens is a crisis hits and we jump straight to bold remediation or change.

The only occasion I can think of in the democratic era was straight after the Second World War, and that was a cataclysmic-scale event that left Europe in ruins. The oil shock was 1973 and the Winter of Discontent was 1978 but the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of the City of London (which is the really pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism) doesn’t happen until 1986. But the process of transition from Keynesianism to Monetarism (the underpinning economic theory of each age) began earlier, and the reason it did is instructive.

Both architects of neoliberalism (Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) pointed out that their views were fringe when they were developed. It was Friedman who said it would take a crisis to make them mainstream. The point is that he knew that if the ideas didn’t predate the cr