From the Golden Age to the North Atlantic financial crisis and after

Michael Dunford

Chapter 8 in Rethinking Uneven Development, 2026, pp 208-236 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Growth was punctuated by a succession of deep and often devastating crises. This chapter pays closer attention to how a crisis of adjustment in the 1930s and during the Second World War led to a divided world and a Western Golden Age. Associated with remarkable reductions in social and territorial inequality in developed countries, the Golden Age centred on new political compromises and the rapid diffusion of the technologies, products and ways of life associated with the second industrial revolution. In the 1970s this historically unprecedented wave of economic development and social progress in ‘mixed’ capitalist economies came to an end. A decline in profitability and crises of Fordism/Keynesianism opened the way to a neoliberal era. Global and national governance were reshaped by the liberal ideologies that had led to the crises of the interwar years. The predominance of market finance, shareholder value and predation, alongside a third industrial revolution and a wave of productive, financial and ideological globalisation, was accompanied by a decline in the productive power of the Collective West, while inequality and debt increased dramatically. A succession of debt-fuelled expansions ended in crises and contractions along with intensifying climate and environmental crises. Debt crises spread from the periphery to the core of the world economy, especially with the dotcom crash in 2001–2002, the North Atlantic financial crisis from 2007 and the Eurozone crisis in 2009, after which secular stagnation set in.

Keywords: Golden Age; Fordism; Welfare State; Neoliberalism; New International Division of Labour; Financial Crises (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035352968
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