The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It

How to better manage systemic risks--from cyber attacks and pandemics to financial crises and climate change--in a globalized world

The Butterfly Defect addresses the widening gap between the new systemic risks generated by globalization and their effective management. It shows how the dynamics of turbo-charged globalization has the potential and power to destabilize our societies. Drawing on the latest insights from a wide variety of disciplines, Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan provide practical guidance for how governments, businesses, and individuals can better manage globalization and risk.

Goldin and Mariathasan demonstrate that systemic risk issues are now endemic everywhere--in supply chains, pandemics, infrastructure, ecology and climate change, economics, and politics. Unless we address these concerns, they will lead to greater protectionism, xenophobia, nationalism, and, inevitably, deglobalization, rising inequality, conflict, and slower growth.

The Butterfly Defect shows that mitigating uncertainty and risk in an interconnected world is an essential task for our future.

Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School and professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford. Mike Mariathasan is assistant professor of finance at KU Leuven.