The solar age: Post‐economic challenges

Historically, the disintegration of a culture was gradual, over many generations. But the crises of industrial culture have emerged swiftly, during the past thirty years, due to the accelerations of technological change and global interdependence, as we slid from the Soaring '60s through the Stagflation '70s into the Economizing '80s. Surface political and economic remedies, whether the latest nostalgia for Monetarism in the West or the latest 5‐year Plans for the socialist economies, cannot address the new malaise: growing resource‐depletion, unhappy workers, alienated tax payers, soaring inflation, balance‐of‐payments problems and general loss of domestic control of national economies due to the realities of global economic integration. The old political consensuses break down and new alignments have not yet emerged to channel the energies of the electorate, or even explain what has happened.