Originally published by John Battelle on LinkedIn: The Global Economy Is On A Shot Clock - And We've Seen This Movie Before

Two generations ago, the largest group of Americans ever to enter the workforce clung to their new devices — televisions — and collectively attempted to process an overwhelming new reality. Humanity teetered on the brink of extinction, its fate routed through the fingers of political leaders in Moscow and Washington. The date was October 22, 1962, and the United States and the Soviet Union were one bad decision from apocalypse.

Those men’s fingers hovered over a big red button — at least that’s how we imagine it now — and while we managed to avoid nuclear holocaust, an entire generation came of age under the existential threat of “mutually assured destruction.” For more than three decades, the world was on a perpetual shot clock, its timer always one tick before the end of days.

“Americans in particular always respond to crises by going to work,” noted Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who featured the Cuban Missile Crisis in an unforgettable early episode. And to work they did go, driving a doubling of the US economy in just one generation, dominating the Soviet Union with a fossil-fuel and corn-syrup fed economic engine, one that out-consumed, outproduced, and outpaced the Soviet’s poorly constructed alternative.

Good for us, and good for the world. Muscular American capitalism won the day. The buttons never got pushed; the apocalypse never came.

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But the economic engine that won the Cold War left a costly legacy. And once again, the largest generation ever to enter the workforce gathers around their new devices, smart phones, and ponders mutually assured destruction — this time not from a handful of men in a war room, but from the collective actions of seven billion people driving us toward a moment when our planet no longer can sustain civilization.

If you’re rolling your eyes, I beg you to pay attention to the facts. Any one of us is now more likely to die in a human extinction event than a car crash. Each month of 2016 has been hotter than any month in recorded history. And while we celebrate the signing of the Paris accords just last month, we’re already at the verge of lapping the 1.5-degree limit ratified by the COP21 agreement.

And climate change is not the only destructive result of our current economic regime. Our financialized economy, operating under the banner of “maximizing shareholder value,” has created extreme and unsustainable income inequality, to the point of hollowing out our once-growing middle class, and creating a world in which a mere 62 people hold as much wealth as half the world’s population.