Daily Archives: May 7, 2022

Jamie Chadwick has won consecutive open-wheel racing championships. Yet the 23-year-old British driver has a difficult road to maneuver her way to the pinnacle of her sport, Formula One racing.

A woman hasn't started a Formula One race in 46 years, since Italy's Lella Lombardi competed in the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix, and there's no sign of that changing soon.

With only 20 drivers on the grid and 10 teams, a seat in F1 is scarce, and the likelihood of drivers making it through the echelons of feeder series Formula Three and Formula Two is narrow, requiring not just talent but millions of dollars in funding.

Susie Wolff, current CEO of Formula E team Venturi and wife of Mercedes team principal and CEO Toto Wolff, was a test driver for the Williams Formula One team for the 2015 season, and remains the last woman to be close to driving in F1.

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More recently, Colombia's Tatiana Calderon made it as far as F2 -- the only woman to do so -- driving for Arden, and spent the 2019 season as a test driver for Alfa Romeo. She has since switched to IndyCar, where she is a part-time driver with A.J. Foyt Enterprises, after she could not secure an F2 seat for the following season and struggled to score points, finishing 21st in the championship.

Could Chadwick get there? Right now, she's focused on what's in front of her.

"From a sporting side, I definitely want to win that third title," she told ESPN. "But also from a wider picture, I want to prepare as best as possible for whatever the future might be. [It's] still going to be a tough ask to try to win the third title, I'm under no illusion of how competitive that will be but I think a little bit more forward-thinking this year and plan ahead more."

Chadwick, the two-time W Series defending champion, is believed to be the next hope for a woman driving in F1, with her role as development driver for Williams and her success in other series, but has yet to secure an opportunity in F3.

"The reality is Jamie is still behind the curve of similar drivers in a Formula 3 or Formula 2 environment," David Coulthard, a former F1 driver and now chairman of the W Series advisory board, told ESPN in Miami ahead of the opening race of the season. "The future is in her hands, she's won the championship twice, she's got the funding that came from that -- a million bucks in two years. If there's anyone who's good enough in W Series to make Formula 1, they have to beat Jamie as she set the benchmark.

"Jamie is a very good racing driver and she's shown that across winning various things, but let's remind ourselves if you're going to make it to the next level you have to be a Lewis, a Max, a Charles. I'm not saying they're not that but there's a lot of people who already think they're that and some of them are already in Formula One. So being good enough is one thing, but being there and having the opportunity is another."

W series, which is now in its third year, was launched by Catherine Bond Muir and Coulthard along with several investors. This year, the all-female series will run a team format with two drivers for each of nine teams. The series was set up to help raise the profile of women in racing, and provide the financial backing for women to race on the world stage for a $500,000 prize. The series will spend its third campaign on the undercard of eight F1 grands prix across the season, starting with a double-header in Miami on Saturday, perhaps giving a peek at the future of racing.

"It's nice seeing how the series has grown from its first season where it was still competitive, but there were a lot [fewer] young drivers," Chadwick said. "It was kind of top-heavy in terms of most drivers were over the age of 20, whereas now you've got 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds -- I think maybe the youngest is 17 -- all coming through and super competitive."

A lack of female drivers in F1 is nothing new, and although there's a long way to go for equality and diversity in behind-the-scenes roles for F1 and in its 10 teams, there are plenty of women in jobs that don't appear on TV race coverage or Netflix's "Drive to Survive," as ESPN reported last year. Many women are involved in Formula One, often behind the scenes as engineers, directors, in marketing and in hospitality for teams.

So why has there been such a prolonged absence of female drivers from the F1 grid?

"Numbers," Coulthard said. "For so long, it's been a purely numbers issue. If you take, let's say, 1,000 karters competing at a junior level, for so long one or two of those have been girls. When only five of those 1,000 make it to a junior racing series, and only one of those maybe makes it to Formula One, the chance of it being one of those two girls is slim. So that's why, as great as W Series has been, the real change has to be at the grassroots level.

"Opportunity is key, too. We'll never know how many women were talented enough to have a shot at Formula One but didn't have a chance to make it to F1. That's true of a lot of racing drivers in general -- the opportunity, the money, timing, it all has to play a part."

Formula One is making efforts to be more inclusive overall, with the help of campaigns such as Racing Pride and F1's "We Race As One" initiative, which was launched in 2020 with the aim of reducing inequality in the sport. Drivers Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton have used their profiles in the sport to promote change on a public level, with Vettel protesting Hungary's anti-gay laws that were passed last year, at the Hungarian Grand Prix, and Hamilton taking a knee before each race and wearing several T-shirts with slogans such as "Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor." Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman, became a W Series team owner this season.

"The environment [in F1] is much more female-friendly," said Chadwick, who drives for Jenner Racing. "There's a lot of cases where, I think for everybody in the sport -- naturally it's been so male-dominated -- it's so refreshing seeing more women in mechanic roles, engineer roles, all these different roles within the teams. It makes a difference in the environment, a positive experience. I'm sure a lot of men in the sport will think that as well. It's nice to have this diversity and a new face of motorsport changing in the next few years [as it reflects wider societal and equal values]. But still a long way to go, of course."

Netflix's "Drive To Survive" has opened up the sport to a wider variety of fans, which coincided with ESPN's own TV audience growing to an average of 949,000 viewers in 2021 from around 550,000 in 2018. The 2022 season opener in Bahrain drew a television audience of 1,353,000, the largest for an F1 race on any of ESPN's networks since 2018, when the sport returned to ESPN. Last year's U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, which aired on ABC, set the previous high with 1.2 million viewers.

"I think it's a domino effect," Chadwick said. "I keep saying this, but I think as soon as it starts to happen, which we're seeing with more and more women getting involved, then it's going to go quite quickly because suddenly it will become a much more diverse environment and more comfortable for women to be in.

"I think that'll make a big difference and I think the interest in the sport is there now. People used to say women aren't necessarily interested in motorsport and that's why they're not getting involved, but now I think they are. I think it's changing and that's a really good thing for the sport."

W Series also had the help of spending its first two seasons on free-to-air Channel 4 in the U.K. This year, it has signed a three-year deal with Sky Sports in the U.K., Italy and Germany, with C4 broadcasting highlight packages, while it was announced this week that the series has partnered with ESPN in the U.S. This weekend's W Series doubleheader will air on ESPN, at 2:30 p.m. ET Saturday and 10 a.m. ET Sunday.

"We always say -- if you can see it, you can be it," Bond Muir said. "The visibility for W Series has been amazing. Over the past few years we've seen more people watching women's sports and that has been huge for us. People forget we're only in our third year. We can't completely change things overnight. But girls seeing W Series on TV, and so closely linked to Formula One, should help them see there is a pathway for them. And it doesn't just have to be about driving, we want more women in STEM jobs and this hopefully turns more people towards that path."

Exposure can only help W Series, but the biggest obstacle to putting a woman into an F1 seat -- money -- remains. All drivers, no matter their gender, need an exorbitant amount of funding to make it to F3 and F2, let alone F1. The sport remains exclusive to those who can afford the price tag.

F1 teams have a budget cap of $140 million in 2022 in an effort to level the playing field on spending. By contrast, Mercedes spent $442 million in 2019.

Some drivers, such as Lance Stroll and Nikita Mazepin, are backed by their wealthy families. Billionaire Lawrence Stroll, Lance's father, bought the Aston Martin team. Russian driver Mazepin was recently ousted from Haas amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine because of his oligarch father's links to Vladimir Putin. But many drivers have financial backing from a variety of sponsors, which can be difficult to secure.

The difficulty in securing funding has long been an issue for women hoping to break into the sport. Alice Powell and Abbie Eaton saw their careers hampered by the struggle to get sponsorship, and they took sideways career moves before W Series. Powell was the first woman to win a Formula Renault championship and in 2012 became the first woman to score points in the GP3 Series, yet she couldn't secure sponsors. Eaton became a stunt driver on the Amazon Prime car series "The Grand Tour."

Aside from securing a drive, some experienced drivers have had alternative opportunities that weren't previously available to them. Powell, Naomi Schiff and Chadwick have been regular pundits for F1's broadcast coverage this season, a change from the long-standing predominantly male TV figures.

W Series is the only racing series in which drivers do not have to pay to enter. That opened the door for Chloe Chambers, Chadwick's 17-year-old teammate with Jenner Racing and the only American driver in W Series.

"My dad and I had made a plan in 2018 when W Series was announced that basically, he could fund my first year in cars and just hopefully that'll give me enough traction to get noticed by W Series, get invited to a tryout and then get into the series," Chambers said. "That was our plan all along and we did end up pulling it off."

Chadwick has received a lot of exposure by virtue of her two W Series championships and drives in other race series such as Extreme E, but she has yet to reach the next level. Exposure and winning does not automatically equate to funding.

"I think it happens a lot in motorsport, in levels equivalent to W Series, drivers that have won and then not been able to progress up through the ranks," Chadwick said. "From my side, I think it's still the goal, even a year later than I'd like. I can't be more grateful to W Series for giving me this third opportunity to keep working toward that.

"Definitely, I think times are changing. If you look at women's sport in general, in football [soccer] where some of the big sponsors have been getting involved with that, I think it's only a matter of time."

Motor racing is one of few sports where men and women can compete head to head, as long as the financing and opportunities are available. Chadwick said overcoming the challenges facing women in open-wheel racing starts with those opportunities.

"I think firstly, straight out of W Series the opportunity to be in a competitive environment and to be prepared enough, and be in a competitive environment in F3 or F2, is important," she said. "And then, understanding the challenges of F3 and F2 ... because in my opinion, there must be a reason no woman has been successful in those two championships. ...

"We'll only understand that once we get more women in there and in that environment."

Chadwick said she hopes there will be a woman on the grid in F1 within the next five to 10 years: "I definitely think there's a whole crop of young talent coming through that, if a pathway is paved a bit more for them and they know what route to take, I strongly believe it'll be possible."

Additional reporting by Bethan Clargo and Nate Saunders.

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Women have a thin history in F1, but there's hope that's changing - ESPN

Art history treasure lies hidden at LeMoyne College, a small Jesuit school in Syracuse, N.Y. Hanging in the colleges Noreen Reale Falcone Library, amid bronze busts of clergymen and statues of Jesus, is a collection of tapestries and paintings that were first displayed in the Polish pavilion at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair.

Theyve been at LeMoyne since 1958, when a former adjunct professor and Polish migr named Stefan de Ropp donated them to the college. But now they are slated to head back to Poland, to be exhibited in a new Polish History Museum in Warsaw.

Peter Obst, head of the Poles in America Foundation, said that the effort to bring the collection back to Poland has been decades in the making.

Ive known about the collection for a long time, because its such a Polonia legend, he said, using the term for the Polish diaspora in America. The local Polish cultural center in Obsts community even has prints of the paintings hanging on the walls. The copies dont come close to the originals, though, Obst said. Not even 10 miles close.

Poles have been trying to persuade LeMoyne to repatriate the art since the early 1990s, when a group including Boguslaw Winid, former Polish representative to the United Nations and a current adviser to Polish president Andrzej Duda, traveled to Syracuse to make their case. The mission proved unsuccessful, as would many subsequent attempts in the following decades.

Inga Barnello, the library director at LeMoyne, said the college treasured the collectionknown as the De Ropp collection, after its donorand didnt wish to part with it for many years.

We arent in the business of giving away our art collections, she said. These were a gift.

Obst said that although the college was never antagonistic, it remained stubbornly attached to the works.

LeMoyne, for a long time, was blowing people off, he said. There were just different points of view and some misunderstandings that had to be reconciled.

There are no villains in this story, except for maybe Hitler and Stalin, he added.

It wasnt until a few years ago that the prospect of repatriation began to look like it might become reality. In 2019, Obst and Deborah Majka, the honorary Polish consul for southeastern Pennsylvania, secured a meeting with then provost the Reverend Joseph Marina. (Father Marina went on to serve as acting president of LeMoyne for 10 weeks in 2020-21and is currently president of the University of Scranton, a fellow Jesuit institution).

Obst described this meeting with Father Marina as the breakthrough moment in the years-long quest to repatriate the collection. After the meeting, the college expressed willingness for the first time to part with the artwork, provided it would have a safe home and be displayed for public viewing.

I guess I managed to appeal to his Jesuit sense of social justice and fairness, Obst said. The Polish people will have their heritage back. Thats what motivated me. So even if it took a little time, I think the effort was worth it.

The Polish Ministry of Culture, which had long been interested in repatriating the collection, reached out and asked if LeMoyne would consider sending it to Warsaw, to be displayed in a yet-to-be-built Polish History Museum. After a few years of back-and-forth, LeMoyne agreed.

Once we learned they were earnestly building a new national history museum in Warsaw, and that was where they were going to go, we felt a little better, Barnello said.

On Wednesday, a delegation from Poland arrived in Syracuse to sign an official agreement with LeMoyne and to celebrate their mutual appreciation for the art. The delegation included Piotr Glinski, the Polish minister of culture, and Robert Kostro, director of the Polish History Museum.

LeMoynes communications director Joseph Della Posta said that both sides agreed not to disclose any details of a financial agreement associated with the arts repatriation.

The artwork will travel in temporary exhibits across Poland beginning in the fall of 2023 and will be placed on permanent exhibition in 2024, when the Warsaw museum is set to open. The paintings depict important scenes from Polish history, highlighting the countrys contributions to democracy in Europe.

The main focus point of the [Polish National History] museum will be the history of democracy and freedom in Poland, Kostro said. The paintings from LeMoyne are of great importance in this way.

The De Ropp collection is made up of seven mural-sized paintings, all over two meters long, and four large tapestries. The paintings were all executed collaboratively by a group of 11 Polish artists known as the Brotherhood of St.Lukas; the tapestries were made by Mieczysaw Szymaski, a student of the Brotherhoods founder, Tadeusz Pruszkowski. All were intended to educate an international audience at the Worlds Fair about Polands place in the progress of Western civilization. Some of the scenes they depict include the establishment of the first writ of habeas corpus in Krakow in 1430; the 1573 Warsaw Confederation, which granted religious freedom in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth; and the Polish army repelling the Ottomans from Vienna in 1683.

The artwork adorned the central Hall of Honor at the Polish pavilionan integral part of an exhibition that, for an interwar Poland newly independent of the Prussian Empire and not yet under German control, was crucial to establishing a revitalized national identity.

When Poland was reborn after 1918, people had not known they had their own country in over 100 years, Obst said. Representing themselves at this pavilion was so important to thembecause it was about projecting their identity and national consciousness.

The paintings are about Polish history, but they are also a part of Polish history, Kostro said.

The art never returned to its home country. In September of 1939, just months after the pavilion opened, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland. In the following years, the artwork was either sold to pay off debts or acquired by cultural institutions. Many pieces from the pavilion ended up at the Polish Museum of America in Chicago; others went to diplomatic posts, like the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C. A statue of King Ladislaus Jagiello, which helmed the Worlds Fair exhibition, was erected in Central Park in New York City, where it remains to this day.

So how did these paintings from the Brotherhood of St. Lukas wind up at a tiny Jesuit college in upstate New York?

Stefan de Ropp, the commissioner of the Polish pavilion, found himself in two predicaments after the 1939 Worlds Fair.

The German invasion, coming just months after the exhibit opened, left De Ropp and his familyin addition to the artstranded in America. Cut off from Polands expense accounts for the exhibit, De Ropp paid his debts by selling many of the items on display once the fair was over.

After the war ended, Poland became a satellite stateof the Soviet Union, and De Ropp did not return. Obst said De Ropp attempted to send the paintings back, but the new Soviet government wasnt interested in art with such blatant nationalistic and religious overtones. (This paragraph has been updated to clarify Poland's relationship with the Soviet Union.)

The paintings shared the fate of many Poles who had to emigrate because of the war and then could not return because of the Communist dictatorship, Kostro said. Finally today, when Poland is a free, democratic, independent country, they can come back to Polandand so is the story of the paintings.

In the 1950s, De Ropp, adrift and broke, found employment at LeMoyne College as a part-time Russian lecturer. By that point he had sold or donated almost all of the pieces from the Worlds Fair, but he had hung on to the artwork by the Brotherhood of St.Lukas, the exhibitions central feature. In 1958 he donated them to his employer, to be put on display in the university library.

He said, Lets put these here in this Catholic collegetheres a lot of Catholic history in [the paintings], Barnello said. And they were huge! It would have been hard to store them.

[De Ropp] wanted to keep the paintings, but he couldnt afford to warehouse them the guy was up against the wall, Obst said. Some people accused him of taking them without permission, but I think he did the best he could.

During their first two decades at LeMoyne, the collection hung in a small, old library, uncased and exposed. Barnello says they were in bad shape until 1983, when the colleges then president Frank Haig had them restored and moved to a newly built library.

They were dusty, dry. Kids drew mustaches on the people in the paintings, she said. There was no glass on them. They were just reachable, in the old library.

After the collection was restored, Barnello started seeing some interest in the art from local Polish American heritage clubs. But for the most part, the pieces simply existed in the college librarygrand and beautiful, she said, but far from the public eye.

In more recent years, we tried to promote programs and showings, Barnello said. But there just wasnt a big audience for them.

For Barnello, who has worked at the LeMoyne College Library since 1982, parting with the De Ropp collection is bittersweet. She plans to retire in June and says she hopes shes gone before the paintings are removed.

I understand its the right thing to do, but Ill miss my friends, she said. Im glad I was able to help promote them in little ways over the last 30 years. It really was a pleasure.

Barnellos postretirement plans include finally visiting Poland, the country she gained a deep appreciation for over the decades she spent caring for and studying the De Ropp collection. And she isnt counting out the possibility of visiting her old friends in their new home across the Atlantic one day.

She wont likely find herself alone in taking in the art. For the first time since the 1939 Worlds Fair, the paintings and tapestries will be displayed for mass public viewingand in the country they were created in, whose history they celebrate.

This is going to be a big deal in Poland, Obst said. My personal feeling is that in the first several weeks [of their exhibition], more people will see them than in the 30-odd years they were hanging in the library.

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Repatriating a Polish art collection with a storied history - Inside Higher Ed

The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic. Deindustrialization, financial crises, mass unemployment, chaos in the Middle East, and rising inequality have shortened life expectancies, undermined social stability, and opened the door to demagogues and authoritarians. And that was before the pandemic killed tens of millions of people and Russian President Vladimir Putins brutal invasion of Ukraine displaced millions more and upended global commodity markets.

Could the West have realistically avoided any of this? Or was it always going to be helpless in the face of structurally driven shocks, the effects of which have cascaded from one place to another and between the geopolitical, economic, and domestic political spheres, as University of Cambridge professor Helen Thompson puts it in Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century?

The question matters. If specific politicians and technocratsand the intellectuals who influence themmake mistakes, then there is hope. The world has the potential to learn from their choices and do better in the futureor at least make new, different mistakes. If not, then the most it can aim for is the peace of mind that comes from understanding that there are no alternatives.

Thompson believes that the troubles of the 21st century have their roots in 1970, when the United States oil self-sufficiency transformed into import dependence and energy poverty. This fundamental change, in Thompsons telling, made it impossible to sustain the post-World War II geopolitical, financial, and social order.

That, in turn, accelerated what Thompson believes is the natural tendency of democracies to descend into mob rule or, more often, oligarchic corruption. Welfare states were rolled back while democracies became increasingly unresponsive to democratic demands for economic reforms that would increase the return to labour. The consequences have varied across societies, but they include the growth of far-right parties across the European continent, the United Kingdoms departure from the European Union, and the U.S. presidential election of Donald Trumpas well as his supporters violent attempt to overturn the election of his successor on Jan. 6, 2021.

It is a complex argument that has Thompson covering subjects varying from historians Polybius and Niccol Machiavellis analyses of the Roman Republic to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchills pre-World War I views on the best way to fuel the British Royal Navy. Disorder is filled with many fascinating observations relevant to the current momentespecially the passages covering the geopolitical dynamics involving Western Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, the Middle East, and the U.S. shale sector.

Unfortunately, Thompson makes her case harder to follow than it should be. The book is structured around three concurrent histories: geopolitics, economy, and democratic politics. As a result, many of the same events are described two or even three times but many pages apart. And although the first and third sections are well written and worth reading on their own for their many insights, the weaknesses of the central economy chapters raise serious questions about the entire project.

Echoing the language of many of the technocrats who set policy for much of this period, Thompson seems to believe that elected governments are powerless against vast and impersonal financial markets. But financial markets are just people trying to make moneyor avoid losing itwhile following the leads of regulators, legislators, and central bankers. Downplaying the agency of these political actors leads to unsatisfying explanations and a few outright errors.

Thus, while Thompsons account of the formation of the euro is full of details about negotiations among various government officials, it fails to address basic questions, such as: Was the euro a good idea, and were the countries that joined better or worse off than those that didnt? (She gives a hint when describing the costs of accession for Italybut roughly 100 pages later.)

Instead, it is taken as given that France had no choice but to tie its currency to Germanys one way or another. The United Kingdoms inability to remain within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism that preceded the euro is presented mainly as a story about the eventual inevitability of Brexit rather than as a chance to consider whether the U.K. and other major non-euro economies, such as Poland and Sweden, had significant advantages or disadvantages compared to their neighbors.

Coming to the crisis itself, Thompson writes, A Eurozone in which the [European Central Bank (ECB)] set monetary policy and elected member state governments decided on the rest of economic policy was a Eurozone heading towards its death. For her, the central bank could never end the financial panics of 2010 to 2012 unless Europeans first gave up democratic control over taxes, spending, and labor market regulations. To be fair, that is what many European elites believed at the time and in retrospect. But their view only makes sense if there actually was an inherent conflict between the policies that the ECB and national governments should have been pursuing.

The tragedy of Europes post-2008 experience is that there was no such conflict. Until the war in Ukraine, inflation in Europe had consistently been slower than the central banks target, thanks in large part to economic weakness caused by the euro crisis itself. The German government may have been led by scolds who practiced pedagogical imperialism, in the words of Der Spiegel, but ordinary Germans failed to benefit from its austerity. They may have done better than the millions of Spaniards who lost their jobs, but they nevertheless suffered from meager wage growth and degraded public services.

Europes problem was that too many of the technocrats and politicians simply misunderstood what was happening and what was needed, preferring cheap ethnic stereotypes over serious economic analyses. Ordinary Europeans paid the price. By the eve of the pandemic, consumer spending and public and private investment in Greece, Italy, and Spain were still well below pre-crisis levels while living standards in Cyprus, Portugal, and Slovenia had just barely returned to where they were in 2008 after more than a decade of misery. Shifting blame was easier for Europes elites than confronting the consequences of their own choices.

Thompsons explanation for the 2016 Brexit referendum suffers from similar flaws. That referendum, it must be remembered, was decided in a close vote that was only held because the Tories won an unexpected parliamentary majority the year before. And that election, it should also be recalled, was one in which European issues played almost no part. Instead, the supposed threat of Scottish independence was the decisive issue in key English constituencies. Moreover, according to the 2016 British Social Attitudes survey, only 22 percent of U.K. citizens wanted to leave the EU in 2015. But instead of treating the outcome as a fluke that needs to be explained by contingent circumstances, Thompson believes that it was a fundamental consequence of the United Kingdoms place outside the euro.

First, she argues that by growing faster than much of the euro area, Britain became a haven for European migrants looking for work, supposedly boosting the political fortunes of British nativists. Second, Thompson writes that the United Kingdoms status as an out marginalized it within Europe and limited its ability to protect its core interests. Thus, she attributes elite support for Brexit to the U.K. governments failure to secure regulatory protections for London-based financial services during the EUs debt negotiations of 2011 and 2012.

These are interesting arguments, but they are not persuasive. Britain did much worse than France from 2007 to 2013 and substantially underperformed Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland ever since the global financial crisis. (Switzerland is not in the EU, but it nevertheless allows full freedom of movement for EU nationals.) The United Kingdom may have done better than Spain or Greece, but it did not do well. Besides, the people who voted for Britain to leave the EU lived in the places with the fewest migrants. And although the U.K. government may not have won all of its battles over euro-denominated clearing while it was inside the EU, it clearly has had far less negotiating leverage with the rest of the European Union after it decided to leave.

The alternative explanation, made convincingly by economist Thiemo Fetzer, is that the U.K.s self-imposed austerity measures after 2010 created fertile ground for bigots and opportunists. And since the EU has always been a convenient bogeyman for national politicians in all of Europes member states, those voluntary budget cuts were decisive in shaping the outcome of a referendum that most people never expected would happen. But nobody forced former British Prime Minister David Cameron, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, and the rest of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government to pursue their ideologically motivated program. It was their choice.

More generally, Thompsons explanation of both the broader global financial crisis and the euro crisis would have benefited from a deeper understanding of the links between trade and financial imbalances. The normal way to pay for imports is to export more, and the standard reward for exporting more is being able to afford more imports. The unusual feature of recent decades is that this did not always happen, with massive imbalances arising among several major economies.

This omission has important implications. Thompson attributes this turmoil chiefly to the interaction between rising oil prices and the excesses of European banks. Higher oil prices squeezed discretionary incomes and limited the ability to service debt. Meanwhile, the creation of the euro led to a surge in bank lending within Europe, and many of those same banks also expanded their U.S. operations, borrowing dollars in the short term from U.S. money market funds to make long-term loans, especially dubious mortgages. For Thompson, the central problem was that the ECB, the Bank of England, and the Swiss National Bank had insufficient dollar reserves they could use to support their banks if U.S. money funds ever pulled their financing. Thus, when the crisis struck, the U.S. Federal Reserve had to step in and provide trillions of dollars in emergency loans.

None of this is wrong, but it is incomplete. It is not possible to understand why some places had debt booms and busts while others did not without also understanding how underconsumption and underinvestment were transmitted abroad through trade surpluses and deficits. Yet in her view, accounts that root the global crisis in this sort of balance of payments analysis are misleading.

Higher oil prices did not have to squeeze growth in either the 1970s or the 2000s. It was only because the exporters chose to hoard their windfalls by purchasing financial assets rather than using their newfound purchasing power to buy more goods and services that the rise in oil prices forced consumers to choose between cutting their spending and going into debt. If oil producers had simply let their living standards rise, workers elsewhere could have responded by making and selling more exports.

Similarly, the emergence of China as a major manufacturing power was so traumatic to the workers of the industrialized world only because the party state ensured that Chinese consumers were unable to spend the money they should have been paid on the goods and services they wanted. China did not practice export-led growth but rather wage suppression and financial repression that held down imports. That choice was bad for people in China, but it was also costly for everyone outside China who lost income because they couldnt sell enough to Chinese customers.

Thompson correctly notes that the boom in bank lending within Europe was motivated by the creation of the single currency and consequent reduction in the perceived risk of currency devaluation. But it is telling that she shows little interest in the reason German banks were particularly prolific in finding questionable assets abroadnamely, that there was such little borrowing and spending at home. And this underconsumption and underinvestment had its own origins in the choices of Germanys policy and business elites.

Most troubling is that Thompsons desire to emphasize the importance of oil and Eurodollars (a term for dollar-denominated lending that occurs outside the United States) in her narrative pushes her to make repeated factual errors.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan and his colleagues did not decide to move away from targeting the money supply because Eurodollar markets undermined national interest rates, as Thompson would have it. After all, interest rates are prices, which means that they are affected by changes in both money supply and money demand. There will never be a stable relationship between interest rates and the money supply as long as households and businesses change how much they want to hold in bank accounts relative to retirement funds, housing, and other asset classes. Instead, Fed officialslike central bankers in much of the rest of the worldrealized that money supply measures were inherently disconnected from what they cared about. The quantity of money that the private sector needs to grow without excessive inflation is constantly changing in unpredictable ways, which is why the Fed and other central banks stopped taking it seriously decades ago.

And although oil prices matter, the Federal Reserve did not begin raising overnight interest rates in June 2004 in response to what it feared might be the inflationary effects of rising oil prices. In fact, the transcript from the policy meeting makes clear that both the staff forecasters and many of the key policymakers believed that oil prices would fallor at least stay flat around $37 per barrel. Instead, Fed officials were simply trying to normalize short-term interest rates to keep pace with the broader economic recovery following the downturn of the early 2000s.

Even as oil prices kept rising, the Fed stopped raising interest rates in 2006and lowered them in 2007 and 2008because officials were consistently focused on underlying domestic U.S. economic and financial conditions. That is also why the Fed kept its cool during the commodity price spikes of 2011. The European Central Bank reacted differently both in 2007 and 2008 as well as in 2011, as Thompson notes, but that was a choice made by people with specific (and wrong) views about inflations outlook rather than the inevitable consequence of the ECBs legal mandate to prioritize price stability over growth.

Chinas troubles with capital flight began in 2012 with the start of its anti-corruption crackdown, not in 2015 when the Federal Reserve was preparing to raise interest rates. China never faced any dollar constraints because the minuscule dollar-denominated debts incurred by Chinese businesses had always been dwarfed by the hoard of reserves held by the Peoples Bank of China.

Most egregiously, the slowdown in Chinas growth rate that began in 2011 had nothing to do with the ongoing risks around dollar shortage problems in Eurodollar markets. Instead, it was a deliberate policy choice by Chinese officials who wanted to curtail the unnecessary and environmentally destructive construction projects that were launched in response to the global financial crisis. Thompson writes Chinese leaders were worried that Chinas dollar debt vulnerability had trapped the country in a lower growth paradigm. Yet she cites a Peoples Daily article from 2016 that warned against another yuan-denominated borrowing surge and welcomed slower growth because China has to make a choice between quantity and quality.

These kinds of errors unfortunately cast doubt on other parts of the book.

Why should the world believe grand assertions that democracies are fundamentally challenged by the problem of political time in ways that autocracies, presumably, are not? Why should a global switch to green energy intensify Sino-American rivalry if it reduces the zero-sum competition for fossil fuel resources? And if the United States succeeds in breaking its dependency on Chinese manufacturing supply chains while China expands its domestic markets to compensate, why would that necessitate conflict, as opposed to restoring the amicable relations that preceded the dislocations of the 2000s?

Policymakers may be constrained by the material and social circumstances in which they operate, with oil and gas playing especially important roles, as Thompson convincingly argues. But as Putin has reminded the world so vividly this year, individual choices can still make a differencefor better and for worse.

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How to Get the History of the Financial Order All Wrong - Foreign Policy