The story of how in the 1970s those in power set out to create a world free of the dangerous big ideas of the past. They banished the grand dreams of changing the world. And replaced them with money. People would live from now on in their own heads – in their own dreams. And the banks would lend them the money to create those dreams. While China would supply a wave of cheap consumer goods on a scale never seen before in the world. But then money broke free across the world. And people started to get frightened that things were out of control. Not just money - but the world’s climate too seemed to be behaving in a strange, unpredictable way. The systems seemed to have a life of their own. Beyond the ability of anyone to shape and predict.

A collage of stories from the early years of neoliberal globalization, organized around the theme of how systems which people think are stable and self-correcting, such as climate and utopian social experiments, have frustrated our expectations. As coal gave way to oil, the organizing power of the miners gave way to that of oil producing states, which empowered bankers lending out petrodollars, and enabled China to redirect its economy to producing cheap consumer goods. Scientists began understanding the workings of the global climate, while Soviet emigrés in the United States were dissillusioned by a society that was all about money.