The first one takes the form of a classic debt deleveraging cycle. This dimension is probably the most visible materialisation of crisis but it is only a symptom of the underlying problem. In fact, there is a deeper dimension which I will refer to as a second dimension of the crisis, the “crisis of the social contract”.
The latter reflects a fundamental misalignment between the economic status that industrial countries have grown accustomed to and the material conditions that are affordable without a profound shift in economic policies. But in engineering such a shift, a third dimension comes to the fore, namely a crisis of the institutional architecture.