Written by Chrisella Sagers, Managing Editor | 20 January 2012

The world as we know it is fundamentally changing.  As globalization picks up pace, sending ideas and products across the globe at lightning speed, the political, social, and economic models that have shaped our world for the past century are failing.  The year 2011 will go down in the history books as a year of revolutions and riots, alongside other such red-letter years as 1789, 1848, 1868, 1911, and 1968.

These times of great upheaval all had a common, underlying thread: a massive societal paradigm shift to which established socio-economic structures failed to adapt.  The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the urbanization of western society, the Napoleonic Wars, the American labor movement, the Vietnam War—all movements in which a new philosophical model of politics or economy began to grip people’s lives and clash with the old establishment.  These times of upheaval were also marked by another phenomenon: economic panics, depressions, and crises, as the economy and social structure struggled to adapt to the new paradigms and demands shaping the markets.

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