The Covid-19 pandemic has had an immeasurable effect on the world and redefined for us what is truly important. We’re witnessing a reversion to the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy as we find ourselves seeking to safeguard our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing. Why? Because we no longer have the luxury of certainty.

For generations, we’ve grown up believing that studying for a defined career and securing a job would guarantee our future. This 'essential' and predictable sequence marked us as productive members of society. But is our society even a healthy one? Are we heading in the right direction or have we been blinded by collective greed and delusion? How can we justify such inequality and environmental degradation in the world? These were questions being asked even before Covid struck – and now the pandemic has accelerated a desire for change. For all the stress and disruption Covid has caused, we now have a gilt-edged opportunity to change things for the better. Now is the time for each of us to cultivate new skills, qualities and characteristics to bring about the collective future we want.

FutureNEXT plots a new way forward by combining the accessible thinking of future strategist John Sanei with the deeply thought economic and philosophical principles of Dr Iraj Abedian. The result is a book about the things we need to rethink so that we may step confidently into the future. About the new roles and responsibilities we will each have as consumers, employees, employers, entrepreneurs and executives. And ultimately about reimagining a more harmonious, systemically fair and sustainable, yet prosperous world.

The earth has enough for everyone's need, but not everyone's greed. - Mahatma Gandhi. The Great Recession, which started around 2007, stands out as the most significant crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s, both in scope and intensity. Although it was triggered by developments in the financial sector in the United States of America, its impact and implications have reverberated across the globe. Virtually all countries have been unable to escape its destructive swell: the interconnectedness that globalisation has fostered made certain of that. As authors in this book assert, the growing sectoral dominance of finance capital and its rapacious licence are the immediate and prime causes of the crisis. However, trends in the real economy over the past three decades created a systemic underpinning to the crisis, and those include the emergence of large corporate behemoths in manufacturing and services, advances in information and communications technologies and improvements in production techniques, the off-shoring of production sites in search of cheap labour, and household debt. At the same time, degradation of the environment has proceeded apace. The period leading up to the Great Recession was also characterised by high rates of economic growth in most parts of the world. Combined with that was the lifting of swathes of humanity from abject poverty. With a few exceptions, particularly in Latin America, the manner in which the surplus is apportioned has resulted in rising inequality, with women and youth most adversely affected. That is the fundamental question of political economy that most of the essays in this book seek to address Humanity is faced with a poly-crisis straddling economics, politics, and environmental and security issues. With that sense of unguided drift, the need for debate on alternative approaches to the management of social relations stands out in even bolder relief, and that is precisely what the essays in this volume set out to do. The book examines the crisis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, and in some instances, the authors do not quite concur on the approaches required. However, running like a golden thread through all the inputs is that the State has a critical role to play in reconfiguring social relations, proceeding from the perspective that markets, left to their own devices, can wreak havoc on the commons. Above all, social relations should be premised on humane values.