About this item
Even before the global pandemic brought terms like "social distancing" into the vernacular, loneliness was well on its way to becoming the defining trait of the twenty-first century. Today, nearly half of adults in the United States report feeling lonely, and more than twenty percent of millennials say they have "no friends at all." All around us, the fabric of community is unraveling. And technology isn't the lone culprit. Rather, the crisis stems from the dismantling of civic institutions, the radical reorganization of the workplace, mass urban migration, and decades of neoliberal policies that placed self-interest above the collective good. On one hand, the prolonged period spent under lockdown has accelerated these trends: from remote work to contactless commerce to the hollowing out of shared public spaces.
About the Author
Noreena Hertz is a great-granddaughter of British Chief Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz, and was born and brought up in London, England. When she was 20 years old, her mother, the fashion designer and feminist activist Leah Hertz, died of cancer. Hertz attended North London Collegiate School, Westminster School, and University College London, UK, where she earned her Bachelor's degree. She then attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S. where she earned her MBA, before gaining a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge (King's) . At the invitation of a professor at Wharton, she then went to Russia to work for the World Bank and played a role in setting up the Russian stock exchange and in advising the Russian government on its privatisation programmes. Her disenchanted and highly critical Cambridge doctoral thesis, "Russian Business Relationships in the Wake of Reform", dispelling the myth of Russia's successful transition to a market economy and questioning the bank's requirements, was published in 1996. In 2000, the left-leaning UK newspaper The Observer described Hertz as 'one of the world's leading young thinkers'; in 2001 Management Today named her amongst the top 35 women under 35, and Vogue magazine named her 'one of the world's most inspiring women'.In 2002 'The Silent Takeover' was published. Hertz then turned her attention to the Middle East Peace Process, where she headed a 40-member research team of Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians and Egyptians. She was selected as a 'Young Global Leader of Tomorrow' by the World Economic Forum in 2004. In her 2002 book 'The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and The Death of Democracy,' Hertz warned that unregulated markets, corporate greed, and over-powerful financial institutions would have serious global consequences that would impact most heavily on the ordinary citizen. Following the financial meltdown and recession of 2008-09, many commentators have described Hertz as insightful. In 2005, Hertz was appointed a Fellow of the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. That year IOU: The Debt Threat was published. A popular treatise on the dangers of irrational lending, it was publicly endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bob Geldof and Bono. During 2005, Hertz also served a 6 month professorship at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. As of 2006, Hertz is a fellow and associate director of the Centre for International Business & Management (CIBAM) , at Cambridge's Judge Business School. In 2006, Hertz played a leading role in the development of (RED) - an innovative commercial model to raise money for AIDS victims in Africa. The singer Bono was also closely involved in the project and has described Hertz's writings as the inspiration for the (RED) project. That year she was appointed Fellow of the Centre for Global Governance at the London School of Economics.
