You're saying nothing dramatic or surprising has ever happened in history, or at best that when it did, no one saw it coming. Both are obviously wrong.
In any case, Tooze is a serious thinker who has written various things besides this line I paraphrased from a podcast. I recommend checking out his work.
I mean you can always find a number of people predicting anything and everything in every single direction. There are no shortage of intellectuals predicting China's decline just as there is no shortage of intellectuals predicting the West's decline. We will only know in hindsight but even then we won't be able to trust any given intellectual's hot take on the next few years or decades, whether they were right in the past or not!
I believe pretty solidly in chaos theory. The future is exponentially more unknowable and unpredictable the further out you try to predict. Anyone claiming they have a script for the 21st century is worth dismissing outright, no matter what their IQ is and no matter how many GPUs they have under their command.
The future is dynamic and evolving and people are more adaptive than you think. Any outcome that can be conceived is being hedged against.
In any case, Tooze is a serious thinker who has written various things besides this line I paraphrased from a podcast. I recommend checking out his work.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-401-the-dollar-sy...