{"id":5670,"date":"2016-10-07T12:03:12","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T07:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=5670"},"modified":"2016-10-07T12:03:12","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T07:03:12","slug":"practical-solutions-to-inequality-and-corruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/studykit\/book-review\/practical-solutions-to-inequality-and-corruption\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Solutions to Inequality and Corruption"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE FIX<\/strong>
How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline<\/strong>
By Jonathan Tepperman
307 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $28.<\/p>\n

The timing of this book could not be better. Big Think has run into a ditch. No one appears to agree on fundamental ideas about governing anymore, and we\u2019re not even sure what we\u2019re arguing about. The grand ideological debates of the 20th and early 21st centuries \u2014 capitalism versus socialism, democracy versus authoritarianism \u2014 today seem too broad, tired and pointless, and little has come along to replace them. Globalization, the economic paradigm of our era, has become an epithet in the mouths of insurgent politicians exploiting middle-class discontent on both right and left (that would be you, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders). The people in power on both sides of the aisle and the Atlantic, the so-called establishment, still seem surprised by the magnitude of the backlash \u2014 by Trump, by Sanders, by Brexit, by the deepening anger \u2014 and confused about how to respond. And with no one pointing a way through the paralysis, either in Washington or Western capitals like Brussels, democracy itself has seemed to curdle, especially with the Arab Spring degenerating into something close to civilizational collapse.<\/p>\n

We are in other words utterly adrift, ideologically speaking. It\u2019s hardly a surprise the vacuum of ideas is being filled, in the political arena, by atavistic impulses like nationalism, racism and xenophobia.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Tepperman\u2019s smart and agile answer to this \u201cgathering darkness,\u201d as he calls it, is to take a giant step back from the larger, paralyzed debate. In \u201cThe Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline,\u201d Tepperman sets aside Big Think to serve up a smorgasbord of small think: practical, microcosmic solutions to big problems in sometimes surprising \u00adplaces from Brazil to Botswana to New York City. Tepperman, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, offers what he calls \u201ca \u00addata-driven case for optimism\u201d at a time when \u201cmost of us have glumly concluded that our governments are broken and our domestic and international problems are insurmountable.\u201d He divides his \u201cgood news book\u201d into chapters on what he describes as \u201cthe Terrible Ten\u201d problems: inequality, immigration, Islamic extremism, civil war, corruption, the \u201cresource curse,\u201d energy, the \u201cmiddle-\u00adincome trap\u201d (the difficulty countries have in making the leap from developmental success to wealthy-nation status) and two kinds of political gridlock: what\u2019s not working worldwide, and American-style. Then he travels to 10 places around the world to highlight successful local or national solutions to these problems.
Continue reading the main story<\/p>\n

Almost to a tale, they are stories of gutsy political pragmatism in the midst of crisis, often involving battlefield conversions by unusually adaptable and able leaders unfettered by \u201cideological handcuffs.\u201d In Brazil, the business community and economists were initially horrified when Lula da Silva, a rough-hewn labor leader who had experienced extreme poverty as a child, was elected president. But the \u00ad\u201crabble-rouser metamorphosed into the Great Conciliator,\u201d Tepperman writes, and to address Brazil\u2019s terrible income inequality Lula launched Bolsa Fam\u00edlia, an innovative and relatively inexpensive cash-transfer program that didn\u2019t just give people handouts but required \u201ccounterpart responsibilities,\u201d including government demands to use some of the money to send one\u2019s kids to school and ensure they are immunized and get regular checkups (along with their mothers). Lula ended up winning over even conservatives in his country and dramatically reducing poverty, leading the former World Bank expert Nancy Birdsall to conclude that Bolsa Fam\u00edlia is \u201cas close as you can come to a magic bullet in development.\u201d More than 60 countries sent experts to Brazil to study the program, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg based his Opportunity NYC program on Lula\u2019s idea.<\/p>\n

Tepperman devotes a separate chapter to Bloomberg\u2019s own innovative approach to breaking through Washington gridlock to secure his prime-target city in the face of terrorist threats. Elected two months after 9\/11, Bloomberg had cause to despair over Washington\u2019s ineptitude in counter\u00adterrorism. His response was to \u201cwork around the federal government and do something no modern American city had ever attempted: try to defend itself, by itself,\u201d Tepperman writes. Bloomberg reappointed a no-nonsense career N.Y.P.D. officer, Ray Kelly, as police commissioner, and Kelly rose to the challenge, becoming the city\u2019s \u201csecretary of defense, head of the C.I.A. and .\u2008.\u2008. chief architect all rolled into one,\u201d in the words of the New York University urban studies professor Mitchell Moss. Kelly in turn hired David Cohen, a C.I.A. veteran who created a raft of new response teams and used his knowledge of Washington\u2019s byzantine ways to force the feds into sharing intelligence. Ignoring the Justice Department\u2019s qualms, Kelly sent officers to 11 foreign cities to foster cop-to-cop cooperation, and deployed 100 more to \u201cmuscle their way\u201d onto the \u00adfederal Joint Terrorism Task Force to demand full access to F.B.I. files.<\/p>\n

Under Bloomberg\u2019s brash leadership, this all happened with admirable swiftness and efficiency: By 2002 the Police Department had 60 fluent Arabic speakers on staff, almost double the number the F.B.I. could claim three years later, Tepperman writes. And by the time Bloomberg left office in 2013, the F.B.I., C.I.A., Secret Service and Defense Intelligence Agency had all asked New York for advice.<\/p>\n

Tepperman finds successful leadership stories in some unlikely places. Among them is Mexico, which despite its reputation north of the border (especially this election season) for runaway corruption and drug violence has begun to recover under President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, who impressively exploited the despair of Mexico\u2019s political elites to forge unprecedented cooperation. In just the first 18 months after his July 2012 election, Pe\u00f1a Nieto \u201cmanaged to bust open Mexico\u2019s smothering monopolies and antiquated energy sector, restructure the country\u2019s education system and modernize its tax and banking laws,\u201d Tepperman writes (though he may have lost some of that political capital after his widely criticized August meeting with Donald Trump). Across the world in Bot\u00adswana, the \u201ccleaner than a hound\u2019s tooth\u201d Seretse Khama lifted his country beyond its dependence on the \u201cresource curse\u201d of diamonds, building what was considered, for a time, one of the best-governed countries in the developing world \u2014 a system so structured against corruption that it is, for now, resisting the alleged abuses of his far less capable son, Ian Khama.<\/p>\n

Though the book is not long, Tepperman goes into impressive detail in each case study and delivers his assessments in clear, pared-down prose, careful to describe most of his success stories as experiments that could still fail. \u201cThe Fix\u201d is no clip job either: Tepperman spent considerable time flying around the globe for his own research, including interviews with Lula, Rwanda\u2019s Paul Kagame, Indonesia\u2019s Joko Widodo and other leaders.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the biggest question about Tepperman\u2019s thesis is one he addresses but doesn\u2019t fully answer: whether many of these programs are readily transferable to other places, or are unique to the political culture whence they sprang. In the end, for example, Bloomberg\u2019s version of Bolsa Fam\u00edlia failed to gain traction in New York, and there are indications it may work better in rural than in urban areas. And it\u2019s somewhat easier to embrace large-scale immigration if you\u2019re Canada (another case study Tepperman looks at), and you enjoy the world\u2019s \u00adsecond-largest state by landmass (after Russia) with something like one-tenth the population of the United States. Perhaps what scholars call the \u201cCanadian exception\u201d \u2014 its avoidance of anti-immigrant \u00adbacklashes \u2014 has as much to do with these peculiar conditions as anything its leaders have done. Tepperman\u2019s answer to the \u00adenergy\/climate problem is also not terribly persuasive: He cites the shale revolution as a rare American success story (these days anyway), but that seems more an example of geological luck and greed than inspired leadership. Tepperman may also be too sanguine about some of his political heroes: Brazil\u2019s Lula is under investigation for graft, and his handpicked successor has just been impeached.<\/p>\n

But to answer these larger questions adequately, perhaps what we need most is a renewal of Big Think \u2014 a deeper reconsideration of the outdated ideologies of our day. In the meantime, Tepperman has produced an indispensable handbook on ways to work around the problem.<\/p>\n

Michael Hirsh is the national editor of Politico Magazine and the author of \u201cCapital Offense: How Washington\u2019s Wise Men Turned \u00adAmerica\u2019s Future Over to Wall Street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: http:\/\/www.nytimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE FIXHow Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in DeclineBy Jonathan Tepperman307 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $28. The timing of this book could not be better. Big Think has run into a ditch. No one appears to agree on fundamental ideas about governing anymore, and we\u2019re not even sure what we\u2019re arguing about. The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5612],"tags":[4534,4538,1163,4536,257,4545,4539,3281,4535,1000,460,548,4540,4537,4544,284,4543,4546,13,3411,4541,2302,4542],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}