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Summary
Summary
We all know the bad news. Our economies are stagnant. Wages are flat and income inequality keeps rising. The Middle East is burning and extremism is spreading. Frightened voters are embracing populist outsiders and angry nationalists. And no wonder: we are living in an age of unprecedented, irreversible decline--or so we're constantly being told.
Jonathan Tepperman's The Fix presents a very different picture. It identifies ten pervasive and seemingly impossible challenges--including immigration reform, economic stagnation, political gridlock, corruption, and Islamist extremism--and shows that, contrary to the general consensus, each has a solution, and not merely a hypothetical one. By taking a close look at overlooked success stories--from countries as diverse as Canada, Botswana, and Indonesia--Tepperman discovers practical advice for problem-solvers of all stripes, making a data-driven case for optimism in a time of crushing pessimism.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, examines global problem solving in this survey of how 10 countries and their respective leaders addressed concerns such as Islamic fundamentalism, inequality, and political corruption. His survey is global, providing an in-depth look at such controversial figures as Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Harry Lee of Singapore, and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico. He tells the story of how Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Canada devised an immigration policy that "abandoned ethnicity" in favor of "educational, professional, and technical qualifications." He explains how Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's welfare program "Bolsa Família" (Family Grant) curbed inequality by providing cash assistance to its recipients. In the United States, he looks at how the fracking industry was developed under President Gerald Ford's leadership, and how former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tackled post-9/11 security issues. He concludes that the world's leaders will only solve the biggest problems by putting party alliances and ideology aside. The book is an enjoyable read, even for those less informed about foreign policy. Tepperman's attempt to provide solutions rather than mere analysis of the problems is noble, even if many readers will disagree with the solutions he puts forward. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
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're not even sure what we're arguing about. The grand ideological debates of the 20th and early 21st centuries - capitalism versus socialism, democracy versus authoritarianism - 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 - by Trump, by Sanders, by Brexit, by the deepening anger - 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. We are in other words utterly adrift, ideologically speaking. It's hardly a surprise the vacuum of ideas is being filled, in the political arena, by atavistic impulses like nationalism, racism and xenophobia. Jonathan Tepperman's smart and agile answer to this "gathering darkness," as he calls it, is to take a giant step back from the larger, paralyzed debate. In "The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline," Tepperman sets aside Big Think to serve up a smorgasbord of small think: practical, microcosmic solutions to big problems in sometimes surprising places from Brazil to Botswana to New York City. Tepperman, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, offers what he calls "a data-driven case for optimism" at a time when "most of us have glumly concluded that our governments are broken and our domestic and international problems are insurmountable." He divides his "good news book" into chapters on what he describes as "the Terrible Ten" problems: inequality, immigration, Islamic extremism, civil war, corruption, the "resource curse," energy, the "middle-income trap" (the difficulty countries have in making the leap from developmental success to wealthy-nation status) and two kinds of political gridlock: what's networking worldwide, and American-style. Then he travels to 10 places around the world to highlight successful local or national solutions to these problems. 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 "ideological handcuffs." 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 "rabble-rouser metamorphosed into the Great Conciliator," Tepperman writes, and to address Brazil's terrible income inequality Lula launched Bolsa Família, an innovative and relatively inexpensive cash-transfer program that didn't just give people handouts but required "counterpart responsibilities," including government demands to use some of the money to send one's 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 Familia is "as close as you can come to a magic bullet in development." More than 60 countries sent experts to Brazil to study the program, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg based his Opportunity NYC program on Lula's idea. Tepperman devotes a separate chapter to Bloomberg's 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's ineptitude in counter-terrorism. His response was to "work around the federal government and do something no modern American city had ever attempted: try to defend itself, by itself," 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's "secretary of defense, head of the C.I.A. and ... chief architect all rolled into one," 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's byzantine ways to force the feds into sharing intelligence. Ignoring the Justice Department's qualms, Kelly sent officers to 11 foreign cities to foster cop-to-cop cooperation, and deployed 100 more to "muscle their way" onto the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force to demand full access to F.B.I. files. Under Bloomberg's 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. 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 Peña Nieto, who impressively exploited the despair of Mexico's political elites to forge unprecedented cooperation. In just the first 18 months after his July 2012 election, Peña Nieto "managed to bust open Mexico's smothering monopolies and antiquated energy sector, restructure the country's education system and modernize its tax and banking laws," 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 Botswana, the "cleaner than a hound's tooth" Seretse Khama lifted his country beyond its dependence on the "resource curse" of diamonds, building what was considered, for a time, one of the best-governed countries in the developing world - a system so structured against corruption that it is, for now, resisting the alleged abuses of his far less capable son, Ian Khama. 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. "The Fix" is no clip job either: Tepperman spent considerable time flying around the globe for his own research, including interviews with Lula, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Indonesia's Joko Widodo and other leaders. Perhaps the biggest question about Tepperman's thesis is one he addresses but doesn't 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's version of Bolsa Familia failed to gain traction in New York, and there are indications it may work better in rural than in urban areas. And it's somewhat easier to embrace large-scale immigration if you're Canada (another case study Tepperman looks at), and you enjoy the world's second-largest state by landmass (after Russia) with something like one-tenth the population of the United States. Perhaps what scholars call the "Canadian exception" - its avoidance of anti-immigrant backlashes - has as much to do with these peculiar conditions as anything its leaders have done. Tepperman's answer to the energy/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's Lula is under investigation for graft, and his handpicked successor has just been impeached. But to answer these larger questions adequately, perhaps what we need most is a renewal of Big Think - 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. MICHAEL HIRSH is the national editor of Politico Magazine and the author of "Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Turned America's Future Over to Wall Street."
Library Journal Review
Tepperman (managing editor, Foreign Affairs) doesn't deny that things in the world are bad. In fact, the introduction to his engrossing book outlines ten areas-from inequality to energy to Islamic extremism-that are seemingly intractable problems. After this bleak setup, Tepperman shares ten case studies of leaders who have taken on major issues and succeeded in effecting positive change. For example, he describes Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's Bolsa Família program in Brazil, which gave cash directly to the poor and brought millions of citizens into the middle class. Others come from Indonesia, Singapore, Botswana, the United States, South Korea, and Mexico, demonstrating that these optimistic accounts are not restricted to one part of the world nor to a particular form of government. While the individual pieces are riveting and well told, Tepperman is after more than simply highlighting "good news" among the bad. He concludes by elucidating what is common across these situations and what leaders-of nations or any other kind of organization-might learn through the crisis. -VERDICT This well-written and surprisingly accessible volume will attract general readers interested in current affairs and political science as well as academic audiences at all levels. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]-Rachel Bridgewater, Portland Community Coll. Lib., OR © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 PROFITS TO THE PEOPLE How Brazil Spreads Its Wealth Look." Lula leaned his stocky frame over the arm of his chair and pushed his face close to mine, locking eyes. "It sometimes bothers my educated friends when I say this. But the number one teacher in my life was a woman who was born and died illiterate: my mother," he said. "With all due respect to experts and academics, they know very little about the poor. They know a lot about statistics, but that's different, sabe? To an intellectual, putting fifty dollarsin the hands of a poor person is charity; an academic has no idea what a poor person can do with it. But that's because at university, they don't teach you how to care for the poor. And it's because most experts have never experienced what the poor go through every day. They've never had to go to work without breakfast. They've never lived in a flooded house, or had to wait three hours at a bus stop. To experts, a social problem like inequality is only numbers. But I took that social problem and made it into a political one, a practical one. And then I tried to solve it." It was December--summer in Brazil--and Lula and I were sitting in his map-lined private office in Ipiranga, a slightly scruffy middle-class neighborhood of São Paulo. I'd traveled there to ask Brazil's former president--formally known as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, though nobody calls him that--just how he'd done it. How had Lula turned inequality into what he'd just described as a politically manageable problem--and then tackled it with such stunning success? Finding the answer felt urgent. After all, income inequality has exploded around the world in recent years, becoming a source of intense global anxiety. The gulf between the ultrarich and the rest seems to be growing inexorably just about everywhere. And no one seems to know what to do about it. One reason for this helplessness is that economic growth--long seen as the key to improving general welfare--is no longer working the way it's supposed to. Though politicians often blame the current inequality crisis on the Great Recession and its aftershocks, that hypothesis doesn't hold up. For if you look at many of the countries whose income gaps have grown the widest in the past few years, you'll make a counterintuitive discovery: the list includes some of the world's fastest-growing economies, like China's. What this means is that merely getting the world's struggling economies back on track isn't going to do much to close the yawning income gaps. It might just produce more Chinas. Truly solving our inequality problem is going to take a much more creative and comprehensive approach. The hunt for that strategy is already well under way, with pundits and increasingly desperate national leaders racking their brains for an answer. Of those proposed so far, the best known is probably that of Thomas Piketty, the superstar French economist who, in his 2014 bestseller, called for the imposition of a global wealth tax. It's not hard to see why so many people have fallen for this scheme. It's appealingly simple, and packs a gratifying soak-the-rich punch. But there are two big problems with Piketty's plan, as well as other similarly extreme approaches to inequality. First, they'd never work, for both political and technical reasons; the global elite are too good at protecting their interests and avoiding the taxes they're already supposed to pay. And second, such controversial strategies are unnecessary. Over the last dozen years or so, one country--Brazil--has shown that there's a far better, less radical, and more market-friendly way to fight inequality. This approach has been tested, and it works. The man sitting across from me on that hot day in Ipiranga was the one who'd made it happen, presiding over one of the most successful, least disruptive social transformations the world has ever seen. In real life, even more than in fiction, stories generally follow predictable paths. The good-looking woman gets the guy. The better-funded politician with the thicker head of hair wins the race. The rich get richer, and everyone else gets screwed. Improbable and unexpected victories are exceedingly rare. Yet every once in a while they do occur, and this is one of those cases. So before explaining just how it happened--how Brazil pulled it off--it's worth considering just what made the happy ending so implausible and, as a consequence, so inspiring. First there's the story's setting. It's hard to imagine that Brazil today could be a model for anything. The country is a shambles, crashing from one crisis to the next. As things fall apart, Congress has gridlocked and the political establishment is being wrenched apart by high-level corruption scandals. Lula himself has come under suspicion as part of a widespread probe. Until very recently, moreover, the idea that Brazil might have something to teach the world about inequality would've sounded like a joke. For decades, the country didn't just have a problem with inequality--it was the problem. Latin America's largest nation was among the most unequal places on earth, a state synonymous with savage social injustice. Sure, it was blessed with a big, youthful population and abundant natural resources (including an eighth of the world's freshwater and among its largest offshore oil and gas reserves). But when it came to spreading the wealth, Brazil did as bad a job as you could imagine; even tiny, benighted Haiti was more equitable. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, although Brazil moved from dictatorship to democracy and bold reforms by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso finally brought hyperinflation under control, its miserable masses remained trapped in rural penury or urban favelas while the fortunate few soared over the country's ungovernable megacities in helicopters. As the new century dawned, about a third of Brazil's population languished beneath the international poverty line (generally defined as living on less than $2 day), and about 15 percent of the country was indigent (living on less than $1.25 a day). But that was the moment Brazil finally started changing, first slowly and then, beginning in 2003, with tremendous speed. By 2011 its economy, thanks to Cardoso's reforms and Lula's subsequent encouragement, was growing by a respectable 4 percent a year and unemployment had hit a record low. And for once, the benefits were actually being widely shared. During this same period, close to forty million Brazilians moved from poverty into the middle class. Average household income shot up by 27 percent. And, perhaps most impressive, inequality fell dramatically--at the same time it was growing almost everywhere else. Just as surprising as the speed of this metamorphosis was the identity of the man most responsible for it. Before the recent scandals hit, Lula had become such an iconic figure--in 2012 he left office with an 87 percent approval rating, shortly after President Obama had called him "the most popular politician on earth"--that it can be hard to remember just how polarizing he was back in 2002, when the campaign that would carry him into office caught fire. Shaggy and wild-eyed, with a low-slung stevedore's body, the candidate scared the pants off Brazil's elites, its corporations, its investors, and many of its foreign partners--especially the United States. The problem was personal. Whereas Lula's predecessor, Cardoso, was a centrist and an urbane academic, Lula was about as rough-hewn and unpolished as one could get, something he made no attempt to hide. Indeed, he was a proud child of the country's destitute northeast. Born in 1945 in the hardscrabble state of Pernambuco, Lula was the seventh of eight children. His family had started out poor and found itself even worse off when, shortly after Lula's birth, his father slunk away and drank himself to death. That had left the rest of the clan so hard up that the future president was forced to drop out of school after the second grade in order to make money shining shoes. At ten he taught himself to read, and at fourteen Lula somehow worked his way into a factory, where he lost his left pinkie finger to a machine press a few years later. Not long after that, he got involved in Brazil's powerful labor movement and discovered his calling. Rising rapidly through the ranks of the São Bernardo Metalworkers Union, Lula became the organization's leader at age thirty. And in 1980--at a time when Brazil was still ruled by a military junta--he helped found the leftist Workers' Party (known by its Portuguese acronym, PT) in the hopes of giving the downtrodden a louder voice on the national stage. By the time of the 2002 election, Lula had already run for president--and lost--three times. While he'd never been a Marxist (unlike many of his PT comrades), his earlier campaigns had featured calls to nationalize industry and default on the country's debt. Such talk, along with his rough roots and his campaign promise to eradicate poverty within a generation, thoroughly spooked Brazil's moneyed classes and foreign capitalists when he finally started climbing in the polls. As Mac Margolis, a longtime Rio-based correspondent, recalls, Lula's rise sent many Brazilians--who feared "the hirsute lefty union man would win the presidential election and turn Brazil into an oversize Cuba"--into a lather. Though Lula himself protested that "Brazil has changed, the Workers' Party has changed, and I have changed," few bought it. In the United States, Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the House International Relations Committee, denounced him as a "pro-Castro radical." Goldman Sachs began publishing a "Lulameter" that purported to track the risks to investors should the PT win. Even George Soros reportedly warned that Lula's election would bring chaos. Nervous foreign banks started cutting off credit. And Brazil's fragile economy, which was just starting to pick up, went into a dive. The main stock index fell by 30 percent. Investors started dumping their Brazilian holdings, yanking more than $12 billion in capital out of the country within a few months. And the value of the real, Brazil's currency, fell 40 percent against the dollar, hitting an all-time low toward the end of 2002. Yet enough Brazilians were sick of the country's feudal social structure and the pain caused by Cardoso's necessary but unpopular structural reforms and austerity measures that Lula won anyway. As the unkempt union man prepared to take office and the economy continued to crater, the country braced for the epic confrontation that was sure to come. But a funny thing happened: the cataclysm never arrived. Lula did indeed assume office with revolution on his mind. But it turned out to be a very different sort of transformation than his conservative critics feared. Neither his earlier defeats nor the nasty reaction to his eventual victory had weakened Lula's commitment to social change. But--and this would prove key to the rest of this story--they had profoundly altered how he planned to make that change happen. All the setbacks and the controversy surrounding him had driven Lula to do some serious soul-searching. Between 1993 and 2001, he and José Graziano da Silva, a balding and bearded American-born agronomist who was one of his closest advisers (despite sharing a name, the two are not related), had traveled some ninety thousand kilometers throughout Brazil on listening tours they called caravanas da cidadania (citizenship caravans). And the politician who emerged was far more moderate, conciliatory, and politically canny than most people yet recognized. Of all the lessons that failure had taught the new president, the most important was that he'd never get far if he tried to govern on behalf of just part of Brazil. If he was going to use his new mandate to really change things, he'd first have to win over his many powerful skeptics. And that meant finding a way to make sure that the transformation benefited everyone. And so the rabble-rouser metamorphosed into the Great Conciliator. Lula banished all talk of debt defaults and wealth redistribution from his lexicon. He tamed his hair and started wearing suits. And he recast himself as what Margolis calls the "CEO-whisperer, amigo to the middle class, [and] champion of a rules-based market democracy." Though this move to the middle caused a lot of grumbling within the PT--"many members of my party, and people from the trade unions, did not like the idea at all," Lula recalls--he held firm. On taking office, Lula pledged to preserve Cardoso's tight fiscal and monetary policies. And shortly after his inauguration in January 2003, he put his money where his mouth was, picking Henrique Meirelles--a well-regarded former Bank Boston executive and member of Cardoso's party, the PSDB--to run Brazil's central bank. He also named Antonio Palocci, another sober centrist, as finance minister. And Lula then started hacking away at Brazil's bloated national budget, cutting spending by about $4 billion in his first year and imposing an even stricter budget-surplus target than the International Monetary Fund recommended. The payoff was immediate. Many of the same antagonists who'd attacked him throughout the previous year's campaign fell into a swoon. In March 2003 Mohamed El-Erian, then managing director of the bond giant PIMCO, declared that the president's initial moves--"from policy announcements, to appointments, to implementation"--had been "very good." The markets agreed; within six months of Lula's inauguration, the value of Brazil's bonds had risen by 20 percent. Even Goldman Sachs sheepishly admitted that its earlier warnings had been wrong. At the same time that Lula was wooing the moneymen, however,he was hard at work on another front, preparing to use his growing political capital to launch a wildly ambitious new social welfare campaign. Rolled out a few months after his election, Fome Zero (ZeroHunger) would feature more than forty different programs run by close to twenty government ministries. But one initiative stood at the campaign's core: Bolsa Família (Family Grant), a poverty-fighting effort that was groundbreaking in its size, ambition, and design. Excerpted from The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline by Jonathan Tepperman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
Legends of the Fall | |
1 Profits to the People | p. 27 |
How Brazil Spreads Its Wealth | |
2 Let the Right Ones in | p. 48 |
Canada's Immigration Revolution | |
3 Kill Them With Kindness | p. 68 |
How Indonesia Crushed and Co-Opted its Islamic Extremists | |
4 Learn to Live With It | p. 87 |
Rwanda's Wrenching Reconciliation | |
5 Assume the Worst | p. 106 |
How Singapore Conquers Corruption | |
6 Diamonds Aren't Forever | p. 119 |
How Botswana Defeated the Resource Curse | |
7 This Land Is My Land | p. 141 |
Why the Shale Revolution Could Only Happen in the USA | |
8 Manufacture Your Miracle | p. 159 |
How South Korea Keeps Its Economy Growing. And Growing. And Growing. | |
9 Give to Get | p. 179 |
How Mexico Got Its Government Going Again | |
10 DIY Defense | p. 198 |
New York City and the Art of the Work-Around | |
Conclusion | p. 218 |
How to Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline | |
Notes | p. 231 |
References | p. 275 |
Acknowledgments | p. 289 |
Index | p. 293 |