About this item

A provocative look at the world's most difficult, seemingly ineradicable problems - and the surprising stories of the countries that solved them. We all know the bad news. The heady promise of the Arab Spring has given way to repression, civil war, and an epic refugee crisis. Economic growth is sputtering. Income inequality is rising around the world. And the threat of ISIS and other extremist groups keeps spreading. 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. The book reveals the often-overlooked success stories, offering a provocative, unconventional take on the answers hiding in plain sight. 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. In his close analysis of government initiatives as diverse as Brazil's Bolsa Famlia program, Indonesia's campaign against radicalism, Canada's early embrace of multiculturalism, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts to prevent another 9/11, Tepperman captures the moments in time which reveal the broadly applicable measures which can boost and buttress equality, incomes, cooperation, and cohesion in wildly diverse societies. He flips conventional political wisdom on its head, showing, for example, how much the U.S. Congress could learn about compromise and conciliation from its counterpart in Mexico. Tepperman has traveled the world to write this book, conducting more than a hundred interviews with the people behind the policies. Meticulously researched and deeply reported, The Fix presents practical advice for problem-solvers of all stripes, and stands as a necessary corrective to the hand-wringing and grim prognostication that dominates the news, making a data-driven case for optimism in a time of crushing pessimism.



About the Author

Jonathan Tepperman

Jonathan Tepperman is a journalist and author. He is currently the Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and the author of The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline (Crown, September 2016) .

Born and raised in Canada, Tepperman started his career in foreign policy in the mid-1990s, working as a speechwriter for a US ambassador. He then spent time as a foreign correspondent before joining Foreign Affairs as a junior editor in 1998. A few years later, he moved to Newsweek, where he was deputy editor of the international edition. After a short stint as a political risk consultant, he returned to Foreign Affairs in 2011.

Tepperman has written for a long list of publications, including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and others, on subjects ranging from international affairs to books to municipal politics to food.

He has interviewed more than a dozen world leaders, including Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Japan's Shinzo Abe, Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mexico's Enrique Peña Nieto, Indonesia's Joko Widodo, and Rwanda's Paul Kagame.

He is the coeditor of the books The U.S. vs. al Qaeda (2011) , Iran and the Bomb (2012) , and The Clash of Ideas (2012) .

Tepperman has a BA in English from Yale, an MA in law from Oxford, and an LLM in law from New York University. He is vice chairman of the Halifax International Security Forum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the New York Institute of Humanities. Born and raised in Canada, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their three kids.



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