The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Solve the World's Worst Problems - Softcover

Tepperman, Jonathan

 
9781101903001: The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Solve the World's Worst Problems
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101903007 ISBN 13: 9781101903001
Verlag: Crown, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Tepperman is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. After growing up in Canada, he studied English at Yale and law at Oxford and NYU. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

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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...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101903007
ISBN 13 
9781101903001
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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