Fareed Zakaria Interviewed Thomas Homer-Dixon about His Book ‘The Upside of Down’

PBS show- Foreign Exchange Fareed: Our first guest of the new year explains to us the fragility of our current global systems. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in his new book ‘The Upside of Down, Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization‘, that the convergent stresses of population, energy, environment, and economy could cause a catastrophic breakdown [...]

Podcast: Free Forum with Terry McNally Interview

Author of Canada’s #1 bestseller, The Upside of Down. Whether from terrorism, climate change, pandemic, energy scarcity, or the widening gap between rich and poor, he believes breakdown is inevitable. And if we won’t change our ways till we crash, it’s up to us to make sure breakdown doesn’t spiral into total collapse. Listen to [...]

The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Squat – Review of Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton: 2005).

Global economic inequality isn’t something that grabs a lot of headlines. And a book on the subject surely doesn’t seem like gripping summertime reading. But don’t go away. This subject is critically important, and this particular book is extraordinary.

Of Human Fallout – The popluation bomb has exploded in the undeveloped world, and its politcal and economic shock waves are rushing for our shores.

Remember the population bomb? This profound concern over exponential growth of the world’s population provided ample fodder for academic dispute and dinner conversation during the 1960s and 1970s. Commentators like Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich warned we would soon see famine, eco-catastrophe, and war as poor nations failed to cope with their surging birth rates. Yet these worries were swept from the popular imagination in the 1990s, when a less gloomy view prevailed: Yes, world population had grown dramatically, but birth rates were dropping practically everywhere. Many conservative commentators declared that the human population explosion was over. The real problem had become the impending global “birth dearth” or “population implosion.”

In reality, both sides in this decades-old debate have missed the crucial issue, which is not population growth or population numbers in themselves. The crucial issue is the huge difference in growth rates between the world’s rich and poor regions.

Synchronous Failure: the Real Danger of the 21st Century

Humankind, I argue, is on the cusp of a planetary emergency. We face an ever-greater risk of a synchronous failure of our social, economic and biophysical systems, arising from simultaneious, interacting stresses acting powerfully at multiple levels of these global systems.

September 11 and the Crisis of Expertise

The attacks of last September 11 tore a ragged hole in the fabric of our reality. Through that hole we glimpsed something hideous. As is in our worst nightmares, it was indistinct and incomprehensible. We couldn’t see its beginning, its end, or its true form. But we knew immediately that this thing – whatever it was – was both profoundly dangerous and utterly terrifying.

Why Root Causes Are Important

The receptivity of young men to terror’s radical message is enormously increased by this legacy of conflict, dislocation, and — yes — poverty in the region. From the refugee camps in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province to the squalid streets of Gaza, we have ignored — for far too long — festering wounds of discontent.

Now Comes the Real Danger

Some events shatter the order of things — the routines and regularities of our lives that we rely upon for our sense of safety and our sense, most importantly, of who we are and where we are going. Some events change our perceptions forever. The world never looks the same again afterward. Suddenly, the reliable landmarks of life seem strange and distorted — recognizable, yet simultaneously weirdly unrecognizable.

The Ingenuity Gap in a Fragmented World

This morning I’m going to talk about “The Ingenuity Gap in a Fragmented World.” I’ll ask whether humanity can meet the ever more complex and fast-paced challenges it’s creating for itself. At the global level, these challenges range from climate change and chronic instability of the international economy to continent-wide pandemics of TB and AIDS; and at the national level, they include widespread homelessness in our great cities, chronic health care crises, and widening gaps between the super-rich and everyone else.

On the Razor’s Edge: Today’s Graduates Are Entering a Winner-Take-All World, And Most Are Painfully Aware They’ve Already Lost the Game

By creating huge, integrated, and efficient markets, modern technologies have helped create a winner-take-all economy, in which the people who are best in any particular field are able to reap huge returns, while those who are just slightly below the very best are rewarded with far less. Incomes rise rapidly for people in the highest echelons of our economies, while they stagnate for many of the rest (see chart). My students know this, and it scares them. They also know – and it also scares them – that we’ve created an economy and society offering immense rewards to people with certain kinds of cognitive abilities and temperaments. It’s an ideal place for people who are hyper-rational and hyper-kinetic – those with finely honed analytical skills and agile, pragmatic minds who thrive on speed and change, and those who are attractive, socially adept, and perpetually optimistic. It’s far from an ideal place for people who are shy, cautious, and emotionally sensitive, and it’s certainly not a place for those susceptible to deep sadness. As someone very close to me who suffers from depression once said: “This society isn’t designed for people like me.”