Synopsis

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 are 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 10 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 Família programme, Indonesia’s campaign against radicalism, Canada’s early embrace of multiculturalism, and the efforts of US mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to prevent another 9/11, Tepperman isolates the universally applicable measures that 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 US Congress could learn about compromise and conciliation from its counterpart in Mexico.