At a time when American and Canadian infrastructures are collapsing, poverty is growing, the world financial system has melted down, huge regions are running out of fresh water, and one country is selling and the other is buying oil from tar sands that are destroying our climate, the conventional wisdom that mere tinkering will close what Thomas Homer-Dixon has called the “ingenuity gap” seems bankrupt. Is it any surprise that for fresh thinking we might have to turn to a Norwegian, a South Korean, and a Brazilian?
In their specifics, Unger, Chang, and Reinert may well be wrong. But in their ideas’ bold ambition and reorientation, we can at least imagine changes profound enough to help us reconcile democracy, economic innovation, and survival, and to address the dangerous and growing web of crises that has thus far defined the twenty-first century.
