Book Reviews

Book Reviews Finance & Development, December 2016, Vol. 53, No. 4

Holiday Cheer Jonathan Tepperman

The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline

Tim Duggan Books/Crown, New York, 2016, 320 pp., $28 (hardcover).

We live in a moment of global trepidation, beset by economic, political, and social problems that are perceived as insurmountable. We see severe inequality everywhere and frequently getting worse over time. Extremists of various kinds prove persistent and very dangerous. And sustainable economic development proves frustratingly elusive.

Jonathan Tepperman provides a refreshing and timely challenge to the idea that any of these problems are insurmountable. In a wide-ranging and detailed analysis, he reviews 10 situations in which strong leaders were able to address specific issues—such as corruption in Singapore, immigration in Canada, poverty in Brazil, and many more—with impressive and lasting results.

These are important stories and Tepperman tells them well. As managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, the author has access to high-profile figures and has dug deep into both the news coverage and the underlying research (full disclosure: he cites some of my work). The book is easy to read and each chapter is thought provoking. I teach a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the future of the global economy, and I plan to use some of this material in future years. This is also a great book to give to friends and relatives during the holiday season—if you would like to be seen as an encouraging, yet realistic, member of your social network.

As part of that conversation—and not to disparage Tepperman’s research or his eloquence—I would suggest three themes around which we should all become more engaged.

First, The Fix highlights three lasting economic success stories—countries that have dramatically improved incomes per capita over the past 50 years: Singapore, South Korea, and Botswana. These are salient and instructive examples. But how well do these models travel across countries? What other country can have Singapore’s combination of highly paid civil servants and essentially no corruption? Would you really recommend to any country that it follow South Korea in encouraging—and arguably subsidizing—the formation of relatively few tightly held powerful family conglomerates? And is Botswana’s handling of diamonds a beacon of policy clarity for everyone facing a bonanza of natural resources, or is...

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