High Noon: 20 Global Issues, 20 Years to Solve Them

by Jean-FrancoisRischard (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $19.33

  An acclaimed economist challenges us to solve the problems of the twenty-first century with a new kind of global governance. In this ambitious, challenging, yet superbly readable book, Jean-Franois Rischard first tells us what constitutes a global problem and then offers a brief overview of the twenty most important. He finds they all have two things in common: They're getting worse, not better, and the standard strategies for dealing with them, such as international treaties, are woefully inadequate to the task. The chief problem is that in our high-population, fast-moving, globalized and interconnected world, we don't have an effective way of addressing the problems that such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to the present and the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past. Rischard proposes a new institution for global governance that would be recognized and supported by governments but would function as extra-governmental bodies devoted to particular problems. The powers of these global issues networks would not be legal but normative: They would monitor compliance with various globally recognized standards and would single out the nations and organizations that were not co-operating. Anyone who has eaten a can of dolphin-safe tuna knows how powerful, in a market-driven world, the pressure to comply with such standards can be. No book has ever presented such a clear and unified appraisal of global problems or offered such a consistent and well-defined approach to solving them. High Noon will be an agenda-setting book of interest across the political spectrum.