Passport disaster.
In case you’ve ever wondered why only 20% of Americans have passports, Bruce Reed has at least part of the answer…
Summer reading: The Upside of Down
If you’re off on holiday shortly and casting around for some readable tome, try Thomas Homer-Dixon’s outstanding The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon’s 300 page essay on global risk trends and the prospect of a multidimensional ‘perfect storm’ is a real page-turner that skips neatly from the decline and fall of Rome to the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, seeking to extract the key lessons from each to apply them to the current predicament.
The book’s recurring theme is that resilience is all about being able to make creative use of moments of breakdown so as to turn them into processes of renewal – rather than sliding into outright collapse (a la Jared Diamond). So, for instance, after we’ve had Homer-Dixon’s epic description of the city fathers of San Francisco enlisting heavy artillery pieces to blow up one of its more well-heeled avenues – this in a last, desperate, and ultimately successful attempt to create a firebreak – we learn that the earthquake and fire led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.