cover image 22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World's Foremost Thinkers

22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World's Foremost Thinkers

Edited by Piotr Dutkiewicz and Richard Sakwa. New York Univ., the Social Science Research Council, and the World Public Forum, $27.95 (492p) ISBN 978-1-4798-6098-2

Political scientists Dutkiewicz and Sakwa present conversations with 23 leading social scientists about stressors facing the international financial system. The sections are often short on specifics and rely on highly abstract arguments. The specialists come from a variety of regions and backgrounds, but the majority espouse some form of heterodox or socialist economics. Some focus on their own particular hobby horses; Immanuel Wallerstein is content to discuss the decline of American hegemony but what he's really interested in is the hyphen in %E2%80%98world-systems analysis': "[I]t's taken me twenty or thirty years to get people to understand how important the hyphen really is." Mike Davis, meanwhile, argues that: "We stand on the precipice of a synchronized global recession that may yet dwarf the 1930s," while Peter Katznelson contends that "[w]e are all more or less blind, trying to figure out whether the trunk of the elephant is its tail." More than any of the ideas presented, one factor makes this book stand out: none of the "world's foremost thinkers" are women. (Oct.)