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In this age of instant communication and biotechnology, on this
ever-smaller planet, what kinds of problems have we created for ourselves? How
do we tackle them in a world where the accustomed methods used by nation-states
may be reaching their natural limits? In High Noon,
J. F. Rischard challenges us to take a new approach to the problems of the twenty-first
century. Defining and then offering a brief overview of the twenty most important
and urgent global problems, Rischard finds that they all have two things in common:
They're getting worse, not better, and the standard strategies for dealing with
them are woefully inadequate to the task. The real problem, in other words, is
that in our increasingly crowded, interconnected world, we don't have an effective
way of addressing the problems such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to
the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past. Rischard
proposes new vehicles for global problem-solving that would be acknowledged by
governments but that would function as extra-governmental bodies devoted to particular
problems. Their powers would not be legal but normative: They would produce globally
recognized standards and would single out the nations and organizations that were
not cooperating. No previous book has presented such
a unified appraisal of this century's global problems or offered such a consistent
and well-defined approach to solving them. With its clear-eyed urgency and refreshing
specificity, High Noon is an agenda-setting book that everyone who cares
about the future must read. The World Bank's vice-president
for Europe, J. F. Rischard brought several years of Wall Street experience, as
well as an MBA from Harvard and doctoral degrees in law and economics from universities
in Europe, to his work at the Bank, where he has held several senior posts in
his twenty year career. He has been writing and speaking about global issues,
development and the knowledge economy since 1993, giving hundreds of speeches
on these topics. He lives in Paris, France. |
