Entertaining and thought-provoking, but short on real solutions

books:

	• The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It Joshua Cooper Ramo Little, Brown and Company, 2009 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

We are in "The Unthinkable."

The Age of the unthinkable is upon us. We are constantly living in several sandpiles: economic, international, cultural, and medical. As the sand shifts, we must adjust our thinking to try to avoid the avalanche and perhaps benefit from it

Joshua Ramos alerts us to the dangers and opportunities of our age.

This book is a must-read.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, but short on real solutions

This book is entertaining and thought-provoking. Ramos is a wonderful writer and has weaved together many interesting stories which reflect the complexity of the world we live in. But Ramos oversteps when he claims to offer a solution for the problems we face. His "deep security" solution lacks real prescriptive ideas. While it would certainly make sense to encourage our intelligence and other government agencies to be more creative and prepare themselves to flexibly deal with unanticipated problems, this will not be enough to solve America's or the world's problems. I would have been happier with this book and might even have given it 5 stars if Ramos had simply written a set of essays and told his stories without trying give them more significance than they deserve and pretending that he has solutions for the world's problems.

Ramos is right that the modern world requires governments to react more quickly and more flexibly. But the institutions that really need repairs are our political ones. America in particular is beset by total gridlock in dealing with the enormous environmental and financial problems that we face. We know that we need to rapidly convert from fossil to renewable energy sources, but we allow 17% of our potential workforce to be unemployed when they could be building and installing wind turbines, solar power, and nuclear energy reactors as fast as possible. We could be using these currently unproductive people to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and stave off global warming. But the U.S. Senate hasn't even passed climate change legislation 11 months after Barack Obama became President. And whatever they do pass will be inadequate and take too long to address both climate change and our high unemployment.

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well written and thoughtful

Joahua Ramo makes some interesting links in this book that use logic to project events of the natural world paralleling events in our social/technological world. He uses illustrations like "the sand pile" to promote the theory that large catastrophic events can be triggered by a small event and that there is a fundamental instability and unpredictability in the world of physics and in the natural world. The work was performed by a scientist named Bak, But Ramo uses it to formulate his vision of a chaotic world.

The book is a collection of stories like the sand pile. Each of the stories is extremely interesting by themselves. The story of the ex Israeli intelligence chief Farkash and the reasons for his success when others failed was wonderful. The story of the investment banker Moritz and why he was a success was also interesting. The story of Hizb'allah and why they have been successful was equally interesting (did we ever learn anything in Vietnam about trying to apply absolute power and technology to suppress a people that were motivated and fighting for their homeland?). Where I think he falls a little short is tying all of the short stories together into a cohesive focused position that explains how to successfully deal with the complex planet conditions we face today. That said the book is absolutely a must read.

Ramo's travels in some very interesting and select circles. The people he has access to, and the information they share with him is astonishing. His willingness to share that with us is a gift. I totally enjoyed this book, and read it in a day. So will you.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction.

The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability--and remarkable, wonderful possibility.

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