Joshua Cooper Ramo - The Age of the Unthinkable; Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It (2009).epub

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The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different.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.

About Author
Joshua Cooper Ramo was a former senior editor and foreign editor of Time magazine and later Managing Director at Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Ramo was raised in Los Ranchos, New Mexico, on the Rio Grande River. He began flying in his late teens and wrote a book about his experiences as a competitive aerobatic pilot.

He joined Time in 1996 as the youngest senior editor in the magazine's history and went on to become its foreign editor and assistant managing editor. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Leaders of Tomorrow, the Asia Society's Asia21 group, as well as a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a cofounder of the U.S.-China Young Leaders Forum. Ramo is a member of the Board of Directors of Starbucks and FedEx.

Ramo is well-known for inventing the term "Beijing Consensus" through a paper he wrote in 2004 of that title. He also served as on-air analyst for NBC during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and shared an Emmy and Peabody award for his work on the Opening Ceremony alongside Matt Lauer and Bob Costas.

He is also the author of New York Times best-selling The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do about It and No Visible Horizon: Surviving the World's Most Dangerous Sport.

Ramo authored the now notorious article "The Committee to Save the World", which appeared in the February 15, 1999 issue of Time magazine and which heaped lavish praise on the now disgraced Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers. Critics including Paul Krugman and Robert Scheer have derided this piece for setting a new low in servile sycophancy in mainstream journalism. According to Scheer's book The Great American Stickup, Rubin was so taken with Ramo's fawning portrait of him that he had the cover of that issue of Time framed and hung on the wall of his office at Citibank.