15. Islam and the Arab Awakening, by Tariq Ramadan
The year after the Arab Spring, Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University, challenges Muslims to embrace democracy on their own terms.
"The presence of the Islamists is now well established; they are fully participating in the future of their respective countries. The popular movements have transformed them into opposition political groups among many, while polarization between secularists and Islamists is becoming increasingly evident. Islam as a frame of reference will surely become a determining factor in domestic political debate in the societies in North Africa and the Middle East. Some speak of a Turkish or Indonesian variant, while others point to new paths to be explored. The Islamists themselves have markedly evolved on a number of issues (though this in itself may not yet be enough) ... There can be little doubt that the relation between Islam as the majority religion and the aspiration to freedom and liberal democracy, or even a liberal economy, will emerge as considerations crucial to the future of Arab societies."
16. Joseph Anton: A Memoir, by Salman Rushdie
Novelist Rushdie describes (in the third person) his life on the run after the 1989 Iranian fatwa condemning him to death for his book The Satanic Verses. The book is named for the pseudonym he adopted while in hiding.
"He drove home alone and the news on the radio was all bad. Two days earlier there had been a ‘Rushdie riot' outside the U.S. Cultural Center in Islamabad, Pakistan. (It was not clear why the United States was being held responsible for The Satanic Verses.) The police had fired on the crowd and there were five dead and sixty injured. The demonstrators carried signs saying RUSHDIE, YOU ARE DEAD. Now the danger had been greatly multiplied by the Iranian edict. The Ayatollah Khomeini was not just a powerful cleric. He was a head of state ordering the murder of the citizen of another state, over whom he had no jurisdiction; and he had assassins at his service and they had been used before against ‘enemies' of the Iranian Revolution, including enemies living outside Iran. There was another new word he had to learn. Here it was on the radio: extraterritoriality. Also known as state-sponsored terrorism. ... [T]o live in a different country from one's persecutors was no longer to be safe. Now there was extraterritorial action. In other words, they cam after you."
17. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel
Harvard political philosopher Sandel argues the rush toward "commodification" -- of everything from human kidneys to elite education -- has gone too far.
"While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to rethink the role that markets should play in our society. We need a public debate about what it means to keep markets in their place. To have this debate, we need to think through the moral limits of markets. We need to ask whether there are some things money should not buy."
18. Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, by Ruchir Sharma
Morgan Stanley's director of emerging market equities looks past the BRICS to the next up-and-coming economies to watch.
"The next decade is full of bright spots, but you can't find them by looking back at the nations that got the most hype in the last decade, and hope they will hit new highs going forward. ... One of the great economic stories of the century is largely overlooked, because the European Union is widely spoofed as an ‘open-air museum' and in late 2011 is in the throes of a severe debt crisis. But the EU is also a stabilizing model and still an inspiration for some new members, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, which are in the rare class of nations poised to break through and join the ranks of the rich elite. Not every little EU member is a Greece."
19. Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States: Essays, by George Soros
The billionaire hedge fund manager offers a 27 collection of essays on Europe and the United States in the fallout of the economic crisis.
"At any moment of time there are myriads of feedback loops at work but all of them fall into two categories: positive or negative. A positive feedback reinforces prevailing misconceptions while a negative feedback corrects them. Most of the time the two types of feedback loops cancel each other out. Only occasionally does a positive feedback loop generate a bubble that is large enough to overshadow the other feedback loops, but on the rare occasions when this occurs the bubble assumes historic significance. The present moment is such an occasion. The euro crisis trumps all other considerations; financial markets dance to its tune all day long. This has a destabilizing effect on the behavior of market participants. Therefore it qualifies as a far-from-equilibrium situation."
20. The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, by Vivek Wadhwa
Wadhwa, an Indian-American entrepreneur and academic, says U.S. immigration policy should do more to support growth-driving immigrant entrepreneurs.
"[A] vibrant United States that opens its doors to skilled immigrants will provide a greater benefit to the rest of the world than a closed, shriveling United States because the rules by which the US practices the game of economic development, job formation, and intellectual capital formation grow the global economic pie. And the ethos that drives America's entrepreneurs and inventors, and has driven US policy until very recently, is critically important for the continued development of the global economy. That ethos is exemplified in the ingenuity, the persistence, and the perseverance of the wave after wave of talented immigrants who have lifted America to ever greater economic and technological heights from one generation to the next, for nearly 250 years."
21. A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity, by Luigi Zingales
University of Chicago business professor Zingales argues that the U.S. economy, once the golden standard of the free-market system, has been corrupted by crony capitalism.
"Indeed, the corporate world has become ever more skillful in milking money from the government. Only in the 1980s did Congress start to pick winners and losers by earmarking funds for specific business recipients. ... [T]he growth in these earmarks, once it started, was enormous. Intensifying this growth has been the widely accepted -- and misguided -- view that public funds can promote private-sector growth in the form of ‘public-private partnerships.' All of this has helped increase the power of business interests over the market. And as business started to control more of the political agenda, popular support for the free-market system began to decline."
22. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, by Slavoj Zizek
Marxist Slovenian philosopher Zizek looks back at the revolutions that shook 2011 and asks why the discontent that sparked those events has faded.
"In 2011, we witnessed (and participated in) a series of shattering events, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, from the UK riots to Breivik's ideological madness. It was the year of dreaming dangerously, in both directions: emancipatory dreams mobilizing protesters in New York, on Tahrir Square, in London and Athens; and obscure destructive dreams propelling Breivik and racist populists across Europe, from the Netherlands to Hungary. The primary task of the hegemonic ideology was to neutralize the true dimension of these events ... The media killed the radical emancipatory potential of the events or obfuscated their threat to democracy, and then grew flowers over the buried corpse. This is why it is so important to set the record straight, to locate the events of 2011 in the totality of the global situation, to show how they relate to the central antagonism of contemporary capitalism."
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