The Wake-Up Call
Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
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3.8 • 12 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
"[An] executive summary of modern political history studded with sweeping assertions and telling anecdotes." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Thought-provoking." -- Kirkus Reviews
“A shot in the arm...powerful.” -- The Financial Times
"The Wake-Up Call, refreshingly concise and eminently readable, highlights how the modern crisis of governance compounded the challenges of the pandemic." -- Bloomberg
"The Wake-Up Call argues that Covid-19 has exposed not just one president's shortcomings but a much more profound degeneration of governance dating back long before 2016...You will read no more interesting book on the political consequences of the pandemic than this." -- Niall Ferguson, author of Civilization: The West and the Rest
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2020 (BLOOMBERG)
An urgent and informed look at the challenges America and world governments will face in a post Covid-19 world.
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that governments matter again, that competent leadership is the difference between living and dying. A few governments proved adept at handling the crisis while many others failed. Are Western governments healthy and strong enough to keep their citizens safe from another virulent virus—and protect their economies from collapse? Is global leadership passing from the United States to Asia—and particularly China?
The Wake-Up Call addresses these urgent questions. Journalists and longtime collaborators John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge identify the problems Western leaders face, and outline a detailed plan to help them become more vigilant, better prepared, and responsive to disruptive future events.
The problems that face us are enormous; as The Wake-Up Call makes clear, governments around the world must re-engineer the way they operate to successfully meet the challenges ahead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Economist columnist Wooldridge and Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Micklethwait team up again (after The Fourth Revolution) for this thought-provoking yet flawed look at how the Covid-19 pandemic exemplifies the decline of the "Western state" since the mid-1960s and what can be done to reverse course. They credit Asian nations such as South Korea and Singapore with steadily improving their governing systems, public infrastructure, and technological know-how over recent decades, allowing them to better respond to the pandemic, and explain how Western governments have been weakened by bureaucratic overreach, private interest group influence, and lackluster leadership. In the book's last chapter, Micklethwait and Wooldridge imagine a hypothetical president named Bill Lincoln (after 19th-century U.K. prime minister William Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln) and his initiatives, including a carbon tax, police reform, reduced Social Security spending, and a mix of public and private health care options. The gimmicky imagining of a fantasy leader who is both a progressive "social reformer" and a conservative "small government man" allows the authors to skirt the considerable roadblocks standing in the way of their goals, which include somehow making America a "race blind society." Nevertheless, this is a succinct and credible assessment of Western government dysfunctions.
Customer Reviews
Nice but not up to Micklethwaitt standards
Micklethwaitt is a brilliant and thoughtful man. The Economist has declined notably since his departure just as Bloomberg has improved notably since his arrival. Wake Up Call is a nice book, but it’s not up to his usual standards. Perhaps its brevity precluded making arguments rather than assertions, but many important assertions go unsupported.
As a reader and Micklethwaitt admirer, I would love to see him go much deeper into why Western governments have become inept and into how that can be changed. This book hints at those things, but it leaves the curious reader unsatisfied.