The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It »

Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Director and a partner at Kissinger Associates, one of the world's leading strategic advisory firms. Prior to joining Kissinger Associates, he was Assistant Managing Editor of Time and worked in the advisory and banking business in China.

For decades, American foreign policy has been based on the seductive belief that there exists a logical relationship between power of states and the physics of change. And yet today policies designed to make us safer instead make the world more perilous. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to boost the quality of life of people around the world, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions taken to stem a financial crisis guarantee its arrival. Environmental techniques engineered to protect species lead to their extinction. Middle East peace plans produce less peace. Our world is not becoming more stable or flatter or easier to comprehend. And what we face isn't one single shift, like the end of World War Two or the collapse of the Soviet Union, so much as a revolutionary avalanche of ceaseless change.

Now, drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, human immunology, psychology and his own...

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…[Ramo has] managed, in this stimulating volume, to make the reader seriously contemplate the alarming nature of a rapidly changing world—a world in which uncertainty and indeterminacy are givens, and avalanches, negative cascades and tectonic shifts are ever-present dangers.

Part 1 The Sandpile Effect

1 The Nature of the Age 3

2 The Old Physics 20

3 The Sandpile 41

4 Avalanche Country 64

5 Budweiser 82

Part 2 Deep Security

6 Mashup 103

7 The General and the Billionaire 132

8 The Management Secrets of Hizb'allah 169

9 The Limits of Persuasion 200

10 Riding the Earthquake 226

11 The Revolution and You 255

Afterword to the Paperback Edition 265

Acknowledgments 271

Selected Sources 273

Index 283

Reading Group Guide 287