Future Challenges Reader: Work in the Developing World

Today we have published the first Future Challenges Reader!

The first volume comprises the lead article Work in the Developing World and five “Local Views” from our blogger network. We hope you’ll enjoy this first in a series of Future Challenges Readers. This volume is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Excerpt from the foreword:

Creating a sustainable future for as many of the world’s inhabitants as possible is an admirable goal, but this goal will slip ever farther out of reach if we do not learn to embrace the complexity of the challenges ahead. We must ask ourselves not simply: What the best way is to ensure our safety? Instead, we must begin to ask: What is the best way to ensure our safety while managing changing population trends, providing high-quality education to as many people as possible, and ensuring that the benefits of economic globalization reach deep into our societies? We must demand that our political leadership takes the same approach. If we attempt to tackle our most difficult challenges alone, independent of one another, any solution that we devise will be unsustainable, sabotaged in the long term by unintended consequences that spill over from other issue areas. On the other hand, if we learn to think about our greatest challenges as part of a connected web of issues, all of which have meaningful impact on one another, we may begin to identify solutions that are robust and long-lasting.

This first Future Challenges Reader covers the topic of employment in the developing world, a subject that requires us to think about demographic change, education and economic globalization. It is no easy subject. The co-authors of our lead article, Arrianna Coleman and Intellecap, a consulting firm in Mumbai, India, advocate a multi-layer policy framework to support increased employment in the developing world. Our network of authors shares responses to these ideas from Pakistan, China, the United States, Germany and sub-Saharan Africa.