I am on a train between Montreal and Ottawa reading Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and thinking about how to characterize Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Is it a thoughtful, intellectual and well-researched treatise or is it a well-meaning, rhetorical polemic? Then I realize the previous sentences reflect Homer-Dixon’s own style of doing research and writing books.
The Upside of Down is both scholarly research and argumentative pamphlet. And stylistically, it is an interesting approach to personalizing the process of research and presenting its results in an engaging and clever fashion. With mostly success, but some failure, the book is a translation of scholarly research into popular idiom.
In this book we find the boyish Tad at about 20 years old (irritatingly, even today he still looks too young) “throwing the chain” on an oil...
Mel Cappe is professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto and was the 18th clerk of the Privy Council, secretary to cabinet and head of the Public Service of Canada.
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