Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe

Journalist Zapata debuts with an illuminating survey of how America’s most pressing social issues have been handled by other countries. Drawing on more than a decade spent reporting around the world, Zapata explains how seemingly impossible goals for Americans—including affordable housing and childcare, quality education, and sustainable postretirement incomes for the elderly—have been tackled successfully elsewhere. Examples include the U.K.’s free national healthcare service, Portugal’s adoption of an innovative new approach to addiction that deals with users solely via the public health system rather than the criminal justice one, and Singapore’s nearly universal offering of public housing to its citizens (though Zapata explains that such policies do not help the city’s “invisible” populations of migrants). Zapata focuses on the technical details of these systems, giving precise explanations of how they work in practice, as a primer for how they could work in America. Her reporting is colorful and impressive in its scope—later chapters delve into such lesser-known examples as Costa Rica’s successful fight to preserve biodiversity from the coffee industry by inventing sustainable new farming practices. The result is a fascinating and inspiring glimpse of how rational governance operates. (Feb.)