Gordon Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, a role he held for more than a decade, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is credited with preventing a second Great Depression through his leadership at the 2009 London G20 summit where he mobilised global leaders to walk the world back from the financial brink. Today he is fully engaged in international development work serving as the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, spearheading efforts to deliver a quality and inclusive education for all of the world's children, and as the World Health Organization's Ambassador for Global Health Finance. Brown has a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh. A Member of Parliament between 1983 and 2015, he lives in Fife, Scotland, and is married to Sarah, and the couple have two teenagers.Mohamed A. El-Erian is the President of Queens' College, University of Cambridge. Since 2014, he has served as Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz, the corporate parent of PIMCO where he formerly served as Chief Executive and Co-chief Investment Officer. He is Chair of Gramercy Fund Management, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a Financial Times contributing editor. He is a Senior Global Fellow at the Lauder Institute and the Rene M. Kern Practice Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously a deputy director at the International Monetary Fund, a managing director at Solomon Smith Barney/Citigroup, and President and CEO of Harvard Management Company. From 2012 to 2017, Dr El-Erian served as Chair of President Obama's Global Development Council. His books When Markets Collide (2008) and The Only Game in Town (2016) were New York Times bestsellers.Michael Spence is the Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Council on Foreign Relations Distinguished Visiting Fellow. He is an adjunct professor at Bocconi University and an honorary fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2001, Spence received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in the field of information economics. He is the author of The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (2011). Spence served as Dean of the Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard from 1984 to 1990. He is a recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for excellence in teaching and the John Bates Clark Medal recognising American economists under forty.Reid Lidow served as Executive Officer to the Mayor of Los Angeles. Prior to this, Reid worked for Gordon Brown on a range of campaigns. Reid completed his undergraduate studies at USC where he double majored in International Relations and Political Science. He was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and went on to earn an MPhil in Development Studies from Queens' College, Cambridge.

Three of our leading public intellectuals come together to offer an urgent way to escape our current permacrisis.

'Offers hope and good sense in equal measure'
Ian Bremmer

'A sensible plan for reform that can help us create a fairer and more equitable world'
Sheryl Sandberg

Problems are mounting.
We face sputtering growth, an escalating climate emergency, worsening inequality, poor policy responses, increasing nationalism and a decline in global co-operation.
But a permacrisis need not be permanent.

In this book, three of the most internationally respected and experienced thinkers of our time, Gordon Brown, Mohamed A. El-Erian and Michael Spence, writing with Reid Lidow, explain where we've gone wrong and set out what could be done to bring about a brighter future for generations to come. They look beyond today's headlines and political rhetoric to offer a bold, big-picture vision and nuanced, achievable solutions for fixing our broken approaches to growth, economic management, and governance.

The world is changing. What that change looks like is up to us.