It's a Funny World
With the Taliban going strong and the polar ice caps melting away, we wouldn’t blame you for feeling like there's nothing to laugh about - until now. You may not have thought policy wonks were funny, but we’re about to prove you wrong with a special evening of international stand-up comedy benefiting World Policy Journal
featuring professional comedians and friends of the World Policy Institute:
- Ophira Eisenberg
- WPI Senior Fellow Ian Bremmer
- Kevin Bleyer
- Robert George
- Emcee Christian Finnegan
Monday, September 13
7 -8:30 pm
at COMIX, 343 West 14th Street
The End of the Free Market
WPI Senior Fellow Ian Bremmer recounts the battle between state capitalism and the free market. Detailing the rise of state-owned firms in China, Russia, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere, he demonstrates the growing challenge that state capitalism will pose for the entire global economy.
William Powers
Senior Fellow
Expertise: Post-conflict humanitarian intervention; food aid; climate change and deforestation; ecological tourism; green trade; Bolivia; Liberia; West Africa; indigenous peoples; globalization.
William Powers' most recent book, Twelve by Twelve (New World Library) was released in May 2010 and already is in its second printing. He also is the author of two critically-acclaimed books from Bloomsbury/Macmillan. Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge, an on-the-ground account of Powers’ two years in Charles Taylor’s civil war Liberia, was a bestseller at Harvard’s bookstore and a Publisher’s Weekly notable book of 2005. Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia’s War on Globalization (2006) has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and in Newsweek and is now in its second printing.
For over a decade Powers has led development aid and conservation initiatives in Latin America, Africa, and Washington, D.C. From 2002 to 2004 he managed the socio-economic components of a project in the Bolivian Amazon that won the Roy Family Award for environmental partnership from Harvard's JFK School of Government.
His essays on global issues have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, The Sun, and the International Herald Tribune, and have been syndicated to three hundred newspapers around the world and translated into a dozen languages. Powers has appeared on programs such as NPR’s Living on Earth, Fresh Air, The Leonard Lopate Show, West Coast Live, Left Jab, World Vision Report, and Book TV. He has been keynote speaker/ presenter / panelist at dozens of events throughout the U.S. and in South America.
Powers has worked as a Fellow at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.; Head of Programs for Catholic Relief Services in Liberia; Chief of Party of a major USAID / Conservation International rainforest conservation program in Bolivia; and Facilitator of the DFID / IUCN-World Conservation Union forest law-enforcement, governance, and trade dialogues project in Liberia.
Education
B.A. (honors) Brown University
M.S. (honors) Georgetown University / School of Foreign Service
Languages
Fluent in Spanish; near-fluent in German.
Tags: William Powers
