FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, I’VE WORKED AS AN INDEPENDENT policy adviser to the presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, and governments of more than fifty countries. Most of them have invited me to help them engage more productively and imaginatively with the governments and populations of other countries, although we’ve often ended up spending our time on very different challenges from the ones they thought they were facing.

In my discussions with them and with thousands of their citizens, from religious and business leaders to students and factory workers, I’ve always challenged them with the same basic questions: What is your country for? What is its gift to the world? How can it make a difference to the whole of humanity, not just to its own citizens? How should a country make itself useful in the twenty-first century and so earn its place in the world?

I suppose that very few people have ever had a job quite like mine, and nobody could lead a life like the one I’ve led without forming some views on where we humans stand today, how we got there, and where we’re going next—unless they were fast asleep.

But I’ve been wide awake since I first started working with countries, and on the plane on the way home from each foreign trip, after a glance at the newspaper with its usual crop of frightening headlines, I’ve found myself asking that same question: Why doesn’t the world work?

How is it that, despite all the experience, power, technology, money, and knowledge that humankind has accumulated, we still seem unable to defeat the biggest challenges facing us today: climate change, pollution, mass migration, overpopulation, corruption, disease and pandemics, extremism, slavery, war, terrorism, drug trafficking, hunger, weapons proliferation, species and habitat loss, prejudice and racism, unemployment, water scarcity, antibiotic resistance, human rights abuses, poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, and inequality?

What a daunting list that is! From Afghanistan to Kazakhstan, from Austria to Bhutan, from the Faroe Islands to Mexico, and from Latvia to Botswana, this book tells the story of how I began looking for answers to that question and gradually built up a worldview, a philosophy, and at last a formula that I believe really could help make the world work better.

The theory behind this book is the Good Country Equation, a simple summary of what I’ve learned about the world so far. The equation consists of a problem and a solution.

Yes, the Good Country Equation is a much simplified account of the state of things. The simplification is deliberate because, over the years, faced with a world that seems to become more bewilderingly complex and unstable with every month that passes, I’ve learned to revere simplicity: not the simplicity that comes from seeing only the surface of things, but the simplicity that comes from seeing through the surface.

I hope I’ve avoided the trap of expecting too much of humanity, or crediting it with more compassion, intelligence, foresight, or imagination than it really has. An objection I sometimes hear from critics of my work is that I don’t make sufficient allowances for people’s innate selfishness, their mistrust of each other, the greed and corruption and shortsightedness of politicians, the stupidity of crowds, the innate tendency of all humankind toward prejudice and tribalism.

Well, in one sense I am guilty as charged. I can’t help liking people and trusting in their capacity for good sense and kindness, even though these qualities aren’t always on show and have a frustrating tendency to emerge only when it’s too late for them to make much difference.

But I hope that my prejudice in favor of humanity is not based on naivete or sentimentality. I have always taken great care to test it repeatedly with objective research, observation, and study. Thanks to my unusual job, that prejudice is reinforced by direct experience of getting to know a great many people from all levels of society in many countries and a relentless compulsion to seek out and hear the people whose views and values differ most from my own. That’s not virtue: it’s plain curiosity, and a serious addiction to variety.

One further point I’d like to add before we get started: Just like every one of us, I have my own educational, social, cultural, and racial background, and of course it influences what I see, what I say about it, and the way I say it. I’m a bit of mongrel, and I’m proud of the fact that several histories, cultures, races, and religions form the background to who I am; and an even more varied and colorful professional and family experience over the last thirty years has added to my worldview. I have both overlords and underdogs in my family tree, citizens of a colonizing power and victims of ethnic cleansing. My personal experience of the world has been a privileged one, thanks largely to the hard work of my parents and grandparents, and the good luck of being born male in a rich country in peacetime with an appearance similar to that of the ethnic majority.

But culture, language, human nature, and human society have been my lifelong passion as well as my study. I have learned that it’s a mistake to fight the fact that my background shapes me; but it is also my duty to be constantly conscious of this bias and to factor it into my understanding of the world. My parents and my schools taught me from the moment I could understand it that the playing field I was about to enter was not a level one. The expression “Check your privilege” didn’t exist then, but it’s exactly what they had in mind. I haven’t always succeeded in following their advice, since putting yourself in other people’s shoes isn’t always easy, but I have always tried and will continue to do so.

One of the main reasons we’re facing all these challenges today is the same reason we’re capable of solving them: globalization.

Globalization is much more than a recent tale of corporate and financial overreach: in some respects it’s the story of our species. Ever since the first humans walked out of Africa sixty or seventy thousand years ago and stopped being a single tribe inhabiting a single territory, facing a single set of shared challenges, one of the stories of human endeavor has been the story of us trying to get back in touch again.

Today, thanks to our technologies of transport, communication, and computation, we’re nearly there: a single species inhabiting a single planet, once again facing a single set of shared challenges (all of which we’ve caused ourselves). It’s been a difficult journey and the path ahead looks frightening and unfamiliar, so it’s hardly surprising if, at times, we seem poised on the point of slipping backward again.

Globalization means many things, good and bad. Most of our progress and most of our setbacks have been both the cause and the consequence of our increasing global connectedness and interdependence. For me, one of the most positive consequences of globalization is the way it constantly stirs up human invention and creativity. Our species comprises many cultures, beliefs, languages, traditions, histories, mindsets, and ways of being in the world, and the more those elements are mixed together, the more new ideas we produce and the more progress we make. That’s how innovation and culture work. On the other hand, growing inequality is stretching the tolerance of humanity to the breaking point, and globalization is deeply implicated in that process.

So while the problems we’re facing today look, and are, truly daunting—in part because for the first time in our history we’re acutely and instantly aware of all of them, and they’re connected in a thousand new ways—we are also armed with an infinite variety of new solutions to those problems, precisely because we’re so well connected and the combination of our different skills and experiences, and our imagination, is so formidable.

The extent to which we choose to increase and make use of those connections, to work together, to acknowledge how all our problems are shared, and to deliberately stir up our innovations and our solutions will determine how successfully we tackle the challenges facing us today.

We’ve allowed many parts of globalization to spiral out of control, and there are failures and responsibilities that need to be acknowledged before we can press Reset. But there are also many aspects of globalization that deserve to be celebrated, and it’s critical that we make the effort to see both sides of the story.

Many of us are in danger of allowing ourselves to become discouraged and downhearted, even cynical and fatalistic, just when we need the most hope and the most energy. Despondency is one of the habits of our age and a temptation we must resist. I hope that reading this book may help restore redress the balance between realistic concern and justifiable optimism.

The way I’ve written this book is a little unusual. It’s an autobiographical travelogue which incorporates research, analysis, and case studies, but it’s also a call to action, ending with some specific proposals that I intend to pursue with, I hope, the help of many of my readers. In other words, it’s the story of an unfinished journey and an invitation to continue it together. I hope that the story of where I’ve come from will interest and encourage you enough to join me where I’m going.