The end of the Cold War did not, as some might have hoped, simplify the issues facing world leaders. Civil war, famine, overpopulation, chronic unemployment, and an exploding refugee problem continue to plague the world economy, to the point where we begin to wonder whether national boundaries can contain such crises, or whether the challenges that face the world are beyond the reach of the leaders we have elected. Has the increasing disparity between the haves and the have nots, between the knows and don't knows led to an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor peoples and rich and poor countries?

Overcoming Indifference offers contributions from Nobel Prize winners, statesmen, scholars and university professors, and chief executive officers of major industrial corporations. The contributors include such well-known and disparate thinkers as Elie Wiesel, Samuel P. Huntington, Michael Hammer, and Carl Sagan. Highlighting subjects as diverse as the new information society, methods of creating sufficient employment, the disintegration of previously held value systems, and the maintenance of global security in the post-Cold War world, the contributors, propose the best possible courses of action.