Autumn 2010

World Leader

by Georgia Levenson Keohane

A GLOBAL LIFE:
My Journey Among Rich and Poor, From Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank.
By James D. Wolfensohn.
PublicAffairs.
462 pp. $29.95

In August, the World Bank redirected nearly a billion dollars in aid to Pakistan from development projects to emergency flood relief. Weeks of heavy rain had left millions of Pakistanis without food, shelter, clean water, or medical care. Media coverage was sparse, and private donors—on vacation? fatigued from Haitian earthquake relief?—few and far between. The World Bank, however, responded immediately to the disaster. While this might seem a natural role for a well-capitalized international institution, crisis intervention has not been the business of the bank for much of its history. The shift in recent years is due in no small part to James Wolfensohn, World Bank president during the tumultuous decade from 1995 to 2005.

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Georgia Levenson Keohane writes and consults on social and economic policy. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, and elsewhere.
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