It's to the best of our knowledge.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

Today, the mayor.

Poverty, climate change, unemployment, name a problem,

and Washington seems unable to solve it.

Immigration, education, enter the mayor.

Pragmatic, problem-solving, nonpartisan, mayors just might be the next best hope for democracy.

That's according to political theorist Benjamin Barber. The title of his recent book puts it right on the line,

If Mayors Ruled the World. Steve Paulson caught up with him at a Chicago conference on cities and sustainability.

Ben, why do you think we'd be better off if mayors ruled the world? Well, we'd be better off if almost anybody else ruled

the world and the people who are ruling it, which is the CEOs of giant carbon corporations

and financial banks, which have no interest in public goods, which is the

leaders of nation states stuck in ideology and embedded in their sovereignty and unable to cooperate.

So you might say that almost anybody would be an alternative.

I argue that mayors in particular, however, are efficient pragmatic problem solvers, closer to their people,

more democratic, and indeed since cities today have over half of the world's population than them,

in the Western world, it's actually 80%. Cities really are democratically representative of the

world's population, and mayors are already

cooperating with one another across borders and dozens of intercity organizations and global

organizations. So in every way, mayors are better positioned, the more capable of, and more

interested in solving real human problems. It's all about real stuff, real stuff.

And if mayors don't do the real stuff, forget the rest.

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