The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

by Bina Venkataraman, Bina Venkataraman (Read by)

Overview

Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR

“How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . .  She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review

A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s.  

Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for the long run. Whether it comes to our finances, our health, our communities, or our planet, it’s easy to avoid thinking ahead.

The consequences of this immediacy are stark: Deadly outbreaks spread because leaders failed to act on early warning signs. Companies that fail to invest stagnate and fall behind. Hurricanes and wildfires turn deadly for communities that could have taken more precaution. Today more than ever, all of us need to know how we can make better long-term decisions in our lives, businesses, and society.

Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. With examples from ancient Pompeii to modern-day Fukushima, she dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives—and the ones we must fight for as a society. The result is a book brimming with the ideas and insights all of us need in order to forge a better future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984888815
Publisher:	Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/27/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. Before joining the Globe, she served as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, was the director of global policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in a small town in Ohio and now lives in Boston.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

A Note on Sources xvii

Introduction: The Trouble with the Future 1

Part 1 The Individual and the Family

1 Ghosts of the Past and Future 13

2 Dashboard Driving 42

3 Beyond the Here and Now 65

Part 2 Businesses and Organizations

4 The Quick Fix 95

5 A Bird's-Eye View 122

6 The Glitter Bomb 159

Part 3 Communities and Society

7 Hell or High Water 181

8 The Games We Play 211

9 The Living Crowd 239

Coda: Hope for a Reckless Age 267

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 283

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

An MIT professor and former senior advisor to the Obama administration, Bina Venkataraman ardently encourages listeners to think about how current actions impact future individual lives, families, the corporate world, and society. Her voice is passionate, clear, and welcoming, while her plea for thinking over personal benefit and immediate gratification is highly insightful and supported with numerous facts and examples. Venkataraman argues that individual decision-making has a powerful effect on society and that a positive outcome is achievable with a communal goal. Through patience and avoiding frivolous distractions, listeners are given the steps needed to bravely confront the future and hear the reasons that we must recognize how our current behavior will impact the world to come. D.Z. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile

How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman…brings a storyteller's eye to this question in her new book, The Optimist's Telescope. She is also deeply informed about the relevant science…[Venkataraman] herself is the optimist in her title, confidently insisting that impatience is not an immutable human trait. Her engaging narratives illustrate how people battle and often overcome shortsightedness across a range of problems and settings.

The New York Times Book Review - Robert H. Frank

05/27/2019

In a thought-provoking and eminently readable debut, Venkataraman, an MIT professor who served as senior advisor for the Obama administration on climate change innovation, considers why people—individually and collectively—often undermine their own best interests, opting for short-term rewards over longer-term, perhaps more sustainable benefits. Venkataraman takes a multifaceted approach—surveying research from biology, psychology, and economics, among other fields, and gleaning lessons from diverse groups such as poker players and Montessori students—to determine ways to encourage people to choose more wisely and more consistently consider long-term consequences. Strategies have ranged from a Michigan credit union’s offering depositors chances to win prizes when adding to their savings accounts, to doctors receiving emails praising their record of giving prescriptions only when warranted. In both cases, positive reinforcements proved far more effective than attempts to, respectively, encourage savings for unknown emergencies or micromanage doctors’ medical decisions. In the business world, strategists have suggested giving investors incentives to take a more patient approach to the market. (One banker likens the idea to Odysseus tying himself to the mast in order to resist the sirens’ song.) Venkataraman’s thoughtful and clear-eyed assessment of how to teach oneself to make more carefully considered decisions should prove a valuable tool for anyone wishing to think less in the short term and more toward the future. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . .  She is also deeply informed . . . heed Venkataraman’s impassioned call for making a commitment to future change.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Bina Venkataraman zeroes in on the heart of [the] problem… with vivid anecdotes, Venkataraman musters all the optimism she can manage to suggest how we might be able to overcome something that feels like plain old human nature.” —NPR, Best Books of 2019

“Venkataraman vividly depicts what happens when we don’t plan ahead and what we can do about it, on our own and together.” —The Washington Post

“In pacy prose that’s easy to digest but offers concrete examples of change . . . this book offers hope that we can take back some control of our own destinies and aim for a better future.” —The Financial Times

“Most of us only see the future after it becomes the past. The Optimist's Telescope is here to change that. It's a rare read that's as fascinating as it is important. In it, Bina Venkataraman brings together powerful narrative, cutting-edge behavioral science, and the rich experience of a high-impact career.” —Adam Grant, author of Originals

“The unknown can always be scary. But in this wise, eye-opening, and hopeful book, Bina Venkataraman shows us the ways we can think more clearly and strategically about the future - in our communities, our families, and in our own lives.” —Arianna Huffington

“Bina Venkataraman illuminates how we can make better decisions for ourselves, our communities, and Earth itself. She introduces us to an array of colorful and unexpected characters, from ancient philosophers to tech entrepreneurs, all while distilling the science of foresight into practical advice we can all use. A timely and valuable book.” —Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business

“The Optimist's Telescope is a noble and important book. Through stories of people who have made a difference and an acute awareness of how things can be made better, Bina Venkataraman shows how we can effect change and make the world a better place. She is the good parent this planet so desperately needs.” —Errol Morris, Oscar-winning filmmaker and author of Believing Is Seeing

“[Venkataraman] explores all sorts of ways that businesses, governments, and communities have learned to be better planners-ahead. . . . She also writes beautifully about how we can all ‘be better ancestors.’” —The Grist

“A timely reminder that time is not on our side without long-term thinking.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A thought-provoking and eminently readable debut…Venkataraman’s thoughtful and clear-eyed assessment of how to teach oneself to make more carefully considered decisions should prove a valuable tool for anyone wishing to think less in the short term and more toward the future.” —Publishers Weekly

“An intriguing look at strategies for the long-term with citations from business executives, sociologists, and philosophers; highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Chinese peasants once got paid by the piece to find dinosaur bones; soon they took to smashing the bones into tiny pieces to boost their income. This book is a sobering compendium of the many ways in which ill-conceived short-term incentives undermine valuable long-term goals.  The stakes go way beyond busted fossils: think rising sea waters, treatment-resistant pathogens, collapsing infrastructure, disappearing topsoil . . . A grim list and grounds for pessimism unless, that is, it gets read in the context of this book, for Bina Venkataraman has assembled a remarkable repair kit, full of tested tools for harmonizing the lure of present reward with the foresight we need if we are to build a durable future.” —Lewis Hyde

“The Optimist’s Telescope will help you think about the biggest decisions you face in your life and that humanity faces in this historical moment. Everyone should read this book.” —Gary Knell, chairman of National Geographic Partners

From the Publisher

2019-05-12
A former Obama administration senior climate policy adviser urges that we adjust our sights to take in a longer view.

"A good forecast, it turns out, is not the same as good foresight," writes Venkataraman (Science, Technology, and Society/MIT), who observes that modern humans do not often take the time to look at the ramifications of the decisions we make outside of their immediate effects. So it is that corporations look to the next quarter and not the next century and retirement catches so many people financially unprepared. And so it is, in a pointed lesson that the author offers early on, that we continue to build our homes and cities in hurricane- and flood-prone areas without adequately preparing for the eventuality, underinsured and underprotected. "The choices we make today shape tomorrow's so-called natural disasters," adding that it might drive the point home better if weather forecasters would include images of the effects of past disasters when they're predicting a storm. It's understandable that we have a bias for the present, or what the film director Wim Wenders calls the "monopoly of the visible," but our failure to examine the implications of our actions is having all kinds of effects. One is the near collapse of our fisheries, which is one of Venkataraman's case studies, and the persistent eruptions of the Ebola virus, which the author considers a prime example of what historian Barbara Tuchman called "marches of folly," on a par with the Trojan horse and the American misadventure in Vietnam: "Societies and leaders of each era knew better but acted as if ignorant." Habitat destruction, extinction, continuing climate change leading to an uninhabitable Earth—such are the results of the short term. To counter our patterns of thinking and doing, the author closes with prescriptions including such things as finding "immediate rewards for future goals" and weaning ourselves from the desire for instant gratification in favor of "fighting for greater foresight in society."

A timely reminder that time is not on our side without long-term thinking.

Kirkus Reviews