Yancey Strickler

I guess if you're among the 80% on the surveys he quotes who list becoming very wealthy as one's main life goal, this might be revolutionary and groundbreaking for you. If the idea of making money your main life goal already strikes you as fairly horrifying or alarming, you will probably not get much out of a book that encourages people to look beyond short term financial maximization and include other values in your decisions.

It's a fine book. I guess the need for it says more about society than the author.

It also struck me as very odd to see repeated references to 2050 without any mention of the importance of that date in climate/carbon terms. (It always strikes me as odd, nowadays, when anyone claims to write about the future without having a solid sense of what that means in climate terms.) Environmental sustainability was in the text as a value, and climate change was mentioned, but my sense is that the author is largely unaware of the extent of the threat posed by this crisis to the future he champions, or the foundational necessity of including climate outcomes in any values decisions affecting the future. You cannot end up with a happy 2050 with future citizens talking about value maximization in bentoism offices if the subway network has been wiped out by repeated flooding and the power grid no longer reliably operates. I just did a very quick google search of 2050 climate impacts on the lower east side, referenced repeatedly in his book, and the picture is pretty grim. The storefront he imagines may no longer exist or be accessible, and if it does, it will be in a neighbourhood vastly restructured to maintain its viability.

If you are writing about the future, and you are not including climate impacts, decarbonization, economic transitions, and adaptation projects, you are writing a fairy tale; and moreover, your fairy tale is damaging. We need more authors to understand this.… (mer)