It’s late December, a time when many parents and their children are nervously anticipating the upcoming ceremonial exchange of gifts. Gathering on the shortest days of the year to honor the season and give to others ties us to a history of human community and natural cycles that goes back at least many thousand of years. The gifts at the center of modern ceremonies, however, are not purely the product of tradition. Complex forces that shape desires, expectations, and values have also been at work. Many children will have made wish lists; parents will have tried to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of different potential purchases in the context of household budgets; and commercial interests, guided by databases and analytics, will have invested heavily to influence the children’s lists and convince parents to ignore their budgets. 

When it all works out, children receive their favorite things, parents get the satisfaction of seeing happy children, and companies make lots of money. It’s a marriage of market forces, persuasion, and tradition, as information is produced and processed to create intergenerational happiness and wealth. But what if, every year, despite ever-growing databases and boundless commercial ingenuity, the list of potential favorite things shrinks? What if—when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when the children of the future are feeling sad—simply remembering their favorite things isn’t so simple?

Today, on the solstice, I invite you to think about what makes life wonderful, to consider intergenerational legacies, and to imagine future memories. In doing so, I hope to shed light on the nature of the choices we are making, often unconsciously, and their impact on the world we leave behind. For we are doing much more than giving and receiving toys, clothes, electronics, and gift cards. We are, with every passing season, altering the world that every future generation will live in, crossing things off the potential lists that today’s children, their children, and every person thereafter might make when asked about their favorite things.

Skies full of stars

In the 1959 musical and 1965 film The Sound of Music, Captain Georg von Trapp is an Austrian widower striving to both take care of his seven children and evade the tightening grip of fascism. He turns to the head of the local abbey for help, and she recommends that he try out a young nun named Maria to be the family’s governess. Faced with a daunting task, Maria relies on her instincts and values. She teaches the children to find joy in their own company and in the natural world around them, and to sing. Their father follows a different strategy, imposing strict military discipline on his children as he seeks a rich wife to preserve the family’s standard of living. Both of these are logical approaches, but as the Nazis close in on Austria, Captain von Trapp discovers that he—and especially his children—have fallen in love with the woman who has the ability to make hard times a bit more fun.

Maria’s mindset is wholly new to the kids who have only ever known financial security and material comfort. For example, when they are scared by a violent thunderstorm, Maria offers the children a simple lesson: Think of your favorite things. “What kind of things?” the children ask, desperate for the secret. “Well, let me see…,” Maria replies. Before she breaks into song, she comes up with “Daffodils. Green meadows. Skies full of stars.” Written 65 years ago, this list must have felt safely timeless and accessible to anyone in the world. Who could imagine a future without flowers, green meadows (or some similar natural landscape), and skies full of stars? 

I spent most of my life taking flowers for granted, so I just used Google to see what daffodils look like. I recognize them from the park next to the library around the corner from our house. Their appearance is a sign that spring has come. Unfortunately, in recent years, they have popped up in February, confused by “unseasonable” weather, only to be smushed by the harsh remnants of winter. 

Over millennia of climate stability, daffodils and other plants, bugs, and birds developed symbiotic relationships governed by predictable seasonal patterns. But different living organisms respond to different cues, so flowers triggered by warm air and soil bloom and grow—and wither—before hungry birds and bees are roused by longer days to take wing in search of pollen. There is a resulting global crisis in meadows, which depend on, as Maria sings, “Silver white winters that melt into springs” which are growing rarer all the time.

What would likely most astound Maria is how few of today’s children have ever seen a sky full of stars. Estimates of sky brightening between 1938 and 2010 are imprecise, but electric lights over this period grew ever cheaper and more ubiquitous as humans used that cheap power to light their surroundings even when sleeping (or trying to sleep). A 2023 publication in the journal Science about the change in the night sky just between 2011 and 2022 revealed how rapidly we have changed our surroundings:

We find that the change in the number of visible stars… is equivalent [on average] to a 9.6% per year annual increase in sky brightness… For an 18-year period (such as the duration of a human childhood), this rate of change would increase sky brightness by more than a factor of 4. A location with 250 visible stars would see that number reduce to 100 visible stars over the same period.

Using this back of the envelope math, it’s likely that the von Trapp children could have looked out at tens of thousands of stars (and clearly seen The Milky Way). Eighty-five years later, their grandchildren, gazing from a rooftop in Vienna, might only make out a hundred stars in a field of silvery gray if they looked up on a cloudless night. If they had moved to South Korea or Singapore, they would, according to a 2016 study in the journal Science, live “under skies so bright that the eye cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision.” 

Perhaps stars aren’t on your list of favorite things, and you are confident that they won’t be on your descendants’ lists, either. But what about snowy mountains, colorful meadows, diverse species of trees, birds, fish, and every other living thing? For thousands of years, it was logical to assume that the vast menagerie of things that we didn’t invent, produce, advertise, or sell would forever be available to everyone. The Beatles’ hit song “Money (That’s What I Want)” begins with “The best things in life are free/But you can keep ’em for the birds and bees.” It’s a cheeky song, but it accurately conveys the idea that the best things don’t cost money and that they are endlessly available. The Fab Four didn’t anticipate that birds and bees would be terribly confused by a rapidly warming world. Neither did I.

For most of my life, I paid almost no attention to the physical world around me. I was interested in people, systems, and outcomes. I had been well acculturated to understand that the poverty I saw spreading and deepening across America’s industrial Midwest throughout my childhood was bad and that, axiomatically, prosperity was good. I learned the clever American moral lesson that being obsessed with your own wealth was crass and immoral but that being obsessed with a company’s, a community’s, or a country’s wealth was civic. I spent decades researching patterns and practices that might lead to higher incomes, greater returns on capital, more jobs, and populations with better statistical attributes, all of which were quantitative proxies for well-being and human flourishing. 

I couldn’t tell one tree from another or locate the constellations above, and I didn’t care. I wanted to help people live in a world with more brown paper packages tied up with string.

Brown paper packages tied up with string

The triumph of markets derives from a powerful, compelling assumption: What you pay for reveals what you value. In a market, things as diverse as lithium, land, life insurance, doorbells, sleigh bells, and schnitzel with noodles all compete for your dollars, euros, yen, pesos, rupees, ringgit, or kroner. The forces of supply and demand incentivize us to work, innovate, and invest so that we can sell more of the things other people want so that we can, in turn, buy more of the things we want. Rational self-interest leads to societal progress. 

The triumph of technological progress and market forces over shortages can be seen in any number of “life is getting better” graphs, from income to life expectancy to caloric intake. Any claim that life was better in the past faces the retort: If the present is so terrible, pick an era you’d like to go back to. Maybe the von Trapps had stars and meadows, but they also might have had polio or the mumps. The first Mrs. von Trapp died of scarlet fever, and there’s no way they could get Amazon to deliver anything they wanted in a brown paper package in a day or less. I know this retort well. It’s an efficient way to combine two ideas: 1) Everything is a tradeoff; and 2) Consumption growth is a good proxy for well-being. The world is simultaneously complicated and simple. It’s a staple of economic rhetoric.

A few years ago, I saw an academic economist I met when we were both in grad school. He asked what I was working on. I told him that I had decided to focus on the implications of climate change. “Why would you do that?” he asked, in a way that clearly implied, “That sounds like a waste of time.” I explained why I thought it was interesting, potentially important work and then asked why he wasn’t interested in it, at least for his children’s sake. His reply took the old “The past was worse” logic and projected it into the future: “We are leaving our children the entire stock of human knowledge for free. So what if we leave them less of something like the environment?”

I don’t share this story to make this person look bad. I share it because although his dismissive retort sounded crass as he said it, I recognized the logic. It was how I used to see the world, and it is how the field of economics and most centrist political thinkers see the world, and how most societies are acting today: Sure, it would be nice to have more of “something like the environment,” but everything is a tradeoff, and people just don’t value environment-like things as much as the things they spend real money on. In surveys, most people say that they are worried about climate change or that it matters, but when asked to put it on a list or in a budget, it falls below almost everything else that might go under the tree or on the Amazon wish list.

After spending a lot of time learning about the ways in which our complex, modern, industrial society depends on both a stable climate and the myriad species and systems that create that stability, I am interested in a thought experiment that I strongly doubt has such an easy answer: Will people of the future look on our current time and wish they could come back?

I suspect that people in the future will wonder how we could have not seen how closely linked risk, wonder, and beauty are and how our dismissal of all three made them poorer morally and aesthetically, as well as materially and financially. They will wonder what we were paying attention to as the stars faded, the birds grew quiet, and both glaciers and capital markets receded from entire geographies. They will wish they could see, smell, hear, taste, touch, and marvel at things that no longer exist in their time and that they could take a reliably pleasant climate for granted when deciding where and how to live. It’s not clear that the entire stock of human knowledge will be a comfort.

Is remembering your favorite things simple?

In 2012, at the same time that I began researching the potential consequences of climate change, I got very interested in the growth of data. I saw the topics as similar: Some people talked about climate change and big data in world-changing terms, but as they were the province of obscure experts, people in other disciplines mostly ignored them. I started reading books and blogs by technologists, and came across essays by Jaron Lanier in which he warned that “free” media from big corporations was extremely dangerous. 

Lanier was insistent that everyone should have to pay to send email and use various things on the web. His contention was that while social and search media appeared to be offering you what you want for free, they actually were built to collect enormous amounts of data about their “users” so that they could in turn change users’ wants to better fit the objectives of their actual customers: advertisers. His point was that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google aren’t information businesses, they are manipulation businesses. 

I have kept up with Lanier’s heterodox writing, and in his memoir Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, I found a story that he presents as entertaining but that I find just as worrying as his concerns about digital media. It’s about how drastically and quickly we can adjust our sense of what’s normal, even to circumstances that we would never choose.

Lanier belonged to a community of curious technologists who started developing virtual reality software and hardware a few decades ago. They wanted to see both what they could get technology to do and how human eyes, brains, and bodies would react. They discovered that we can use our existing nervous system to control bodies unlike our own. Programmers created avatars with limbs and appendages we don’t have and discovered that users could figure out how to control them. In Lanier’s words, the human body is pre-adaptive: ready to evolve to inhabit different potential future evolutionary changes, whether they be extra arms or even tails and whiskers on kittens (Lanier loves cats). 

Virtual reality experiments revealed that our adaptive skills weren’t limited to expanded possibilities. It turned out that we would readily adapt to reduced possibilities as well. When placed in a low-resolution, pixellated world with less vibrancy, color, and detail, people would almost automatically adjust their expectations and even their senses. They would accept a downgraded reality. One of Lanier’s favorite things to do was to sneak “a genuine flower” into the room while a visitor was inside a VR experience. In Lanier’s memoir he writes, “They’ll come out and experience a flower as if it was the first one they’ve ever seen.” In other words, after a short time without seeing an actual flower, people forget just how spectacular even a modest daffodil can be.

Who knows your favorite things?

In 2012, the Facebook management team visited the offices of the company where I worked during their IPO roadshow. The young executives and bankers were all dressed in suits and carrying briefcases and computers except for CEO Mark Zuckerberg whose hands were empty as he walked in wearing sneakers, jeans, and a hoodie. The meeting commenced, and I noticed that a glistening bottle of Orangina had somehow appeared in front of him, which meant that one of his subordinates’ briefcases was actually a cooler for Mr. Zuckerberg’s drink of choice.

My colleagues asked Mr. Zuckerberg and CFO Sheryl Sandberg questions about revenues and users that would influence whether they invested in the IPO, but I was interested in a different question: Did Facebook, after observing and experimenting on tens of millions of people, have special insight into human nature? 

When I posed this question to Mr. Zuckerberg, his look conveyed a sense that my question was a waste of time. He then answered verbally, “No. People just like what they like and they like what their friends like.” It was the most simplified description of humanity I had ever heard. The clarity of his answer, however, felt genuine. I suspect it is what the Facebook folks had learned and have refined: It’s very valuable to know what people desire, and those desires can be altered by presenting them in a social context. We pay attention to what other people say and do. Maria changed the von Trapp children’s lives in part by convincing them that simple, natural, shared things had great beauty and intrinsic value and would always be available to them. She was compelling in her virtue, her aesthetics, and her caring. She also wasn’t competing with Instagram and YouTube.

My interactions with people at the center and the periphery of the rapidly changing digital ocean in which we all now try to stay afloat have affected my understanding of human nature and, by extension, the capacity for humans to react to a changing climate. The following observations and assumptions are now clear to me: 

1. Unlike the most fundamental assumption of economics, our wants can be manipulated.
2. Increasingly ubiquitous, powerful technologies are working day and night to steer our passions and preferences to maximize their own profitability.
3. Humans have a tremendous ability to adapt and recalibrate our sense of the world. We can lose important things without noticing. 
4. The diversity of life, the complexity of ecosystems, and the capacity of nature to mend when given time and space are the fundamental underpinnings of even the most artificial aspects of the modern economy. In other words, there is nothing “like the environment.” There is the environment and everything else that depends on it.
5. The specific climate we are leaving behind was ideal for humans. We could live almost everywhere on the planet with relative ease. 
6. The further we alter the atmosphere and ecosystems, the more everyone will be forced to depend on technology, energy, and money to replace the natural wealth we inherited. 
7. This indoor, climate-controlled, media-dominated life is ideal for tech companies.
8. Future generations will not have the choice to destroy natural wealth to satisfy their wants. Instead, they will inherit natural liabilities. They will have to protect themselves from, manage, and try to repair the unstable, perilous, unpredictable world they live in. 
9. Those who cannot afford to alter their climate and import their sustenance will suffer in ways that no group of people has ever suffered before.
10. If we don’t make lists now of what really matters, we will get distracted, lose track, and forget our favorite things. 

These observations lead me to worry that people are starting to adapt to climate change primarily by reducing their expectations, interests, and preferences and accepting increased suffering and instability instead of making conscious choices guided by virtue, aesthetics, and intergenerational relationships—the things they actually care about when they consider children’s well-being.

In other words, our choice not to value the night sky, meadows, or snowflakes that stay on a child’s nose and eyelashes but instead to think that—or simply to act like—our favorite things are short-form social media videos or consumer goods that can be delivered in brown paper boxes is a natural reaction to unnatural, persuasive stimuli. Stars, snowflakes, winter, and migrating birds aren’t spending anywhere near the kind of money on media that (to pick a random example) competing water bottle manufacturers are. So as they disappear, instead of fighting for them or at least registering alarm, we lower our expectations, we seek indoor “climate control,” and we turn further toward our devices. This behavior literally reduces our field of vision.

Seeing the world like a child or like a state?

A constant source of tension in The Sound of Music is Maria’s youth, both in her behavior at the restrained convent and in her relationship with the mature Captain von Trapp. It isn’t primarily about age (although there is that) but how Maria is child-like in her observations, her enthusiasm, and her appreciation of people and things. She doesn’t behave the way grown-ups are supposed to behave. To the people who are doing what everyone else does, who are trying to be like their peers and friends, she appears reckless, foolish, childish. When the Captain and others resist or reprimand her enthusiastic, creative behavior, their case is reasonable: It’s a tough world, and there are costs for not liking the same things that your friends seem to like and not following the path that the successful people follow. An economist (or a parent with an MBA) would wonder how Maria could possibly get her act together to accumulate enough human capital to make herself an attractive worker for an enterprise that made real money so that she could afford the good things in life. 

But here’s the thing: Reasonable people doing reasonable things are extremely capable (especially en masse) of gradually accepting things that they would have rejected as ugly, unreasonable, or immoral as children. You can sense that the nuns and the Captain are themselves not quite sure what’s wrong with Maria’s behavior. Their expressions betray the knowledge that their reasons are simultaneously flimsy and stuffy. The surrounding context of The Sound of Music is the gradual acceptance of the Nazis by reasonable people who, if asked a year or two earlier, would have said, “That would be horrible,” but now have convinced themselves it’s not so bad, that there isn’t much choice, there will still be parties for some people. They are adapting.

Maybe the Alps in the 1930s doesn’t resonate with you. (Or maybe the encroaching threat of fascism feels too resonant.) So I propose that we consider the case of Singapore, a stop on our climate handbook’s A tour of temperature. The equatorial city-state is a model of economic development, of investment in human capital, and of physical capital overcoming a challenging environment. 

In the early 1960s, Singapore was a poor, chaotic, dangerous island in the midst of global political turmoil. Mortality rates were exceptionally high. By 1980, 15 years after the island city was expelled from Malaysia during a time of military and racial violence, the country’s per capita income was half of the average developed country. Today Singapore’s per capita income is 50% higher than that of the average developed country, its citizens live long lives, and the country has exceptionally low rates of violence. Not surprisingly, people who are interested in policies, strategies, and the relationship between states and markets look to Singapore for inspiration.

Founded in a crucible of danger, with temperatures and humidity close to the human body’s natural limits, it was rational and in many ways admirable for Singapore’s adults to teach their children to follow best practices of successful people in rich countries, to shape their country’s policies to attract industry and investment, and to accumulate financial wealth so that everyone could afford air conditioning. Singapore is often called a paternalistic society, and its parents were diligent and mindful, keeping the island free of not just pornography, drugs, and other potential social ills like chewing gum, but myriad forms of social experimentation and rebellion. Singaporean children studied hard, were given access to useful, powerful screens and high-speed internet, and were shielded from increasingly uncomfortable weather.

As Singapore was growing stable and rich, the political scientist and anthropologist James Scott spent years in neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia studying the opposite: how people resisted authority, especially how agrarian and rural communities relied on their own knowledge of the world to rebel against grand state and corporate plans. After decades of accumulating examples and lessons, in 1998, Scott published Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. It’s the best thing I’ve read about how choosing objectives like the ones to which I was so drawn for the first 30 years of my adulthood can lead to a kind of blindness. His book’s opening lines are these:

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.

Scott shows the reader what he means by taking them to the forests of Europe. 

The early modern European state, even before the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs… Lurking behind the number indicating revenue yield were not so much forests as commercial wood, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth.

From a naturalist’s perspective, nearly everything was missing from the state’s narrow frame of reference. Gone was the vast majority of flora: grasses, flowers, lichens, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and vines. Gone, too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable species of insects. Gone were most species of fauna, except those that interested the crown’s gamekeepers. 

From an anthropologist’s perspective, nearly everything touching on human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state’s tunnel vision. The state did pay attention to poaching, which impinged on its claim to revenue in wood or its claim to royal game, but otherwise it typically ignored the vast, complex, and negotiated social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage, fishing, charcoal making, trapping, and collecting food and valuable minerals as well as the forest’s significance for magic, worship, refuge, and so on.

My point is not to criticize or valorize European forest managers or the Singaporean government but to point out how societal choices change the very nature of living things. European landowners, guided by their simplifications, started creating forests that complied with their objectives and even looked like ledgers: neat, evenly spaced rows of trees with no troublesome “underbrush” (one of many forestry terms invented to dismiss non-lumber aspects of a forest) or other living species. In Singapore—and in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, all of which have had similarly impressive economic success—children live overwhelmingly indoors, focusing on short distances as they pursue rigorous studies and human capital–building pursuits. In response, their bodies have changed. 

Fifty years ago, about 20% of 20-year-olds in these countries were myopic. Today the number is above 80%. Up to 20% of Singaporean children today have what is called high myopia, which means that their eyeballs are so elongated that there is serious risk of retinal detachment. If all the lights in Singapore were to go out, few children would be able to see the thousands of stars that would have dazzled the eyes of all of the previous children in the history of our species. They are adapted to a different world, and children in every country around the world are following their lead.

Wild geese that used to fly with the moon on their wings

While wealthy societies engage in a lackluster debate about how vigorously to address climate change, every landscape is already changing. Glaciers have been shrinking rapidly everywhere. According to Andreas Kellerer-Pirklbauer, the head of the glacier measuring service at the University of Graz in Austria, “There might be some remnants in shadowed locations, but de facto in 40 to 45 years all of Austria will be pretty much ice-free.”¹ Austrian adults have to decide what to tell and teach their children, as do all other adults of every species, everywhere else in the world. 

Geese have noticed the lack of snow and have decided in many places not to bother teaching their children to migrate. Invasive pests are taking advantage of warmer, wetter winters to lay eggs further and further north so that their offspring can devour all kinds of defenseless trees. Trees, meanwhile, are pumping out pollen many more months of the year as they try to figure out how to survive the changing seasons and possibly discover new places to send their offspring. Fish and crustaceans—adapted to specific water temperatures, oxygen levels, predators, and prey—are looking for new places to breed, hoping their descendants can find enough to eat and carry on their legacies. Every species is trying to adapt. The faster and further the climate changes, the fewer species will survive. 

Lanier’s single vibrant flower overwhelmed people as they returned from virtual reality to the world they already lived in. Our choices in the coming years will determine how many beautiful flowers, trees, and all manner of species people of the future will be able to turn to when they look away from their screens. On our current path, their physical reality will be more like old virtual reality with its low resolution, limited color scale, and lack of complexity. Humans in much of the world are already, mostly unconsciously, teaching their children to move indoors and reduce their fields of vision. Most parents sense it’s not great, but the children like what they like and they like what their friends like online. Plus, staying inside is a reasonable adaptation to year-round allergies, smoky air, increasing threats from viral ticks and mosquitoes, extreme rainfall, higher levels of heat and humidity, and a less interesting sky. The outside isn’t what it used to be, and the inside gets brighter all the time.

The rational economist says that having less of “something like the environment” is indeed more than offset by digital abundance as the lines on the graphs that matter to him keep going up and to the right. He would say that my argument is one of aesthetics, and that those are personal. If I thought there were even a moderate chance that he was right, I would probably not publish this essay. I’m confident he is wrong. 

In each of these seasonal essays, I show how climate change will likely affect civilization. With each passing season, it becomes clearer to me that climate change will undermine the things you care about, regardless of what your favorite things are. Seeing Like a State was a warning that the kinds of simplifications that make the world easily tractable lead to the destruction of things that matter for a healthy society. The book helped me see the risks of dismissing aesthetics, beauty, and complexity even if all you care about are numbers. Choosing beauty and vitality may sound sentimental and aesthetic. It is. Choosing not to value beauty and vitality is like choosing to live in a world without the sound of music. It will also lead to a world that is fundamentally poorer in economic terms.

Marrying the baroness

Most people don’t watch The Sound of Music and think, “He really should have married the baroness,” but I know people who would. I can make the case for the baroness, and I think that case will seem stronger the more the climate changes. First of all, she’s conventionally pretty and seems nice enough, so even if you like Maria more, it’s not a terrible tradeoff in those departments. And the assets! She’s definitely got a big house with air conditioning, lots of big TVs, and amazing broadband. In fact, she’s probably got multiple houses, so she can “live” in a warm, tax-free place for six months and a day and leave when the weather gets inhuman for her cooler retreat in the summer months (and can shift to an even cooler retreat further north and up the mountain as temperatures rise). She’s fashionable, so she knows how to like what other people like and will continue to adjust as likes change. She’s able to accommodate different political regimes. She’s adaptable to certain kinds of change.

For over 10,000 years, people could live all over the world in simply built homes, in comfortable relationships with the land and ecosystems around them. As the atmosphere warms, what we consider a comfortable life will require more money. Homes will become more like fortresses that require capital and technology to protect residents from the increasingly unfriendly elements. Billions of people will consider moving because of drought, extreme heat, and flooding. To keep them, cities and states will need capital to build new sewer systems, roads, and clean water facilities and replace other infrastructure that was built for a different, milder climate. Food will become both increasingly expensive and less diverse as it is engineered for harsher conditions and pollinated mechanically. Taxes for the military will go up to keep the desperate and the migrants away. And then there will be the unknown costs of a brighter sky. 

Over the past 30 years, economics, technology, and finance first attracted and ultimately were taken over by people whose powerful skill is simplifying complex aspects of life to make them tractable. They were driven by abstractions and money. They saw the world as a set of patterns to be estimated and exploited, a set of problems to be solved. Their definitions of success were simultaneously grandiose and bland. They thought more and more like states as they chose their favored metrics (elasticity, churn, melt, lag, yield, EBITDA, free cash flow, conversion rate, scalability, carry, float, ROI, etc.).

As this group of people ascended the domains I studied and worked in, I watched how their thinking shaped the enterprises, markets, and communities they increasingly dominated. Most startlingly, I watched how young people entered the fields of economics, technology, and finance ever more preconditioned to cut to the chase, to find the clever, incisive insight that would reveal an exploitable pattern. They were eager to make their call and get their share of the upside. “Captain von Trapp should have married the baroness” is exactly the kind of thing they would love to say in an interview.

I learned a lot from these twentysomethings because they were so brazen, unfiltered, and willing to see things to their logical conclusions. One of them came to my office to talk about climate change in 2015 or so. He’d read my work. He agreed with my conclusions, including that it would be devastating economically to do nothing. He knew it was an out-of-consensus view, the kind of thing he was hungry for. It took me a while to realize, however, that he wasn’t there to learn from me or to tell me his clever idea for shorting a set of stocks or bonds. He wanted to help me emotionally. He wanted to protect me from disappointment. He was advising me to adapt. He was telling me the equivalent of “Accept the baroness. It will make your life easier.” What he actually said was, “None of these people are really going to do anything. It’s not going to be worth it to them. Eventually they will just decide to shoot sulfur dioxide into the sky.” 

Ten years later, his forecast is on track. As we pass 1.5°C of atmospheric warming, most leaders in economics, technology, and finance continue to see climate change as a marginal issue, an unfortunate tradeoff. They are still focused on leveraging their own “flywheels” to achieve “speed and scale.” The complex problem of climate change will eventually reveal itself to this group of powerful people in the form of lost revenue or unsteady housing markets or another impingement on their key performance indicators. When that happens, they will undoubtedly seek one essential climate measure and train their sights and funds on the simplest, cheapest solution they can find. This will logically lead to brightening the sky so that fewer of the sun’s rays reach us. A fine mist of aerosolized sulfur dioxide (or something similar) could be sprayed into the stratosphere to block the sun’s daytime rays. We don’t know what the consequences will be for any other living thing, nor for us, but it would certainly cool the atmosphere quickly. It’s also certain that less starlight would reach our planet and more of the light that shoots out of our buildings, vehicles, and devices would bounce back at us from above. Elizabeth Kolbert’s book about this is called Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. 

We can choose how we adapt. We can defend possibilities for young people now and in the future. I believe this process starts by looking around and identifying things that enable and embody complexity, beauty, and wonder. Our work at Probable Futures is to make the consequences of climate change vivid and resonant so that people can decide which future they want to live in, which they need to prepare for, and how hard they should work to convince others to change their behavior, work together, and plan. If we adapt with intent and care, we can leave more of the environment in which humans thrive and more choices for everyone to come. It’s what the von Trapps did.

Hearing like a person  

In the movie, the von Trapps win first place in the Salzburg Music Festival then sneak out the back of the theater as the Nazis wait inside the theater to imprison the family after their encore. They hide in the abbey and cross the border to Switzerland on foot. In reality, the von Trapps’ singing fame had earned them an invitation to perform in America, so they packed their bags, caught what may have been the last train out of Austria for Genoa, Italy, and carried on to New York. They wound up touring the US as a musical act singing traditional songs, bringing the best of European culture to communities across the country as the Continent descended into carnage.

The main difference between real life and the movie seems to be the remarkable character of Captain von Trapp. He was the premier submarine pilot of the Austro-Hungarian Navy who encouraged his children to sing. He refused to fly a Nazi flag or serve in the German navy despite lavish overtures (including more singing gigs, an offer to perform for the Führer, and a job as a doctor for one of his sons). He wasn’t tempted by a baroness. He was wary of the simplifications and persuasions of a state that sought power and riches. As his son Johannes said in a 1998 interview, the family was guided not by “upper class standards” but by “environmental sensitivity [and] artistic sensitivity.” ² These principles saved the lives of Captain von Trapp’s children. 

There’s something about music, perhaps especially about singing, that can keep us in touch with what makes life truly wonderful. For months now, I’ve had “My Favorite Things” running through my head, and I’ve come to think that putting a list of goals and values to music and singing them aloud is a good way to test whether those goals and values are actually worthy. If you’re not willing to sing your favorite things aloud, you might want to reconsider those things. Maria’s melodies are a very good place to start, but if you need inspiration, the internet, whose record I would say thus far is pretty mixed on many fronts, has made a world of inspiring music available. It’s one of the things I’m grateful for.

I hope that you are well and that your life has a great deal of music in it.

Onward,

Spencer

PS: I have started keeping track of the things around me in a way I didn’t before. I want to be more aware of what’s changing. On the night of December 31, nine days after today’s solstice, there will be a new moon. It will thus be the darkest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. If the weather is clear, I will be going outside to see how many stars I can count in the sky. I invite you to do the same.