The power to think ahead in a reckless age

So in the winter of 2012,

I went to visit my grandmother's house

in South India,

a place, by the way,

where the mosquitos have a special taste
for the blood of the American-born.

(Laughter)

No joke.

When I was there,
I got an unexpected gift.

It was this antique instrument

made more than a century ago,

hand-carved from a rare wood,

inlaid with pearls

and with dozens of metal strings.

It's a family heirloom,

a link between my past,

the country where my parents were born,

and the future,

the unknown places I'll take it.

I didn't actually realize it
at the time I got it,

but it would later become
a powerful metaphor for my work.

We all know the saying,

"There's no time like the present."

But nowadays, it can feel like
there's no time but the present.

What's immediate and ephemeral
seems to dominate our lives,

our economy, and our politics.

If you think about it, our species
evolved to think ahead,

to chart the stars,

dream of the afterlife,

sow seeds for later harvest.

Some scientists call this superpower
that we have "mental time travel,"

and it's responsible for pretty much
everything we call human civilization,

from farming to the Magna Carta

to the internet,

all first conjured in the minds of humans.

But let's get real:

if we look around us today,

we don't exactly seem to be
using this superpower quite enough,

and that begs the question, why not?

What's wrong is how our communities,
businesses and institutions are designed.

They're designed in a way
that's impairing our foresight.

I want to talk to you about
the three key mistakes

that I think we're making.

The first mistake is what we measure.

When we look at the quarterly
profits of a company

or its near term stock price,

that's often not a great measure
of whether that company's

going to grow its market share
or be inventive in the long run.

When we glue ourselves to the test scores
that kids bring back from school,

that's not necessarily what's great
for those kids' learning

and curiosity in the long run.

We're not measuring
what really matters in the future.

The second mistake we're making
that impairs our foresight

is what we reward.

When we celebrate a political leader
or a business leader

for the disaster she just cleaned up

or the announcement she just made,

we're not motivating that leader

to invest in preventing
those disasters in the first place,

or to put down payments on the future
by protecting communities from floods

or fighting inequality

or investing in research and education.

The third mistake
that impairs our foresight

is what we fail to imagine.

Now, when we do think about the future,

we tend to focus on predicting
exactly what's next,

whether we're using horoscopes
or algorithms to do that.

but we spend a lot less time imagining
all the possibilities the future holds.

When the Ebola outbreak
emerged in 2014 in West Africa,

public health officials around the world
had early warning signs

and predictive tools

that showed how
that outbreak might spread,

but they failed to fathom that it would,

and they failed to act
in time to intervene,

and the epidemic grew to kill
more than 11,000 people.

When people with lots of resources
and good forecasts

don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,

they're often failing to imagine
how dangerous they can be.

Now, none of these mistakes
that I've described,

as dismal as they might sound,

are inevitable.

In fact, they're all avoidable.

What we need to make
better decisions about the future

are tools that can aid our foresight,
tools that can help us think ahead.

Think of these as something like
the telescopes that ship captains of yore

used when they scanned the horizon,

only instead of for looking
across distance and the ocean,

these tools are for looking
across time to the future.

I want to share with you a few of
the tools that I've found in my research

that I think can help us with foresight.

The first tool I want to share with you

I think of as making
the long game pay now.

This is Wes Jackson, a farmer
I spent some time with in Kansas.

And Jackson knows that the way

that most crops are grown
around the world today

is stripping the Earth
of the fertile topsoil

we need to feed future generations.

He got together
with a group of scientists,

and they bread perennial grain crops
which have deep roots

that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,

preventing erosion
and protecting future harvests.

But they also knew

that in order to get farmers
to grow these crops in the short run,

they needed to boost
the annual yields of the crops

and find companies willing
to make cereal and beer using the grains

so that farmers could reap profits today
by doing what's good for tomorrow.

And this is a tried-and-true strategy.

In fact, it was used
by George Washington Carver

in the South of the United States
after the Civil War

in the early 20th century.

A lot of people have probably heard
of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,

the products in recipe
that he came up with

that made the peanut so popular.

But not everyone knows
why Carver did that.

He was trying to help
poor Alabama sharecroppers

whose cotton yields were declining,

and he knew that planting
peanuts in their fields

would replenish those soils

so that their cotton yields
would be better a few years later.

But he also knew it needed
to be lucrative for them in the short run.

All right, so let's talk about
another tool for foresight.

This one I like to think of as keeping
the memory of the past alive

to help us imagine the future.