Month: June 2019

Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.

If he is, it would hardly be his only accomplishment: Stephenson is the author of some of the most prescient and beloved science fiction of the last 30 years, including Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Seveneves. He has been both disciple and muse to the most powerful men in tech—the inventors of the internet and the iPad, for starters. He was an early employee at Blue Origin, the private space firm founded by Jeff Bezos, and has worked with the Long Now Foundation to promote optimistic science fiction designed to lead to actual technological innovation. He is the sort of writer whose novels include descriptions of vast nanotech defense systems, as well as of incredibly elaborate methods for eating Cap’n Crunch, complete with a special spoon. He keeps his head shaved and wears a gray-streaked goatee, a look that is part heavy metal wizard, part monk.  

I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto. What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?

That this outlandish possibility even exists suggests the ingenuity of his mind and the depth of his influence. It’s plausible that Neal Stephenson invented, or helped invent, Bitcoin, because that is simply the sort of thing that Neal Stephenson might do.

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For nearly three decades, Stephenson’s novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture. His novel Anathem is, among other things, an elaborate investigation into the philosophy of knowledge. His new book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, pursues these themes literally beyond the grave, into the complications of estate planning and cryogenics. Satoshi Nakamoto sounds like a Neal Stephenson character name. Satoshi Nakamoto’s initials are SN; Neal Stephenson’s are NS.

Of course, Stephenson is far from the only person obsessed with these topics. His early work was heavily influenced by the cypherpunks, a coalition of hacker-technologists obsessed with cryptography, distributed information platforms, and science fiction (the title Cryptonomicon was inspired partly by the Cyphernomicon, a cypherpunk FAQ). It is possible he was and is simply drawing from the same pool of ideas and influences that eventually resulted in the creation of Bitcoin.

But consider this brief history. In 1995—more than a decade before the birth of bitcoin—Stephenson published his fourth novel, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. About two-thirds of the way through the book, there’s a passage describing the “media net,” an anonymous peer-to-peer communications system “designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security so that people could use it to transfer money.” Nation-states as we now know them have collapsed, the story explains, because “financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments,” rendering tax collection impossible. (While he’s at it, Stephenson breezily imagines technologies that resemble both the iPad and Alexa-style artificial intelligence voice recognition as well.)

Four years later, Stephenson published Cryptonomicon, a large adult son of a novel that traces both the World War II origins of cryptography, and efforts by a group of ’90s-era hacker-entrepreneurs to set up a system of anonymous online banking and digital currency outside the reach of traditional governments. He followed this with The Baroque Cycle, a trio of novels, each approximately the size of a piece of industrial farm equipment, exploring the historical foundations of math, money, and modern philosophy.

Stephenson, in other words, described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality. At bare minimum, you can be sure he spent a lot of time thinking about these concepts and the technical challenges they might pose. Even if Stephenson had no direct role in the creation of Bitcoin, it is hard to imagine that its creators were not aware of, and likely heavily influenced by, his writing.

Stephenson’s vision of an anonymous, decentralized currency jumped the chasm between fiction and fact in 2008, with the publication of what is now referred to as the “Bitcoin white paper.” The paper, which describes a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that would circumvent both government-issued currency and traditional financial institutions, was signed by Satoshi Nakamoto, a shadowy figure whose identity or identities has yet to be revealed.

A few years later, Stephenson published REAMDE, a contemporary thriller about a draft-dodging marijuana Sherpa who came to found a video game company built partly around the conversion of in-game gold to real-world currency. The story explores many of the challenges of moving money across both national and virtual boundaries, and it features as its protagonist Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, a middle-aged guy who, like Stephenson, lives in the Pacific Northwest and grew up in Iowa. Forthrast has, in his middle age, become rather rich, on the order of tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. By this time, Bitcoin was up and running, and Nakamoto, whoever that is, retained a fairly large stash, which would have made the owner quite wealthy.

His new novel, Fall, once again revolves around Forthrast. He is older, and has become a billionaire several times over. The novel frequently delves into topics such as the legal and organizational structure of nonprofits and foundations, and how, through guided philanthropy, large fortunes take on lives of their own after the deaths of their makers.

Fall is, at least in part, a novel about very, very rich people entering the later stages of their lives and considering their legacies, financial and otherwise. Just as Stephenson’s earlier works made clear that he had spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of currency and what a digital version of it might look like, Fall suggests that the dispensing of great wealth is something that has occupied his thoughts.

Bitcoin prices have fluctuated wildly over the years, but in late 2017, when the novel was being drafted, the Nakamoto stash, approximately 980,000 Bitcoin, would have been worth about $19 billion, making a single owner among the 50 richest people on the planet. So far, the stash hasn’t been touched. But tt seems likely that whoever it belongs to has spent more than a little time thinking about what to do with that fortune, presuming he or she is still alive.

Whether or not he played any knowing part in the creation of Bitcoin, Stephenson has unarguably shaped the technological culture we live in,  from iPads and AI assistants to the private space race and the augmented reality revolution that waits just over the horizon. In Fall, he wades into debates about social media, the rural-coastal divide, and radical life extension. Stephenson is not merely a fantasist of the future; he is a prophet of our present, a virtual architect of the ideas that define our world. If he did invent Bitcoin, it wouldn’t be the first time Stephenson wrote a new reality into existence.

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You could make a case that Neal Stephenson kind of, sort of invented the internet. Not the specific technology, or even the terminology, but the idea of it, the sense of what it could do, what it should do, and how people might live with, and even inside, it.

His 1992 novel, Snow Crash, published just as the World Wide Web as we know was coming into existence, imagined the online world, or Metaverse, as a virtual gathering place, one where people could adopt new identities that both departed from and expanded on their offline selves. It was a space for invention and reinvention, both technological and social, in which businesses, entrepreneurs, scammers, criminals, and even some relatively ordinary people went to play, make money, find friendship, and generally escape from their offline lives. Although the particulars were different, it functioned a lot like the internet as we know it today.

Stephenson wasn’t the first or only science fiction writer to envision something like the internet: In the 1980s, William Gibson gave us the early language of virtual reality in Neuromancer, and, in Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card concocted a future in which online news nets allowed anonymous young columnists working from home to shape global politics—essentially, blogging. Throughout the decade, cyberpunk authors (who are somewhat distinct from the cypherpunks) gave the coming connected world grit, grime, and attitude.

But Stephenson’s idea was that the internet would be a place, a virtual space with formal rules and unspoken conventions, somewhere people would go to hang out and spend time, that it would have culture, or rather a lot of them, clashing and colliding and mixing with each other, just like people and cultures do in the real world. The internet wasn’t just a technology for delivering and organizing information; it was an entirely new world existing in parallel to, and on top of, this one.

And one of the most prominent features of the place was that it would allow you to reinvent yourself; to be better, stronger, stranger, or more powerful than you could ever be in real life. Denizens of the Metaverse took the form of digital avatars—stylish figures that they controlled. Low-quality public terminals made the experience accessible to everyone, but those with the means could pay to upgrade the visual fidelity of their experience, creating a world of high and low culture, and strivers trying to make the leap from one tier of society to the next.

What Stephenson understood before almost anyone else was that the online experience, which allowed for both anonymity and a departure from the physical constraints of meatspace, would upend the idea of a fixed individual identity. Being online meant the possibility (if not the guarantee) of being free to be someone else.

In the decades since Snow Crash, Stephenson’s freewheeling, anarchic vision has paid real world dividends, not only in the broad contours of the way it predicted the evolution of the internet and online culture, but in specific applications, especially with regards to virtual reality (V.R.), and its even-more-promising cousin technology, augmented reality (A.R.), which seeks to create a second virtual layer on top of the existing physical universe.

In 2018, Amazon released Sumerian, a platform for the development of A.R. and V.R. software; its name was inspired by Snow Crash, which posts ancient Sumerian as a kind of ancient, biological programming language. In addition to writing novels, Stephenson also works as Chief Futurist for Magic Leap, a major augmented reality startup that has received more than $2 billion in funding. It has long been rumored that Second Life, a proto-social network built as a sprawling, three-dimensional virtual space, was modeled directly on Snow Crash‘s Metaverse.

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The Metaverse was an archetypal Stephenson invention—not just a useful technology, but an entire rowdy culture, one with risks and dangers, a complex set of status signals, a sense of both danger and unlimited potential. So while it would be easy to simply categorize Stephenson as an adept technological prognosticator, it would also be a mistake. His true gift is not only to see how technology will evolve, but how society will transform along with it, segmenting into tribes and factions who live in radically different yet overlapping styles. He is science fiction’s great cultural extrapolator.

The high-low tension that exists in Snow Crash is, if anything, even more pronounced in The Diamond Age, which is set in a world where tech-savvy elites have retreated into cloistered enclaves, some of which fetishize Victorian fashion and manners, while poorer and less educated “thetes” content themselves with vulgar, mindless, often pornographic cultural pursuits and the low-quality abundance that has come from a world in which atoms are near-infinitely malleable.

The book follows two main narrative paths: In one, a Victorian nanotech designer falls from grace after he attempts to provide his daughter with a stolen copy of the Primer, a specialized, iPad-like “book” that customizes its lessons to its owner. In the other, a young thete girl named Nell is given a copy of the book, and slowly advances her way through the sociological strata.

The setting, in which in which rich, highly educated tech workers live lives of intense personal restraint and desperately attempt to pmart bourgeoisie values and wealth to their children while the lower classes engage in the mindless pursuit of lowbrow pleasure, feels strangely relevant, like something out of a David Brooks column, or a conservative book club: If it were published today, it might be called Nanotech Elegy. Though it was written more than two decades ago, the novel’s social hierarchy seems to predict much of the Trump-era debate about the cultural divergence between the rural working class and the high-tech coastal elite.

The novel both acknowledges the importance of strong cultures, and also seems to argue that they are far from determinative when it comes to individual outcomes. One also gets the sense that the book was born partially out of frustration with traditional schooling; the leader of the Victorians was deeply bored with his schooling, and orders the Primer created in hopes of helping his daughter escape from its stifling conventions.

These sorts of cultural divisions appear repeatedly in Stephenson’s oeuvre: His 2008 novel Anathem tells a far future story of a world in which intellectuals charged with preventing the collapse of society live highly ordered monastic lives with extremely limited use of technology, and are prevented from any interaction with the outside world except on very rare, highly proscribed occasions. The final section of Seveneves is set in a post-extinction Earth, in which the human species has been reengineered into seven genetically and dispositionally distinct castes. Reamde, which is set partially in Iowa, returns again and again to notions of middle-American self-reliance, politeness, and competence, often juxtaposed with more conventionally liberal coastal values and attitudes.

Stephenson’s latest, Fall, takes place in an information-overloaded near-future where news and social media—which he dubs the Miasma—have become unfathomably chaotic. As a result, wealthy, educated residents of high-tech coastal cities hire personalized “editors” to manage their information streams. Poorer, rural, more traditionally conservative populations—they are fond of guns and violent, cultish religious practice—access unedited or algorithm-managed feeds of garbage news, and come to believe all manner of myths and falsehoods as a result.

These are concepts that Stephenson has toyed with for years: The Diamond Age notes briefly that the rich tend to read the same elite newspapers, rather than the personally customized trash favored by the lower classes. But it is not much of a stretch to say that it is a novel partially about the problem of fake news and online trolling.

Yet Stephenson, ever the problem solver, has also imagined a series of solutions—editors, public feeds, an anonymity system that allows people granular control over their digital identities. When one character’s reputation is threatened by an online character attack, our protagonists respond by releasing a massive dump of false and derogatory information about her—putting so much bad info into her search results that no one believes any of it. One way to fight bad information, he seems to suggest, is even more bad information.

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Fall may not be Stephenson’s best novel, but it might be his most Stephensonian.

At roughly 900 pages, it is a smorgasbord of acronyms and ideas, action and exposition, characters and subplots. It sometimes feels more like a dozen novels, and a binder full of white papers, stuffed into a single book. It is sprawling not in the way of a city, but of a country or a continent; it begins as a science-fictional exploration of extending life through digitized brains, detours into a road-trip adventure through an America half-wrecked by AR and social media, briefly considers the privacy implications of a permanently connected society, pauses to explore both the ethical and technical implications of a world in which human consciousness can be digitally reanimated (the power consumption of large server farms turns out to be an important issue), and then, somehow, morphs into a quasi-fantasy novel inspired by the Bible, J.R.R. Tolkien, World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, Dante, and Greek mythology.

Actually, it’s a wonder it’s only 900 pages.

Through it all, he maintains a keen sense not only the ways that technology might evolve, but the cultural shifts it might entail, from news and social media to leadership and social structures in a virtual afterlife where people have limited senses of the self. Fall is not just a book about futuristic technology; it is an extended sci-fi thought experiment about the long-term evolution of human culture.

There is something similar to be said about bitcoin. Yes, it’s virtual money, with all sorts of implications for government-issued fiat currency and global markets. But it is also something larger, something more intrinsically conceptual—a system for the creation of trust between two anonymous parties without the aid of a government or other third party. Bitcoin is an idea, a very Stephensonian idea, about the ways that fragmented, atomized, disorganized people can, ultimately, figure out how to work together without the need for a stifling order to be imposed from above. It’s a technology of productive cooperation.

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Stephenson is no utopian. His novels are filled with schemers, criminals, corporate hacks, goons, weirdos, bureaucrats, and politicians, who are generally regarded as a nuisance, at best. They occasionally detour in the kind of massive, antic shootouts that have irresistible appeal to a firearms enthusiast like Stephenson. But he is, at core, an optimist, someone who believes that humans can solve the problems they face.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Seveneves. The book starts with the explosion of the moon into seven large fragments, and the rapid realization that those large fragments will quickly break up, rain down on the planet, and make Earth unlivable for thousands of years. Governments, scientists, and billionaire entrepreneurs come up with a slew of schemes to help the species survive, and Stephenson, who once worked on rocket alternatives and trajectory analysis for private space company Blue Origin, describes them in extensive mathematical detail. The best of these schemes are based on distributed technologies rather than top-down planning.

Thanks in part to political interference, after nearly 600 pages, the schemes all appear to have failed, leaving just a small band of women alive. But this is a Neal Stephenson novel, which means that having read almost 600 pages, you’ve still got several hundred to go.

So after the single most bonkers section header of any novel I have ever encountered—it just says “FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER”—Stephenson picks up the story, and explains how a genetically modified form of humanity survived, and then eventually reveals that many of the apparently failed schemes (living underground or under water, heading off to Mars) appear to have worked too, creating new evolutionary strands of humanity, and new human cultures, in the process. Humans lived through the planetary apocalypse, and it just made them weirder. 

This relentless, unbounded optimism is not merely an approach to narrative. It is a philosophy of existence.

Over the past several years, Stephenson has devoted a considerable amount of energy to encouraging science fiction writers to create positive visions of the future, as opposed to the crusty, hopeless dystopias that often seem to dominate the field. Anathem was inspired partly by the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit designed to support long-term thinking about humanity’s future. And Stephenson has worked with Arizona State University’s Project Hieroglyph, which in 2014 published an anthology of short stories imagining non-dystopian futures, in hopes, he has said, of inspiring inventions that could be made real in Stephenson’s lifetime. In his public speaking, he casually avers that the solar system has enough resources to meet essentially endless human demand. There are no limitations except the ones we place on ourselves.

“What science fiction can do” Stephenson once told Lightspeed Magazine, “is provide not just an idea for some specific technical innovation, but also supply a coherent picture of that innovation being integrated into a society and an economy.” More than almost any other contemporary fiction writer, Stephenson maintains a boundless faith in human ingenuity, in our capacity to overcome challenges through a combination of wit, cleverness, technical expertise, and exhaustive, exhausting, persistence—which, come to think of it, describes Stephenson’s fiction as well. Whether or not he is the real-world individual lurking behind Bitcoin’s avatar, Satoshi Nakomoto, he remains a science fiction writer who is not only determined to entertain, but to make the world a better place—even if it means inventing that future himself.

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When I was thirteen years old I won an essay contest, “What the United Nations Means to Me,” with Eleanor Roosevelt serving as a judge. She noted the similarity in our names. I was Eleanor Roeloffs, and getting singled out in that way by a former First Lady lauded for her human rights work made a big impression on me. I didn’t know much about politics then, but I knew enough to understand that she was a driving force behind what the United Nations stood for and that I wanted to be on her side.

I learned to define my politics and values by identifying heroes to look up to and follow. I think a country does the same thing. The people we choose to elevate and remember over time signify the American narrative. In my own life, the social justice movements that shaped me individually and America as a country, which despite our problems remains the envy of the world, are the civil rights movement, the fight for women’s liberation, and the mobilization against the Vietnam War.

These social movements are America’s story, and they’re my story as a woman born in the middle of the last century whose life was made measurably better amid these broad strokes of history.

Young people coming of age today are shaped by Black Lives Matter, the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, and the advocacy for LGBTQ rights, which led to the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage in a landmark ruling on 26 June 2015. The progress in this area has been remarkably swift in sweeping away political opposition once thought intractable.

For those who despair about our current state of extreme partisanship, I would urge them to turn away from partisan politics and celebrate the progress of the disability rights movement as an analogue of the gay rights and civil rights movements in freeing people to be fully productive citizens. I am also watching with enormous pride the emergence of the next generation of activists, born out of horror at mass shootings and determined to assert their right to be safe from military-style weapons.

Set in motion by Parkland, Florida, high school students who survived a school shooting that killed seventeen of their classmates, people of all ages rallied on 24 March 2018 in Washington and cities all over the country, and indeed the world, in solidarity against a permissive gun culture that sanctions military-grade weaponry in the hands of civilians claiming the protection of the Second Amendment.

Social movements take a long time. They don’t make change overnight. If you ask people who waited sometimes for decades to marry the person they love whether the Supreme Court ruling in 2015 legalizing same-sex marriage happened quickly, they would likely say no, it was a long time coming. They’re right, of course, but when we consider how fast things moved once the groundwork was laid, and the courts got involved, and constitutional protections were put in place, it’s possible the same shift in thinking could happen around gun safety and commonsense gun laws.

I always thought that if I weren’t a reporter covering Hillary Clinton that we would be friends. I admired her intelligence and her fortitude in the face of personal challenges and stinging political defeats, and I hope she finds some comfort in the fact that she has inspired more people, especially women, to get involved in politics because she lost a race she was supposed to win than if she had actually won. They say history is written by the winners, and the record hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the Women’s March the day after President Trump’s inauguration are winners too, and they will be writing the next chapters in the American narrative.

The women’s movement popularized the phrase that the personal is political, and thanks to the internet and social media, more people have the tools to tell their stories and guide the history yet to be lived.

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Sarah Lawsky’s valuable report about this year’s entry-level law professor hires is out. And I was interested to see a trend: Both this year and last year, about half of the entry-level law professor hires have doctorate degrees.   The shift toward candidates with doctorates is not new, of course.  And it has been written about before, most memorably in Lynn LoPuck’s article Dawn of the Discipline-Based Law Faculty.

Reading over Sarah’s report, it occurred to me that someone should study a question that I don’t think has yet been answered: Is the scholarly trajectory of U.S. law professors with doctorates different from that of U.S. law professors without doctorates?  And if so, how?

Here’s my thinking.  In the current entry-level market, having a doctorate gives candidates a significant advantage.  Among the reasons for this, I think, is that law schools tend to have high tenure rates.  This makes hiring committees relatively risk-averse.  When hiring an entry-level candidate, schools want clear and objective evidence that the candidate is going to become and stay a productive scholar.  They want evidence that a candidate has scholarly discipline, an interest in ideas, and a methodology that seems likely to bear scholarly fruit.

A doctorate degree can help make that case.  Imagine you’re an appointments committee chair going through a large pile of entry-level resumes.  You see a lot of smart and accomplished junior lawyers.  But who is going to be a committed scholar?  A candidate with a doctorate will seem more likely to have the qualities you’re looking for than one without. Getting the degree shows scholarly discipline.  The subject-matter training teaches a methodology.  And the candidate’s dissertation shows the interest in ideas and (hopefully) produces the fruit.  If you’re looking for a proxy that plausibly tracks future scholarly productivity and impact, a doctorate degree can seem like a decent bet.  And I think that’s a significant part of the reason why the entry-level market favors candidates with doctorates.

The particularly interesting part of this, in my view, is that I think we now have enough professors both with and without doctorates to test whether our intuitions are correct.  The question is, has the market accurately assessed the value of doctorates?  Does having a doctorate signal what we think it signals about future productivity and impact?  And more broadly, is the scholarly trajectory of U.S. law professors with doctorates different from that of U.S. law professors without doctorates?

There would be various ways to try to measure this, of course.  Perhaps you could try to measure scholarly impact, such as by counting citations on Westlaw or on HeinOnline.  Or maybe instead you could compare scholarly output, such as by counting publications of various kinds. I don’t have any particular ideas about what approach (or combination of approaches) is the least flawed.  But it seems like something that could be a really interesting empirical study that could also shed light on a very important trend in legal academia.

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Man-made climate change (now dubbed “climate crisis” by The Guardian’s editors) poses potentially serious risks for humanity in this century. But acknowledging the hazard is not enough for a growing claque of meteorological apocalypse porn peddlers who insist that if their prescriptions for solving the problem are not followed then civilization will momentarily come to an end.

Recent hawkers of fast approaching climate doom include David Wallace-Wells in his book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, Cumbria University professor Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation” paper, and environmental activist Bill McKibben’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (my review is forthcoming).

Now comes a policy paper, Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach, from an Australian climate action advocacy group the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. The headline over at Vice says it all: “New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ in 2050.”

In his foreword to the 8-page sketch of purported climate calamity, retired Australian admiral Chris Barrie asserts that it lays “bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.”

To justify their alarm, the authors of the paper, David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, are basically channeling Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s dismal theorem. In deriving his dismal theorem, Weitzman probed what it would mean if equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)—conventionally defined as global average surface warming following a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations—exceeded the likely range of 1.5–4.5°C.

Weitzman outlined a low probability-high consequence scenario in which ECS could be as high as 10°C. Such a case would indeed be catastrophic considering that the temperature difference between now and the last ice age is about 5°C and it took several thousand years for that increase to occur.

So just how likely is such an extremely high ECS? In its Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that the “equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, extremely unlikely less than 1°C, and very unlikely greater than 6°C.” More reassuringly, a 2018 article in Climate Dynamics calculated a relatively low climate sensitivity range of between 1.1°C and 4.05°C (median 1.87°C).

The Breakthrough Centre paper rejects conventional cost-benefit analysis in favor of sketching out a “hothouse earth” scenario that relies on projections in a 2017 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article that average global temperature will exceed 3°C by 2050. They devise their scenario with the aim of alerting policymakers to the idea that climate change could turn out to be worse than current climate model projections suggest.

In their scenario, sea level rises by about 20 inches by 2050 and by 6 to 10 feet by 2100. Fifty-five percent of the world’s population is subjected annually to more than 20 days of heat “beyond the threshold of human survivability.” Wildfire, heatwaves, drought, and inundating storms proliferate. Ecosystems collapse including the Amazon rainforest, coral reefs, and the Arctic. Global crop production falls by at least 20 percent. Unbearable heat, along with food and water shortages would force billions of people to migrate. The result of this “hothouse earth” scenario would be “a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end.”

On the basis of their scenario, the authors assert that only thing that can protect human civilization is “a massive global mobilization of resources is needed in the coming decade to build a zero-emissions industrial system and set in train the restoration of a safe climate. This would be akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization.”

Before racing to embrace their scenario, let’s consider what is known about the current rate of climate change. According to relatively uncontroversial data, average global surface temperatures have increased by 0.9°C since 1880. Getting to an increase of 3°C above the pre-industrial level by 2050 would mean that temperatures would have to increase at the rate of about 0.7°C per decade from now on.

The State of the Climate in 2017 report issued last year by the American Meteorological Society cites weather balloon and satellite datasets indicating that, since 1979, the increase of global average temperature in the lower troposphere is proceeding at the rate of between 0.13°C and 0.19°C per decade. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, the rate of temperature increase since 1975 as measured by thermometers at the surface is roughly 0.15–0.20°C per decade. Basically, the rate of global temperature increase would have to triple in order to destroy civilization in the Breakthrough Centre scenario.

The flaw with constructing scenarios is that they enable our easy propensity to imagine disaster to run rampant. Scenario building, with the goal of advising policymakers and the public on how to govern the globe in the context of environmental and economic policy, has failed its practitioners spectacularly.

Probably the best example of scenario building gone badly awry is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion?. Ehrlich sketched out three dismal scenarios in which hundreds of millions of people died in the 1970s from pandemic disease, thermonuclear war, and massive cancer epidemics sparked by exposure to synthetic pesticides. In his most hopeful scenario, the “major die-back” of hundreds of millions of people starving to death in India, China, Latin America, and Africa would end by 1985. Thereafter, the world population would be being managed downward by the remaining enlightened countries to just 2 billion by 2025 and 1.5 billion by 2100. “Our only choices are a lower birth rate or a bigger death rate,” Ehrlich declared.

Much like the Breakthrough Centre policy researchers, Ehrlich proposed sweeping plans to solve what he viewed as a desperate global problem. At home, he recommended that “a federal Department of Population and Environment (DPE) should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment.” Although Ehrlich acknowledged that it would be politically impossible at the time when he wrote, he noted that “many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.”

Outside our borders, the United States and other developed countries would have to practice “triage.” Food exports and aid must be denied to hopelessly overpopulated countries such as India since that would only delay and worsen the famines that must eventually pare back their excess citizenry.

Fifty years after Ehrlich outlined his gloomy scenarios, world population is at 7.7 billion and global average life expectancy has increased from 57 years to over 72 years now. Ehrlich totally missed the scenario that actually unfolded which lowers fertility and limits population growth—the prosperity that results from the spread of economic freedom and the rule of law turns out to function as a kind of invisible hand of population control.

Nevertheless, despite the wrongheadedness of trying to use worst-case scenarios to guide policy, I have also noted that the projections of the climate and econometric models could be way underestimated.

The future trajectory of man-made climate change is not certain. Consequently, hedge fund manager Bob Litterman sensibly argues that climate change is an undiversifiable risk that would command a higher risk premium. Litterman likens climate change risk to the systemic risk that investors face in the stock market. It is hard to hedge when unknown unknowns can cause the prices of all assets to decline at once. Litterman’s analysis suggests that some policies—perhaps a revenue-neutral carbon tax—could help mitigate climate risk.

More fantasy than fact, the Breakthrough Centre scenario fails to persuade that an impending climate apocalypse threatens human extinction. Worst-case scenarios mislead far more than they enlighten. Given what is known about the rate of global temperature increase, my best judgment is that it is not yet time to panic about the imminent end of civilization.

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