How Can We Be Better Ancestors?
Channel: New America
Date: 2019-09-24

When it comes to our finances, health, homes, and even the planet, it’s easy to avoid thinking long-term and focus instead on tomorrow, or maybe next week.

The results? Companies that fail to innovate end up failing altogether. Superbugs born out of the overuse of antibiotics endanger our health. Natural disasters turn deadly for towns that failed to take precautions. This tendency to put off hard decisions threatens the economy, politics, even our very survival, as Bina Venkataraman explains in her recent TED talk.

As an adviser in the Obama administration, Venkataraman helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change. She learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. In her new book The Optimist’s Telescope, she combines her reporting from around the world with new research to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. Rejecting the idea that human nature is impossibly reckless, she argues that we can individually, and as a society, adopt some surprising practices to help us confront the future—and leave the best possible world for those who will come after us.

Join the New America's Fellows Program and Future Tense in Washington, DC for a conversation with Bina Venkataraman, author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age and New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali on how we can become better ancestors.

Follow the conversation online using #OptimistsTelescope and by following @NAFellows and @FutureTenseNow.

Lunch will be served.

Participants:

Bina Venkataraman, @binajv
Class of 2016 National & Future Tense Fellow, New America
Director of Global Policy Initiatives, Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard
Author, The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

Wajahat Ali, @WajahatAli
New York Times Contributing Op-ed Writer
CNN Contributor
Playwright, The Domestic Crusaders

Moderator:

James Fallows, @JamesFallows
National Correspondent, The Atlantic
Board Member, New America

Copies of The Optimist’s Telescope will be available for purchase through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.


====================================

We are dedicated to renewing America by continuing the quest to realize our nation's highest ideals, honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.

Subscribe to our channel for new videos on a wide range of policy issues: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=newamericafoundation

Subscribe to The New America Weekly and other newsletters: http://www.newamerica.org/subscribe/#

Visit newamerica.org