The Poverty of Our Imaginations

One of the curiosities of our age is that we devote extraordinary intellectual resources to predicting the future, while investing remarkably little in deciding what kind of future we would actually prefer.

Every few weeks another report appears telling us what lies ahead. Artificial intelligence will reshape the labour market. Rising temperatures will redraw coastlines. Demographic change will strain pension systems. Geopolitical rivalries will alter patterns of trade and power. We have become remarkably sophisticated at forecasting tomorrow.

There is obvious value in these exercises. Governments need them. Businesses rely on them. Universities increasingly organise research around them. Schools, too, have become preoccupied with preparing young people for the future that experts predict.

But forecasts answer only one kind of question. They begin with the world as it is and ask where present trends might lead. They tell us what may happen if existing institutions, technologies and patterns of behaviour continue along their present course.

A rather different question is this: if we were designing society from first principles, what kind of future would we actually choose to create?

That question seems to have become surprisingly rare.

That is why I found myself lingering over a recently published report with the rather unassuming title The Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality and Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. It wasn't the politics that interested me first. It was the method. Instead of asking where present trends might lead us, the report began by asking what kind of world would actually be worth building.

Produced by researchers at the World Inequality Lab, including Thomas Piketty and his colleagues, the report attempts something I cannot remember encountering elsewhere. It begins by describing what its authors regard as a desirable future, one that combines prosperity, socioeconomic equality and ecological sustainability, and then works backwards to explore the institutional, economic and environmental changes that such a future would require.

Readers will disagree, often passionately, with many of the report's assumptions. They will argue about taxation, redistribution, economic growth, global governance and any number of other proposals. Those disagreements are inevitable, and healthy. What struck me was that the report treats a desirable future as worthy of the same intellectual effort that we routinely devote to forecasting undesirable futures.

That simple shift in perspective stayed with me long after I had finished reading the report.

We build sophisticated models to estimate inflation decades into the future. We project carbon emissions to the end of the century. We forecast migration, productivity, fertility, energy demand and the impact of artificial intelligence on employment. Yet when the conversation turns to justice, equality or human flourishing, we often retreat into generalities. We speak of creating a "better world", but rarely attempt to describe what that world might actually look like or what it would demand of us.

Perhaps this is understandable. The moment we begin to specify a desirable future, we expose ourselves to disagreement. Every assumption can be questioned. Every trade-off can be debated. Every aspiration must eventually encounter the constraints of economics, politics and human behaviour. It is much easier to agree on values than on institutions.

Yet institutions are precisely where societies take shape.

The abolition of slavery was once dismissed as economically impossible. Universal public education, labour rights, public health systems, progressive taxation and universal suffrage were all, at different moments in history, regarded as unrealistic, impractical or dangerously utopian. None emerged because someone correctly predicted the future. They emerged because people imagined different possibilities, argued over them, refined them and, over time, built them. The history of social progress is not simply a history of responding to change. It is also a history of redesigning society.

Reading the Global Justice Report, I found myself wondering whether something has shifted in the way we think about the future. Much contemporary discussion has acquired the language of weather forecasts. Artificial intelligence will do this. Demographic change will produce that. Climate change will require these adaptations. There is an implicit assumption running through much of this conversation that the broad direction of society is already determined and that our task is simply to adapt as intelligently as possible.

Prediction has, of course, become extraordinarily sophisticated. Machine learning systems identify patterns that escape human perception. Climate models incorporate astonishing amounts of data. Economists build increasingly complex simulations. There is immense value in all of this. Prediction is becoming one of the defining capabilities of artificial intelligence. Perhaps that is precisely why imagination deserves renewed attention. That makes the human capacity to imagine and debate desirable futures more important, not less.

No amount of data can tell us what kind of society we ought to build. It cannot determine how prosperity should be shared, what obligations we owe future generations or where we should strike the balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility. Those are not predictive questions. They are civic questions. They belong as much to philosophy, politics and public deliberation as they do to economics.

Perhaps that is what I found most refreshing about the report. Whether or not its conclusions prove persuasive, it treats the design of a desirable future as a serious intellectual undertaking. It treats the design of desirable futures as something that can be described, criticised, revised and debated with the same analytical rigour that we bring to forecasting economic growth or climate change.

I suspect this matters for education as much as it does for public policy.

Schools frequently ask what knowledge and skills young people will need twenty years from now. It is an understandable question, and an important one. But beneath it lies another question that receives far less attention.

What kind of society are today's students being invited to imagine?

Every curriculum carries within it an implicit vision of the future. Every educational system embodies assumptions about the kind of citizens it hopes to cultivate and the kind of world it expects them to inhabit. Those assumptions are rarely discussed because they often appear self-evident. Yet they are, in the end, acts of collective imagination.

Schools ask students to imagine characters in novels, civilizations in history and molecules they cannot see. We ask them to imagine mathematical worlds and scientific possibilities. But how often do we ask them to imagine, with the same seriousness, the kind of society they would like to help create? If we have become reluctant to ask that question ourselves, perhaps it is not surprising that our public imagination sometimes feels so impoverished.