Sunday, January 19, 2014

Great quote about predicting the future

I just finished the book China Airborne: The Test of China's Future, by James Fallows, which is by far the most interesting book about China that I have yet read.  Fallows' narrative is entertaining and engaging, and yet he is able to use the development of a modern commercial airline industry as a very effective proxy for framing and (trying) to grasp the scale of both potentials and challenges in China.

At the very end he has a great line about the challenge in predicting China's future that I just loved:

But I know how much is in flux, and how much is at stake.  It is not an evasion of analysis but a recognition of China's complexity, and the world's, to say that a wide range of outcomes is possible, and that it is worth watching very carefully signals like those I have mentioned to recalibrate our estimates.
That's simply an awesome and elegant quote that I think captures the tentativeness and openness more or us should adopt in our thinking about the futures of complex life.

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