Virginia Postrel has an old article on several things, but the hook is the difference between East and West Coasts, specifically Silicon Valley and Boston. It leads up to this:
In his 1988 book, SEARCHING FOR SAFETY, the late UC-Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky laid out two alternatives for dealing with risk: anticipation, the static planning that aspires to perfect foresight, and resilience, the dynamic response that relies on having many margins of adjustment:
Anticipation is a mode of control by a central mind; efforts are made to predict and prevent potential dangers before damage is done. Forbidding the sale of certain medical drugs is an anticipatory measure. Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back. An innovative biomedical industry that creates new drugs for new diseases is a resilient device. . . . Anticipation seeks to preserve stability: the less fluctuation, the better. Resilience accommodates variability; one may not do so well in good times but learn to persist in the bad.
I want to apply the distinction to our approach to climate change. Most of the things we're doing are anticipatory, central, top-down. That's good, but my general optimism is based on human resilience. There are many things going on which will enable us to survive with a reasonable standard of living. For example, in today's papers there was a brief mention of scientists working on wheat varieties which are more heat tolerant.
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