The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age. This item is unavailable.The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

In a world where immediate satisfaction is the norm, it's easy to avoid thinking ahead. Whether it's decisions about our health (our chronic overuse of antibiotics has triggered a shocking rise in superbugs that are resistant to them), our finances (many in the UK save nothing for retirement), or our jobs, we lack the tools we need to choose what's best for the future. Today more than ever, we need to know how to make better long-term decisions. Bina Venkataraman understands this. As a former journalist and senior advisor in the Obama administration, she forged partnerships between government and business to combat climate change, and she learned first-hand why people dont think ahead. Drawing from her own experience, the stories she has reported from around the world, and new research in biology, psychology, archaeology, economics, and beyond, she identifies the best ways to make decisions that benefit us over time. She dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless, and explains the role that culture and environment play in our behaviour. She highlights the surprising and successful practices that each of us can adopt to make smarter, more thoughtful choices.

Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. Before joining the Globe, she served as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, was the director of global policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in a small town in Ohio and now lives in Boston.