How to Think About the Future (Part 2): Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades | Frankly 139

About this episode

Nate Hagens discusses the importance of considering multiple possible futures through a structured scenario-building exercise.

This week's Frankly is part two of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, Nate expands on the case for holding a distribution of possible futures rather than a single preferred one, and walks through a structured scenario-building exercise. He begins with the two-by-two grid that he has used for years, which indicates whether the economy will expand or contract and whether this happens within ecological limits or in overshoot. The four quadrants this produces represent possible directions toward the future: toward green growth, Mordor, Mad Max, or the Great Simplification. From there, Nate layers three more grids on top of this economic foundation. A grid focused on power – military, political, financial, and technological – asks how concentrated each is and where the gains flow. A grid regarding geopolitics maps cooperation and adversarial relations against interdependence and self-sufficiency, using the Strait of Hormuz closure as a live example of an adversarial and interdependent geopolitical makeup. Finally, an Earth systems grid tracks climate stress and biosphere integrity, taking into account that we are operating from an already compromised baseline. Nate also…

People in this episode

Host: Nate Hagens

Topics covered

• future thinking
• scenario building
• geopolitics
• economic models
• climate stress

Keywords

• future
• scenarios
• economy
• geopolitics
• climate change

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Strait of Hormuz

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