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RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2018 by Steven Johnson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnson, Steven, author.
Title: Farsighted : how we make the decisions that matter the most / Steven Johnson.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017060305| ISBN 9781594488214 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525534709 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Decision making.
Classification: LCC BF448 .J64 2018 | DDC 153.8/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060305
p. cm.
Version_1
For Dad
What theory or science is possible where the conditions and circumstances are unknown . . . and the active forces cannot be ascertained? . . . What science can there be in a matter in which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when that moment will come?
• LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace
It is now clear that the elaborate organizations that human beings have constructed in the modern world to carry out the work of production and government can only be understood as machinery for coping with the limits of man’s abilities to comprehend and compute in the face of complexity and uncertainty.
• HERBERT SIMON
CONTENTS
Also by Steven Johnson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION:
MORAL ALGEBRA
1. MAPPING
2. PREDICTING
3. DECIDING
4. THE GLOBAL CHOICE
5. THE PERSONAL CHOICE
EPILOGUE:
WE MIGHT AS WELL GET GOOD AT IT
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
MORAL ALGEBRA
Roughly ten thousand years ago, at the very end of the last Ice Age, a surge of glacial melt broke through a thin barrier of land that connected modern-day Brooklyn and Staten Island, creating the tidal strait now known as the Narrows—the entrance to what would subsequently become one of the world’s great urban harbors, New York Bay. This geological event would prove to be both a curse and a blessing to the human beings who would subsequently live along the nearby shores. The opening to the sea was a great boon for maritime navigation, but it also allowed salt water to pour into the bay with each rising tide. Though Manhattan Island is famously bordered by two rivers, in reality, the names are misleading, since both the East River and the lower section of the Hudson are tidal estuaries, with extremely low concentrations of fresh water. The opening up of the Narrows made Manhattan Island a spectacular place to settle if you were looking for a safe harbor for your ships. But the fact that it was an island surrounded by salt water posed some real challenges if you were interested in staying hydrated, as humans are wont to do.
In the centuries before the completion of the epic aqueduct projects of the 1800s, which brought fresh drinking water to the city from rivers and reservoirs upstate, the residents of Manhattan Island—originally the Lenape tribes, then the early Dutch settlers—survived amid the salty estuaries by drinking from a small lake near the southern tip of the island, just below modern-day Canal Street. It went by several names. The Dutch called it the Kalck; later it was known as Freshwater Pond. Today it is most commonly referred to as Collect Pond. Fed by underground springs, the pond emptied out into two streams, one of which meandered toward the East River, the other draining out westward into the Hudson. At high tide, the Lenape were said to have been able to cross the entire island by canoe.
Paintings from the early eighteenth century suggest that the Collect was a tranquil and scenic spot, an oasis for early Manhattanites who wished for an afternoon’s escape from the growing trade center to its south. An imposing bluff—sometimes called Bayard’s Mount, sometimes Bunker Hill—loomed over the northeast edge of the pond. Climbing the hundred feet of elevation that led to its summit opened up a spectacular vista of the pond and its surrounding wetlands, with the spires and chimneys of the bustling town in the distance. “It was the grand resort in winter of our youth for skating,” William Duer recalled in a memoir of early New York written in the nineteenth century, “and nothing can exceed in brilliancy and animation the prospect it presented on a fine winter day, when the icy surface was alive in skaters darting in every direction with the swiftness of the wind.”
By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, commercial development had begun to spoil the Collect’s bucolic setting. Tanneries set up shop on the edge of the pond, soaking the hides of animals in tannins (including poisonous chemicals from the hemlock tree) and then expelling their waste directly into the growing city’s main supply of drinking water. The wetlands at the edge of the pond became a common dumping ground for dead animals—and even the occasional murder victim. In 1789, a group of concerned citizens—and a handful of real estate speculators—proposed expelling the tanneries and turning Collect Pond and the hills rising above into a public park. They hired the French architect and civil engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who would design Washington, DC, several years later. An early forerunner of the public-private partnerships that would ultimately lead to the renaissance of many Manhattan parks in the late twentieth century, L’Enfant’s proposal suggested that Collect Pond Park be funded by real estate speculators buying property on the borders of the preserved public space. But the plan ultimately fell through, in large part because the project’s advocates couldn’t persuade the investment community that the city would ultimately expand that far north.
By 1798, the newspapers and pamphleteers were calling Collect Pond a “shocking hole” that attracted “all the leakings, scrapings, scourings, pissings, and shittings for a great distance around.” With the pond’s water now too polluted to drink, the city decided it was better off filling the pond and the surrounding marshlands, and building a new “luxury” neighborhood on t
op of it, attracting well-to-do families who wished to live outside the tumult of the city, not unlike the suburban planned communities that would sprout up on Long Island and in New Jersey a hundred and fifty years later. In 1802, the Common Council decreed that Bunker Hill be flattened and the “good and wholesome earth” from the hill be used to erase Collect Pond from the map of New York. By 1812, the freshwater springs that had slaked the thirst of Manhattan’s residents for centuries had been buried belowground. No ordinary, surface-dwelling New Yorker has seen them since.
For a time in the early 1820s, a respectable neighborhood flourished over the former site of the pond. But before long, the city’s attempt to erase the natural landscape of the Collect fell victim to a kind of return of the repressed. Below those fashionable new homes, in the “good and wholesome earth” plowed in from Bunker Hill, microorganisms were steadily working their way through the organic material that had remained from Collect Pond’s earlier life: all those decaying animal carcasses and other biomass from the wetlands.
The work of those subterranean microbes caused two problems at ground level. As the biomass decomposed, the houses above began to sink into the earth. And as they sank, putrid smells began to emanate from the soil. The mildest rains would cause basements to flood with dank marsh water. Typhus outbreaks became routine in the neighborhood. Within a matter of years, the well-to-do residents had fled, and the housing stock had plummeted in value. The neighborhood soon became a magnet for the poorest residents of the city, for African Americans escaping slavery in the South, for the new immigrants arriving from Ireland and Italy. In the squalor of its decaying infrastructure, the neighborhood developed a reputation for crime and debauchery that echoed around the world. By the 1840s, when Charles Dickens visited it, it had become the most famous slum in the United States: Five Points.
THE FIVE-HUNDRED-YEAR MISTAKE
The story of Collect Pond is, in part, a story about a decision, or about two decisions, really. The decisions did not coincide directly in time, and neither was adjudicated by a single individual. But for the sake of shorthand we can compress them down into a simple binary: Should we preserve Collect Pond by turning it into a public park, or should we erase it? The consequences that trailed behind in the wake of that decision continue to affect the daily experiences of New Yorkers who live and work in the neighborhood today, more than two centuries later. Today, the land that was once occupied by the menacing crowds of Five Points now hosts a more wholesome, but not exactly lively, collection of government buildings and quotidian office towers. But imagine a Lower Manhattan that harbored a green oasis, perhaps the size of Boston Common, featuring a picturesque pond bordered by a rocky bluff that rivaled the heights of the man-made structures around it. We like to romanticize the Five Points era now, but the gangs of New York would have found somewhere else to assemble if the city hadn’t filled the pond. The sudden drop in real estate prices that those subterranean microbes triggered certainly helped attract the immigrants who would make the city a truly cosmopolitan center, but there were other forces driving that population influx beyond the cheap housing in Five Points. City neighborhoods are still capable of great demographic and architectural change, reinventing themselves every few generations. But once you bury the pond, it never comes back.
If L’Enfant’s plan had been put in place, it’s entirely likely that Collect Pond Park would today stand as one of the great urban idylls in the world. The National Mall in Washington, DC, which L’Enfant also designed, attracts millions of tourists each year. Formal city parks have a longevity to them that can exceed that of castles or cemeteries or forts. The decisions to create Central and Prospect Parks continue to benefit New Yorkers a hundred and fifty years after they were first contemplated, and there is every reason to suspect that the parks will survive, more or less intact, for centuries to come. Wetlands similar to Collect Pond in the Spanish city of Seville were converted into an urban park in 1574 when the Count of Barajas drained the marsh into irrigation channels and constructed a promenade lined with poplar trees. Like many similar urban spaces, the park went through some dark times in the 1970s as a den of drugs and crime, but today it prospers, its boundaries a constant island in the sea of urban change for almost five hundred years. Only the street plan itself is more durable.
When you think about it this way, it’s hard not to conceive of the decision to fill Collect Pond as a five-hundred-year mistake. But that mistake ultimately had its roots in the fact that rejecting the L’Enfant plan and burying the pond was never truly approached as a decision. It was, instead, a disorganized muddle of action and inaction. No one set out to deliberately contaminate the fresh water; the demise of the Collect was a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons. The L’Enfant plan collapsed not because the citizens didn’t want to see their pond preserved, but because a handful of speculators were fantastically shortsighted about the future growth of Manhattan.
It is a truism that we suffer from chronic short-attention spans in the twenty-first century, but the fact is, we are much better at making these sorts of decisions today. A geographic element so important to the ecology of downtown Manhattan would never be destroyed without an extensive environmental impact analysis. Stakeholders would be convened to discuss alternate land-use scenarios, and participate in group decision-making rituals like design charrettes. Economists would calculate the cost to local businesses, or potential revenue from tourists visiting a landmark urban park. Participants in this conversation would be guided by a growing scientific field called decision theory—with roots in economics, behavioral psychology, and neuroscience—that has codified a number of helpful frameworks for making these kinds of long-term decisions. None of those resources were available to the residents of Manhattan at the end of the eighteenth century. We are still capable of five-hundred-year mistakes, to be sure, but we have tools and strategies now that can help us avoid them.
The ability to make deliberative, long-term decisions is one of the few truly unique characteristics of Homo sapiens, right alongside our technological innovation and our gift for language. And we’re getting better at it. We can confront these epic choices with an intelligence and foresight that would have astonished those city planners two centuries ago.
DARWIN’S CHOICE
In July 1838, a decade or so after those fine homes began to sink into the remnants of Collect Pond, Charles Darwin sat down on the other side of the Atlantic to take notes on a decision that would, indirectly, alter the course of scientific history. Darwin was twenty-nine. He had returned from his legendary voyage around the globe on the HMS Beagle two years before, and was a few months away from sketching the first outline of natural selection in his notebooks, though he wouldn’t publish his discovery for another two decades. The decision he was wrestling with in July would play a critical role in that agonizing delay, though it was not, strictly speaking, related to scientific questions about the origins of species. It was a different kind of decision—existential as well, but of a more personal nature: Should I get married?
Darwin’s approach to this decision took a form that would be recognizable to many of us today: he made a list of pros and cons, dividing two facing pages in his notebook into two columns, one arguing for marriage and one against. Under the heading “Not Marry” he listed the following arguments:
Freedom to go where one liked
Choice of Society and little of it
Conversation of clever men at clubs
Not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle
Expense and anxiety of children
Perhaps quarrelling
Loss of Time
Cannot read in the evenings
Fatness and idleness
Anxiety and responsibility
Less money for books etc.
If many children forced to gain one’s bread (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much)
Under the heading “Marry” he compiled this list:
Children (if it Please God)
Constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one
Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
Home, & someone to take care of house
Charms of music and female chit-chat These things good for one’s health—but terrible loss of time
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all—No, no, won’t do
Imagine living all one’s day solitary in smoky dirty London House
Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps
Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlboro Street, London
Darwin’s emotional accounting survives to this day in the Cambridge University Library archives, but we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other. We do know the decision he eventually reached, not only because he scribbled “Marry, Marry, Marry QED” at the bottom of the page, but also because he did, in fact, wed Emma Wedgwood six months after writing the words. The wedding marked the beginning of a union that would bring much happiness to Darwin, but also great intellectual conflict, as his increasingly agnostic scientific worldview clashed with Emma’s religious beliefs.
Darwin’s two-column technique dates back to a famous letter written a half century before by Benjamin Franklin, responding to a plea for advice from Joseph Priestley, the British chemist and political radical. Priestley was trying to decide whether to accept a job offer from the Earl of Shelburne, which would involve moving his family from Leeds to the earl’s estate just east of Bath. Priestley had been friends with Franklin for several years, and so in the late summer of 1772 he wrote Franklin, who was then residing in London, and asked for his advice on this momentous career decision. Ever the master of self-improvement techniques, Franklin chose not to take sides in his reply but instead offered up a method for making the decision:
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