Our Uncertain World

So far, humanity hasn’t done very well in addressing the ongoing climate catastrophe. Veteran science educator L. S. Gardiner believes we can learn to do better by understanding how we’ve dealt with other types of environmental risks in the past and why we are dragging our feet in addressing this most urgent emergency. Weaving scientific facts and research together with humor and emotion, Gardiner explores human responses to erosion, earthquakes, fires, invasive species, marine degradation, volcanic eruptions, and floods in order to illuminate why we find it so challenging to deal with climate change. Insight emerges from unexpected places—a mermaid exhibit, a Magic 8 Ball, and midcentury cartoons about a future that never came to be. Instead of focusing on the economics and geopolitics of the debate over climate change, this book brings large-scale disaster to a human scale, emphasizing the role of the individual. We humans do have the capacity to deal with disasters. When we face threatening changes, we don’t just stand there pretending it isn’t so, we do something. But because we’re human, our responses aren’t always the right ones the first time—yet we can learn to do better. This book is essential reading for all who want to know how we can draw on our strengths to survive the climate catastrophe and forge a new relationship with nature.

The #1 international bestselling author of The Gray Rhino offers a bold new framework for understanding and re-shaping our relationship with risk and uncertainty to live more productive and successful lives. What drives a sixty-four-year-old woman to hurl herself over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Why do we often create bigger risks than the risks we try to avoid? Why are corporate boards newly worried about risky personal behavior by CEOs? Why are some nations quicker than others to recognize and manage risks like pandemics, technological change, and climate crisis? The answers define each person, organization, and society as distinctively as a fingerprint. Understanding the often-surprising origins of these risk fingerprints can open your eyes, inspire new habits, catalyze innovation and creativity, improve teamwork, and provide a beacon in a world that seems suddenly more uncertain than ever. How you see risk and what you do about it depend on your personality and experiences. How you make these cost-benefit calculations depend on your culture, your values, the people in the room, and even unexpected things like what you’ve eaten recently, the temperature, the music playing, or the fragrance in the air. Being alert to these often-unconscious influences will help you to seize opportunity and avoid danger. You Are What You Risk is a clarion call for an entirely new conversation about our relationship with risk and uncertainty. In this ground-breaking, accessible and eminently timely book, Michele Wucker examines why it’s so important to understand your risk fingerprint and how to make your risk relationship work better in business, life, and the world. Drawing on compelling risk stories around the world and weaving in economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology research, Wucker bridges the divide between professional and lay risk conversations. She challenges stereotypes about risk attitudes, re-frames how gender and risk are related, and shines new light on generational differences. She shows how the new science of “risk personality” is re-shaping business and finance, how healthy risk ecosystems support economies and societies, and why embracing risk empathy can resolve conflicts. Wucker shares insights, practical tools, and proven strategies that will help you to understand what makes you who you are –and, in turn, to make better choices, both big and small.

In his entertaining and informative book Graphic Discovery, Howard Wainer unlocked the power of graphical display to make complex problems clear. Now he's back with Picturing the Uncertain World, a book that explores how graphs can serve as maps to guide us when the information we have is ambiguous or incomplete. Using a visually diverse sampling of graphical display, from heartrending autobiographical displays of genocide in the Kovno ghetto to the "Pie Chart of Mystery" in a New Yorker cartoon, Wainer illustrates the many ways graphs can be used--and misused--as we try to make sense of an uncertain world. Picturing the Uncertain World takes readers on an extraordinary graphical adventure, revealing how the visual communication of data offers answers to vexing questions yet also highlights the measure of uncertainty in almost everything we do. Are cancer rates higher or lower in rural communities? How can you know how much money to sock away for retirement when you don't know when you'll die? And where exactly did nineteenth-century novelists get their ideas? These are some of the fascinating questions Wainer invites readers to consider. Along the way he traces the origins and development of graphical display, from William Playfair, who pioneered the use of graphs in the eighteenth century, to instances today where the public has been misled through poorly designed graphs. We live in a world full of uncertainty, yet it is within our grasp to take its measure. Read Picturing the Uncertain World and learn how.

We live in times of uncertainty and anxiety. In these times, how can we best navigate our unknowns? Our Uncertain World answers that question through a Jungian prism. Carl Jung’s theory has helped many people through difficult times. Jungian perspectives facilitate such challenging navigation by not simplifying complexity but rather by finding the meaningful through-lines that guide the individual toward individuation even in the darkest of times. Using Jung’s unique multi-dimensional approach, this book offers insights and provides answers to questions about life in a state of three-dimensional flux. Our Uncertain World was born from the premise that we are in a period of ongoing change. The interlocking crises of COVID, national polarization, environmental disaster, and international war can undermine or even destroy the symbols, rituals, and mental structures that give meaning and coherence to our lives. These crises are explored in depth In the book’s three sections, Living with Personal Uncertainty over the Long Term, Social Turmoil: A Moment of Social change for Our Community and Our Nation, and Challenges Facing Our World: Grappling with the Environment, The Pandemic and War. The authors of this book accompany the reader through the current challenges we face and examine new ways of adjusting to the existing condition of protracted uncertainty. The book encourages the reader to articulate their own challenges and develop their own language to write, speak, and live within the reality of uncertain times. Our Uncertain World provides tools for individuals and groups to formulate new perspectives and life strategies for the current reality.

Robert Rubin was sworn in as the seventieth U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in January 1995 in a brisk ceremony attended only by his wife and a few colleagues. As soon as the ceremony was over, he began an emergency meeting with President Bill Clinton on the financial crisis in Mexico. This was not only a harbinger of things to come during what would prove to be a rocky period in the global economy; it also captured the essence of Rubin himself--short on formality, quick to get into the nitty-gritty. From his early years in the storied arbitrage department at Goldman Sachs to his current position as chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, Robert Rubin has been a major figure at the center of the American financial system. He was a key player in the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. With In an Uncertain World, Rubin offers a shrewd, keen analysis of some of the most important events in recent American history and presents a clear, consistent approach to thinking about markets and dealing with the new risks of the global economy. Rubin's fundamental philosophy is that nothing is provably certain. Probabilistic thinking has guided his career in both business and government. We see that discipline at work in meetings with President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, Newt Gingrich, Sanford Weill, and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. We see Rubin apply it time and again while facing financial crises in Asia, Russia, and Brazil; the federal government shutdown; the rise and fall of the stock market; the challenges of the post-September 11 world; the ongoing struggle over fiscal policy; and many other momentous economic and political events. With a compelling and candid voice and a sharp eye for detail, Rubin portrays the daily life of the White House-confronting matters both mighty and mundane--as astutely as he examines the challenges that lie ahead for the nation. Part political memoir, part prescriptive economic analysis, and part personal look at business problems, In an Uncertain World is a deep examination of Washington and Wall Street by a figure who for three decades has been at the center of both worlds.

Understand the most revolutionary human transformation in four centuries... and prepare for it! We're not just living through an age of change: we're living through a 'change of age': the most profound inflection point in human history since the Enlightenment. That's the thesis of Eamonn Kelly's remarkable new book Powerful Times. From terrorism and nuclear proliferation to emerging technologies and economic globalization, Kelly weaves together 7 powerful 'dynamic tensions' that will reshape human life in the coming decades. Kelly offers breakthrough insights into how these tensions will conflict -- and how they'll resonate, creating giant waves of change beyond anything we've ever faced. He takes on the truly big questions. To answer pivotal questions, Kelly draws on breakthrough 'scenario planning' techniques he pioneered: techniques hundreds of top organizations now rely on. Simply put, this book will help you prepare for humanity's most profound transition in 400 years. For every executive, strategist, manager, entrepreneur, public policymaker, and citizen interested in the trends that will most powerfully impact business and life in the coming decades. Eamonn Kelly, the CEO and president of Global Business Network, the renowned future-oriented network and consulting firm, has for over a decade and has been at the forefront of exploring the emergence of a new, knowledge-intensive economy, and its far-reaching consequences for society, organizations and individuals. He has consulted with senior executives at dozens of the world's leading corporations in virtually every leading business sector; with key global and national public agencies, and with major philanthropic foundations. Kelly co-authored What's Next: Exploring the New Terrain for Business and The Future of the Knowledge Economy, and authored GBN's 2003 Scenario Book.

This book will show you how to harness sustainable thinking to move forward with confidence into the unknown.

Uncertain Worlds is the definitive presentation of the evolution of world-systems analysis from the point of view of its founder, Immanuel Wallerstein. Few theorists have offered a more systematic theory of what has become known as 'globalisation' than Wallerstein. The book includes a one-of-kind interview with Wallerstein by Carlos Rojas, a conversation between Wallerstein and Lemert about the history of the field as it has come down to the present time, a long essay by Lemert on the uncertainties of the modern world-system, as well as a preface by Rojas and a concluding essay by Wallerstein. No other book lends such biographical, historical, and personal nuance to the biography of world-systems analysis and, thus, to the history of our times. The will be a key reference book for students of global politics, economics and international relations.