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Truth, Errors, and Lies: Politics and Economics in a Volatile World resources

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422 A Letter It’s amazing how many things were supposedly impossible but hap- pened anyway. In my day, we didn’t have enough imagination. With unpredictable things, imagination makes more difference than knowl- edge, because we don’t have any knowledge to go by yet. All of us, including you, are the outcomes of a future that might well not have happened. As you can see from your viewpoint, we took ad- vantage of most of our chances, but we missed a few. You live in a com- pletely different world that’s still on the move, but that could have been even happier, more beautiful, and richer. There must be a lot of fl owers, but there could have been even more, couldn’t there? When I gaze far into the future, I see—because I know—how much is possible. When you peer into the past, in turn, you surely see— because you know so much more, even though you’re not majoring in economics—how many chances were missed. The loss is irreversible, or at least it will remain so for another hundred years. But it doesn’t matter. The next hundred years will pass. Write a letter to your granddaughter’s granddaughter (maybe she’ll study econom- ics). Tell her to read Truth, Errors, and Lies: Politics and Economics in a Volatile World and check to see where we were right and where we were wrong. And tell her to be sure to send us an e-mail, or whatever they call it then, in 2210. I’m glad that you’re majoring in APS. I always said that interdisci- plinary studies have a colossal future. You’ll understand a lot, and see even more, and you’ll have a chance to help development along. Every- body should do all they can. At the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein said that a scientist tells himself a story and then uses an experiment to check whether it is true or not. In physics, an experiment can verify the cor- rectness of a hypothesis—although not all hypotheses—at once. Some were not confi 21st century, and rmed beyond question until the early even in the early 22nd century some will surely be comprehensible to only the very few. Development economics can only be verifi ed on the historical scale, and this has sometimes been very costly. Remember: it’s better to be right while there’s still time. I’ve told my story. You’ve read this book, and you have all the facts verifi ed, and interpreted at a touch, or a click, or a voice com- ed, classifi mand, so check for yourself! I hope that you’ll be happy when you see that I was right. Being right is just as nice as being lucky.

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