Shaping the Next One Hundred Years

The checkered history of predicting the future—such as proclamations that "Man will never fly"—has dissuaded policymakers from considering the long-term effects of their decisions. New analytic methods, enabled by modern computers, transform our ability to reason about the future. This book reviews traditional methods of grappling with the morrow, from narratives to scenario analysis, which fail to address the multiplicity of plausible long-term futures. The authors then demonstrate a quantitative approach to long-term policy analysis (LTPA). Robust methods enable decisionmakers to examine a vast range of futures and design adaptive strategies to be robust across them. Using sustainable development as an example, the authors discuss how these methods apply to LTPA and a wide range of decisionmaking under conditions of deep uncertainty.