Riveting… As a deep thinker and gifted storyteller, Johnson is the right author to tackle the topic. He’s at his best when analyzing impossibly complex decisions… One of Johnson’s thought-provoking points is that [people who excel at long-term thinking] read novels, which are ideal exercises in mental time travel and empathy. I think he’s right

Precision planning or gut instinct? Well-placed to dig into the dilemmas of decision making, Steven Johnson gracefully serves up examples ranging from 17th-century urban planning to contemporary artificial intelligence… Now we all have to learn from their example.

Johnson is explicitly focused on real-life decisions that (ideally) involve serious deliberation… [He] reminds us that, fundamentally, choices concern competing narratives, and we’re likely to make better choices if we have richer stories, with more fleshed-out characters, a more nuanced understanding of motives, and a deeper appreciation of how decisions are likely to reverberate and resound.

Steven Johnson is a great science writer

Steven Johnson’s mind works in wondrous ways

An infectiously exciting writer… Steven Johnson is that rarest of commodities among twenty-first-century public intellectuals… His is a questing intelligence, eager to consider opposing arguments, explore opposing arguments, explore new terrain, and notice underlying patterns he hasn’t seen before.

A fascinating history of how people made decisions with lasting impacts over recent centuries, exploring ways to plan wisely for now and for future generations. Johnson’s book rightly devotes ample space to climate change, and shows how we can learn from past mistakes in warfare, banking and other realms

Insightful but eccentric book . . . Farsighted is intelligent . . . impressively erudite