Uncertain Twilight

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the future’s not what it used to be. Inequality has soared, social mobility has stalled, and astronomical housing prices have forced young people to camp with their parents. Those young people could quite possibly end up poorer than their moms and dads. A pandemic — symptomatic of a biosphere crisis — has upended billions of lives and hammered the world economy. Superstorms rage where superstorms are not supposed to be, and all those bugs that used to splatter your windshield as you headed for the cottage have vanished. Droughts stalk the heartlands, forest fires rage in the West, flash floods have become commonplace, and everywhere temperature records topple like dominoes.

In The Next Age of Uncertainty: How the World Can Adapt to a Riskier Future, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, warns us that the upcoming years — and decades — will be even more volatile, less predictable, and trickier than the recent...