B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
If I see a diet-busting dessert, then I eat an
apple. You picture possible obstacles in life —
such as a tasty temptation — and how you’ll
react. Another telescopic tactic: Many organi-
zations use gamelike scenarios in which they
role-play responses to enemy attacks or natu-
ral disasters or business disruptions. “We feel,
not just think, when we play a game,” Venkat-
araman writes. Threats become more real,
and participants feel more empowered.
Finally, even when individuals have perfect
foresight, it may not be in their interest to act
on it unilaterally. If I refrain from depleting a
fishery, my competitor might scoop up the
catch instead. That’s one reason Venkatara-
man suggests institutional changes that bind
us to intergenerational concerns: fishing
catch-share programs, national park designa-
tions, legal protection for communities that
limit development in floodplains.
By bringing tales from basketball, an Ebola
epidemic, poker, classroom discipline and
nuclear power plants, as well as literary
depictions of her travels to Mexico, Japan,
India and South Carolina, Venkataraman viv-
idly depicts what happens when we don’t p lan
ahead and what we can do about it, on our own
and together. Despite the high-seeming bar
suggested by the book’s title, there’s n o need to
be an optimist or to have a special future-tell-
ing telescope. Whether you’re trying to lose a
few pounds or avert climate catastrophe, all
that’s needed is to be a realist with an
imagination.Matthew Hutson is a freelance science writer in
New York and the author of “The 7 Laws of Magical
Thinking.”ings by entering depositors in lotteries. In
Venkataraman’s ideal world, homeowners ev-
erywhere would receive tax rebates for disas-
ter preparation. Campaign finance reform
would offer public money to wean politicians
off donors who seek near-term advantage.
Venkataraman writes that Citizens United — a
Supreme Court case that opened the doors to
greater corporate influence in elections —
“has brought us an era of American leadership
and decision making more geared for reck-
lessness than ever.”
Why do we require immediate inducements
to act in our own long-term interest — like a
child receiving a lollipop for visiting the
doctor? In part because we see distant re-
wards as benefiting someone else: We treat
our future selves as strangers. “In my experi-
ence, it is easier to contemplate death by shark
attack than it is to envision myself with fake
teeth,” Venkataraman writes. One psycholo-
gist has developed a solution: When partici-
pants faced artificially aged versions of them-
selves in virtual reality, t hey expressed greater
interest in saving for retirement. Another
researcher has placed people in body suits
that simulate the limitations of old age. These
tricks make the future three-dimensional.
According to Venkataraman, “Prediction is
not that helpful for heeding future threats,
unless it is paired with imagination.”
There are also low-tech ways to engage
imagery. You can write a letter to your future
self or a hypothetical grandchild addressing
the effects of your decisions today. O r consider
what you will be remembered for in an
obituary. There’s also a simple trick called an
implementation intention, or an if-then plan:loans not to start businesses and repay the
lenders with their profits, but rather to buy
food; the borrowers then took out more loans
to pay off their existing ones. The bubble
collapsed in 2010, and shame-filled borrowers
killed themselves by the hundreds. At a
minimum, Venkataraman recommends guid-
ing behavior by the light of several metrics at
once for a fuller picture of progress.
Another takeaway is the need to align
immediate incentives with distant aims. Most
executives at American public companies
admit to prioritizing quarterly earnings tar-
gets over sustainable profit. That’s in part
because they receive bonuses based on such
short-term metrics, an arrangement at odds
with the more patient of the investors they
supposedly serve. One solution is to reward
execs with company stock that they must hold
for several years. In m edicine, many doctors —
pressured by patients who want immediate
results — overprescribe antibiotics and pain-
killers. Health-care systems in which doctors
must receive prior approval for such prescrip-
tions, or must justify them in medical notes,
limit such temptation.
Beyond removing rewards for immediate
exploitation or concession, Venkataraman
suggests adding new short-term incentives
that align with long-term goals (a practice she
calls “glitter-bombing,” in reference to the
time she repeatedly blasted her friend with
glitter as he ran a marathon). A farmer at the
Land Institute encouraged other farmers to
grow perennial crops — which preserve the
land — by engineering them to produce more
food and by arranging buyers. Credit unions
have encouraged customers to increase sav-W
e’re swimming in data, and we
can’t help but use it. Likes on
Facebook measure our social
standing, financial indicators
slice up company growth, stan-
dardized tests track student progress, and
smartwatches count our every step. Measure-
ment generally allows for prudent planning,
but sometimes it focuses our attention on
mere proxies for what we care about. We
optimize short-term metrics — teaching to the
test, worshiping the watch — at the expense of
long-term goals, from corporate to corporal
health.
That’s one of the takeaways from “The
Optimist’s Te lescope” by Bina Venkataraman,
a former journalist and senior adviser for
climate change innovation in the Obama
White House. The book, wise but not wonkish,
is an argument for foresight, by which Venkat-
araman means not the ability to look into the
future but the willingness to do so. A number
of social, psychological and structural forces
deflect our gaze, and the book offers ways to
retrain our sight toward the horizon, citing
scientific experiments, historical events, busi-
ness case studies and personal anecdotes.
What’s wrong with wearable fitness track-
ers? If you want to put holes in your walking
shoes, nothing. But consider Venkataraman’s
friend who took long strolls to boost her step
count — past a bakery near her office. In the
end, she gained weight. More gravely, Venkat-
araman explores the role of myopic metrics
that fueled a microlending surge in India.
Microlenders saw high repayment rates as
signs that their business model was solid,
when in fact many borrowers were using thethe country spreading her opinions on
matters of dress, decorum and stain remov-
al. (Child had another hit in 1865 with
“Looking To ward Sunset,” a meditation on
aging.) One gets the impression that
throughout the 18th and 19th centuries
women were crisscrossing the country
giving “talks” in parlors and auditoriums,
telling their fervid audiences how to be.
One thing they could not be was too
youthful. It was deceitful and unseemly.
Collins quotes the author Robert To mes, who
wrote “The Bazar Book of Decorum”: “Old
people of the best breeding now seldom
resort to the hair-dresser to refurbish their
shattered and decaying frames.” Since many
evenings in town involved going to parties
with dancing, the old p eople were best served
— according to society — by sitting quietly in
a corner, cognizant of their own obvious
decline. When lovely, healthy, married wom-
en were seen enjoying themselves, well, that
was almost vulgar. “To dress cheerfully and
becomingly is considered as an attempt to
affect youth; to converse gaily an unsuitable
effort to attract admirers. There is really no
limit to the ungracious things said,” com-
plained the married Caroline Kirkland.
The painful adherence to beauty stan-
dards that created the corset and later the
girdle gets its due in Collins’s history.
Although a Brooklyn gynecologist in 1910
suggested that it was dangerous for women
to wear corsets, around the same time an
editorial in Harper’s Bazaar suggested that
eliminating this item of “foundation”
would be regrettable for the older woman:
“an ill-advised experiment... if she wishes
to look neat and trim and well-groomed.”
In t he 1920s, youth was a queen in a short
flapper dress. “The whole nation got the
idea: the younger generation intended to
live life full-force and, of course, never get
old.” The amount of fabric needed to make
the average woman’s outfit had dropped
from a voluminous 191 / 4 yards to a trim
seven yards. Americans now had movies
and movie stars to emulate, as well as
beauty and fashion magazines filled with
ads. Collins writes that there were 7,000
beauty products on the market by 1927, and
the ads she quotes are harshly phrased,
terrorizing their customers into buying
their wares. Naturally, corsets were re-
quired for the modern silhouette. And they
continued to be worn, though they were
harder to buy, during World War II, when
rubber was needed for the war effort.
Women were urged for the first time to
locate their abdominal muscles and exer-
cise them to flatten their tummies if the
manufacturing of these foundations were
to take a hiatus. (Women complained.
There was a backlash, and the government
rethought a restriction on sales, deciding
that girdles were helpful to the many
women working in factories.)
“No Stopping Us Now” devotes much
more time and space to politics and good
works. From America’s first female senator,
Jeannette Rankin of Montana, to Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, American women
devoted themselves for years and years to
winning the vote and equality under the
law. Women were the trailblazers of the
civil rights movement as well. Many of the
pioneering women we used to read about —
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Jane Addams, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman
Catt and others — were the mothers of both
movements, some starting settlement
houses for the poor.
We gals have made a ton of progress over
the 389 years covered in Collins’s book. We
may one day even conquer the White
House. But my favorite story belongs to
Frances Willard, a leader o f the temperance
movement, whose interests included suf-
frage and “health reform.” Willard learned
to ride a bicycle at the wobbly old age of 53
and then wrote about it: “The most
remarkable, ingenious and inspiring motor
ever yet devised upon this planet.” She
became a devoted cyclist and advocate for
the exercise and the experience. The year
was 1895.Lisa Birnbach is a writer and humorist. Her
podcast, “Five Things That Make Life Better,” is
available at her website, http://www.LisaBirnbach.com.B
eing a woman of 50 or more has
always been a kind of drag, really.
We keenly understand that we are
invisible in public unless we have
enormous fame that surrounds us
like an omnipresent picture frame, or are
muttering loudly on the street. Ye t being,
um, older (and there is always that “um”)
can allow a woman the freedom to be
herself and enjoy what is left of her life.
I’m being serious. For succor, I recom-
mend Gail Collins’s new book, “No Stop-
ping Us N ow,” s ubtitled, “The Adventures of
Older Women in American History.” Col-
lins, an opinion writer (and formerly the
first female editorial page editor) at the
New York Times, is a cheerful companion
through the decades. Right from the intro-
duction, the reader understands Collins’s
point of view: A woman can be kind,
intelligent, hard-working and successful,
but we’re always going to wonder if she’s
coloring her hair, or has gained or lost a
little weight. Nevertheless, there are doz-
ens upon dozens of heroic stories of
remarkable women in this book that will be
new to the average reader. And though you
may already be an expert on Eleanor
Roosevelt, I was not, and thus I could be
surprised by Collins’s take that, as she
traveled nonstop, speaking and writing on
all manner of important issues, Roosevelt
“was possibly having the most extraordi-
nary middle age of any woman in American
history.”
This is a history book, a sprightly one.
But since it begins in 1630, the narrative
starts on a grim note. Middle-aged women
were likely to have gaping holes in their
gums where their teeth used to reside.
(Personally, I’m pretty convinced that I
would have died from a hit-and-run horse,
as I can barely see without my 2 0th-century
inventions, contact lenses.) Life in the early
years of our country saw few comforts, and
sadly one often outlived several of one’s
own children. Medical treatments were
limited to bloodletting, homemade rem-
edies and sometimes opium.
You recall from your American history
class long ago that independent-thinking
women in the pre-Revolutionary War years
might be taken for witches. An Englishman
visiting the colonies in 1646, Collins writes,
“deplored the way in which ‘every old
woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow,
a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a
squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue... is
not only suspected but pronounced for a
witch.”
With that warning, if women wanted to
pretty themselves up they had to be rich
enough to use the family bacon. I mean this
literally, as Collins explains that applying
bacon to one’s face was said to prevent
wrinkles. However, in most communities,
makeup and hair dye were shunned as
misleading, dishonest and reflecting the
bad character of a woman trying to fool a
man into marrying her.
Most women didn’t have many or any
career options. However, once they had
launched all their children and ditched the
housework, many older women won re-
spect — the old-fashioned way. They were
midwives and ministers, writers and edi-
tors. Ta ke for instance, the author of “The
Frugal Housewife,” Lydia Maria Child,
whose story is woven throughout these
pages. She was perhaps the first-ever
influencer, and though female, she traveledHISTORY REVIEW BY LISA BIRNBACHWomen of a
certain age,
making
their mark
PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW BY MATTHEW HUTSONToo much data, too little imagination: Why it’s hard to achieve long-term goals
NO STOPPING
US NOW
The
Adventures of
Older Women
in American
History
By Gail Collins
Little, Brown.
422 pp. $30THE
OPTIMIST’S
TELESCOPE
Thinking
Ahead in a
Reckless Age
By Bina
Venkataraman
Riverhead.
318 pp. $28ASSOCIATED PRESSNEW YORK UNIVERSITY/ASSOCIATED PRESSCOLUMBIA LAW SCHOOLFirst lady Eleanor
Roosevelt, on a tour
of the South Pacific
in September 1943,
stops to chat with a
U.S. Marine in a
hospital. Roosevelt
had, Gail Collins
writes, perhaps
“the most
extraordinary
middle age of any
woman in
American history.”Susan B. Anthony,
who helped lead the
charge for women’s
suffrage, also
campaigned for
civil rights for
African Americans.Ruth Bader
Ginsburg teaching
at Columbia Law
School in 197 2.
Before becoming a
Supreme Court
justice, she was an
advocate for
women’s rights.