All my experience tells me that such a level of fatalism isn’t realistic; we can, up to a point, design and choose the society we wish to live in. Besides, there have been few moments in history when we have needed creativity more—to work out how to get to net zero carbon emissions and avert climate change; how to cope with ageing populations; how

What’s suggested here is the conscious, deliberate, iterative, experimental design of a better world, fed by expansive imagination, informed by systemic analysis and put in practice through experiment. This could be a golden age for such an approach, given the data and technologies that governments today have at their disposal.