I’ve spent my life trying to understand the forces at work in the human world. As I was born in 1946, the problems my thinking formed around were those visible in the world around me: the problem of war in an age of nuclear weapons, the degradation of the biosphere by ever-more-impactful human activity, and the problems that arise from the dynamics of an insufficiently regulated market economy. Here’s some of what I learned in our conversation. We’ve had new technologies before — the train, the