Edward Morris

In Future Perfect—as in earlier books such as The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You—Steven Johnson seeks to discover the processes by which truths are incrementally revealed and goals attained. His inspiration for Future Perfect arose from a headline in USA Today that said “Airlines Go Two Years With No Fatalities.” It set him to thinking about how this remarkable record of safety had been achieved and why it wasn’t bigger news. In looking for answers, he became convinced that the drift of history is toward improving human conditions, even though isolated—but heavily publicized—setbacks make many of us believe that life is becoming more perilous.

In today’s political scene, Johnson notes, two contrasting philosophies hold themselves up as roads to progress: the market-driven, libertarian route and the top-down, central-planning approach. He maintains, however, that there is yet another way of bettering society, one that overcomes the limitations of these competing orthodoxies without jettisoning their useful features. Those who subscribe to this new way he calls “peer progressives.” While these people recognize the genius of markets in ferreting out and satisfying certain needs, he says, they are also aware that markets are indifferent and sometimes hostile to meeting such other needs as “community, creativity, education [and] personal and environmental health.” Still, he argues, the more minds there are focused on delineating and solving social problems, the better the results will be. What government can do—at least sometimes—is consolidate, analyze and implement these torrents of data and suggestions.

To illustrate peer progressivism at its best, Johnson cites dozens of examples of that process in action, from New York City’s 311 service that enables citizens to report a wide range of problems that the city can then chart and follow up on, to Kickstarter, the website that allows artists and entrepreneurs to raise private funds to support their projects; from corporate innovators like Whole Foods, which caps executive pay at no more than 19 times that of the average worker’s wages, to a host of private and government organizations that offer prize money—rather than market-thwarting patents—for new ideas and products.

This book is not a call for peer progressives to band together for political purposes. Rather, it aims to demonstrate the dynamism and value that ensues when a great number of diverse people network together to solve common problems. This it does well.

Beware the apocalyptic book title. It’s a great marketing device, but the forcefulness and flash with which a title states a book’s theme virtually ensures that the author’s more measured conclusions will be overlooked. Hanna Rosin, who previewed the thesis for The End of Men in a 2010 cover story for the Atlantic, doesn’t use the word “end” to mean “termination” or even “destination.” She’s essentially arguing that men, particularly in the lower and middle classes, are losing ground economically to their female counterparts.

To illustrate this point, Rosin peers into the day-to-day lives and evolving motivations of several groups, including college girls and post-grads who embrace their sexuality as a career tool, upper-class couples who have made their marriages work to their mutual advantage (as opposed to lower-class ones who haven’t), men left idle or underemployed after a textile mill leaves town and women who are inundating the once primarily male profession of pharmacy.

Rosin also investigates the little publicized fact that women are so outpacing men in college enrollment and completion that some schools have quietly instituted “affirmative action” programs to recruit more men by lowering or re-structuring admission standards.

As Rosin demonstrates, women are getting ahead on the economic front in no small part because they work for less money and fewer benefits. In addition, many of them are too occupied in their off hours by children and unemployed or underemployed mates to demand more from their employers.

Don’t look for any Norma Rae unionizers or 9 to 5 score-settlers here. The men Rosin shadows are not out of work because there’s no work to be done but because companies can make more money and pay less taxes by shifting the work elsewhere. It’s not a pretty picture to see women and men forced to compete with each other for economic success and happiness.

Conceding that the term “amateur” means different things to different people, in his book Bunch of Amateurs Jack Hitt nonetheless singles out particular examples of that breed—those characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness and self-confidence—and shows how they have functioned in such disparate fields of study as ornithology, astronomy, genetics, robotics, archaeology and history. “Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there,” he asserts, “because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know.”

To set the stage for his amateur vs. professional faceoff, Hitt devotes a chapter to America’s most exemplary novice, Benjamin Franklin, and his prissy, think-inside-the-box nemesis, John Adams. (Never one to shy away from reductionism, Hitt calls Adams “the Yosemite Sam of the founding fathers.”) Both men were in Paris in 1778 to drum up French support for America in the war against Britain. Franklin, who tended to wing it when it came to diplomatic relations, was a living affront to all the traditional formulations Adams held dear. But he was also an infinitely more effective emissary.

Hitt demonstrates these competing approaches in a series of profiles. His method is to “hang out” with especially provocative amateurs, describe their personalities and assess their processes for discovering truth or utility. There’s Meredith Patterson, for example, who cobbles together a home laboratory and homemade ingredients to study DNA; John Dobson, a “ninety-two-year-old hippie” whose obsession is teaching other amateur astronomers how to grind large telescope lenses in order to better view the universe; and the ever-enthusiastic David Barron, who contends—and not without reason—that certain stone structures in southeastern Connecticut were built 1,500 years ago by Irish monks.

Fascinating though Hitt’s profiles are, they merely serve as entry points to his more extensive discussions of the subjects they’re obsessed with. He goes into great detail about the search for a living specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker and how the professional ornithologists were just as prone to embrace flimsy evidence as amateurs often are. The same holds true in his discussion of the discovery of the remains of the “Kennewick man” in 1996 and the subsequent effort to establish that he was Caucasian, an exercise in wish-fulfillment to which even credentialed professionals were not immune.

Hitt doesn’t really develop a cohesive thesis here on the nature and value of amateurism, nor does he argue persuasively that it is a distinctly American phenomenon, as he suggests at the outset. But he does illustrate with striking specificity that the road to knowing is cluttered with hazards, the chief of which are our own desires and preconceptions.