Most frightening and/or depressing story: The latest paper from Johan Rockstrom and company lays out climate scenarios through the year 3,000. There is plenty still to be figured out about the scientific details, but some major uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases – in other words, how much warming will occur per unit of emissions – and how likely the major feedback loops are, such as melting permafrost releasing massive amounts of methane, loss of sea ice reducing reflection of sunlight in an accelerating loop, and major shifts in ocean currents that distribute and rebalance heat across the planet. These are existential risks, and they can potentially reinforce each other in multiplicative ways. So even though there is scientific uncertainty over whether it will get bad, or really catastrophically bad, there is no logical or moral case for not taking precautionary action now to reduce the risk of these outcomes.

Most hopeful story: If AI does in fact accelerate productivity and create significant new wealth, there are many well-known effective policy options for redistributing this wealth. Some of these have the word “tax” in their names, but there are also less efficient but perhaps more politically palatable options like baby bonds. Perhaps if the rate of new wealth creation is really a major departure from the past, our system may have a chance at implementing some of these.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I wanted to teach my own children not only some basic financial literacy concepts (Johnny wants ice cream today but is trying to save for a new bike) but also how those relate to the idea of a capitalist economy (why does interest exist, what causes inflation, and what the heck is money anyway?) and the real physical world (yes, little Johnny, the consequences of taking natural resources out and putting pollution back into our biophysical system are in fact intertwined with our human economy). A daunting task, considering that Nobel laureates have struggled with this. But the Nobel laureates aren’t going to explain it to the children, so your intrepid blogger waded in and came up with something.