Commonwealth Club: The Novelist & the Economist: Kim Stanley Robinson and John Fullerton on the Story We Need Next

A novelist and an economist walk into a bar. Outside, the world is in polycrisis. One of them spent 20 years in the belly of the beast, becoming the second youngest managing director in JPMorgan's history, followed by a two-decade search after a close encounter with 9/11. The other has spent four decades writing novels set on Mars, in a flooded New York, and inside a ministry created to speak for generations not yet born. You might expect the banker to bring the hard facts and the novelist the imagination. On this evening, it may run the other way. Kim Stanley Robinson writes fiction about reality. His novels are built on climate science, politics and money. In The Ministry for the Future, central bankers become pivotal characters in the fight for a livable planet. John Fullerton walked away from Wall Street in 2001 with no plan and many questions. He came to a conclusion few bankers reach: economics is itself a story, and a broken one, built on a fatally flawed foundation that is in conflict with modern science. Derived from outdated Newtonian physics, the story tells us the economy is a complicated machine to be controlled and optimized for efficiency. In stark contrast, Fullerton argues, the economy must be understood and designed in alignment with the patterns and principles of complex living systems. The polycrisis, from climate destabilization and biodiversity collapse to grotesque and accelerating inequality, social fracture and political division, and unsustainable financial fragility, is what happens when you run a living system on the logic of a machine. Regardless of our political or other identities, the deeper truth is this: we have outlived that story. The question is, what will be the new story, and who gets to write it? Moderated by Commonwealth Club World Affairs Co-CEO Philip Yun, the novelist and the economist will meet where fiction and finance overlap, where philosophy, often unseen, moves to the forefront. They'll ask what each can see that the other misses, and where a scientifically rigorous, legitimate reason for hope may be hidden in plain sight. For as Leonardo da Vinci taught us, "All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions." Then it's your turn. Guests break into small groups around a question that needs all three: what is the difference between business and commerce, and what would a regenerative chamber of commerce look like, built in a real city? Fullerton and Robinson will move between the tables, followed by a book signing and reception. Pull up a chair and find out what happens next.