CJ had a Facebook entry that linked to New York Times: Preparing Kids For The Unknown, which is commentary and expansion on Brain, Child: Armageddon Mama. I had to check the dates twice, because they could as easily have been inspired by the current heat wave and derecho and whatever else as by the February 2010(?) event that they appear to have referenced.

Only problem: What if that isn’;t at all what the near future will look like? What if we’;re raising our kids to succeed in a George Jetson kind of world, but they wind up living more like Fred Flintstone?

I'm sympathetic. It's easy to make a plausible case that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Where once I dived in to the virtual world, now I'm spending as much or more time improving my skills as relates to the physical one. More than one friend has, independently, stated that come the end of the world they're going to use whatever means they have to show up on my doorstep, because I clearly have the skills necessary to thrive in a post-apocalyptic world.

On the other hand... much of the reason I have these skills is that my parents thought similarly. We lived far from the city, with ducks and goats and sheep and a huge garden, and I learned to sweat copper and hotwire tractors and tape drywall about the same time I was learning to solder...

Which is the problem with any bubble: The pessimists only win when their timing is dead on. We live in a time of unprecedented economic and technological expansion. It's been going on for two or two and a half centuries.

It might continue for forever, there's little debate that humans are dramatically impacting the environment, there's more debate over what that impact will be longer-term and it's possible that we'll suddenly come up with new energy sources that mean we can continue pushing out the Malthusian limits that, up until the Industrial Revolution, played out for millenia. It's also possible that over the next decade weather patterns will shift such that ¾; of the humans on earth starve or die in natural disasters.

The problem is timing: Because even if you give that latter scenario the most credence, it could as easily happen after my lifespan. In fact, with either doom and gloom or a Polyanna-ish belief in eternal prosperity, most scenarios have my lifestyle pretty much unchanged for the rest of my expected span. Human lives are inconsequential in geologic epochs, timing that market's gonna be pretty damned hard.

So should you raise your kids to be rough and ready survivalists? I think my parents did a pretty good job with me, and it's likely that those skills are ancillary to ones that have helped me thrive in the world I ended up living in. It turns out that margins for safety aren't conducive to hard growth, and if you do so you're betting on something that might just hit your grandchildren. Or it may happen tomorrow.