‘simple-minded avoiders of complexity rather than closed-minded avoiders of change’, and their beliefs are activated by perceived external threats.

Are there interesting patterns in other fields that could be appropriated or adapted? What could be taken from airports and applied to hospitals to help the flow of people through the system; from the provision of food that could be applied to schools, such as calorie counts or diets; from healthcare that could be applied to relationships?

the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.

They, like the public, tended to overestimate how much could change in the short term while underestimating how much could change in the longer term.4

their experiences open up the counterfactual question of whether there were alternative imaginaries open to them, less about fixing belatedness and more about a distinctive route to development.

Thin imagination is vague and partial, whereas thick imagination combines ideas, philosophy, programmes and detailed implementation. Most influential ideas achieve their impact by becoming thick in this sense, as well as through repetition.

Indeed, imagination is alive and well in relation to technology: a future is being built where manufactured goods will mainly be grown rather than made, where wars may be settled in a matter of seconds thanks to AI, or where long-standing hopes for the colonisation of space may start to be realised. Technology has repeatedly expanded the space of p

So imagination happens in the mind, often involves a new way of seeing, both literally and metaphorically, and feeds off a deeper shared unconscious. What else does it depend on? Everyone can imagine to some extent. We are all endowed with an ability to picture things which don’t exist. But social imagination—the ability to picture a future society

Indeed, it is this ability to grasp and challenge at the same time, to sense directions of change while simultaneously trying to shift and shape them, that makes imagination both most useful and most exciting.