Steven Johnson: ‘Decision-making should be taught in schools’

The author of Everything Bad Is Good for You on his new book, and why decision-making is a creative process

Steven Johnson is a popular science author of 11 books, including the bestseller Everything Bad Is Good for You. Now 50, he divides his time between California and New York, the decision of where to live being at the heart of his latest book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. It focuses on long-term and complex decision-making - both political and personal.

What made you decide to write about decision-making?
It had the longest incubation period of any of my books, which is maybe appropriate for a book that's about long-term decision making. I first started taking notes on it eight years ago. There had been a lot of books about decisions, but they were almost all focused on short-term instinctive Blink-like decisions. I love those books but it did seem odd that I'd spent so much time looking at short-term decisions when the decisions that really end up shaping your life require deliberation and foresight and all of these properties that I felt were being unappreciated. Then I stumbled across Darwin's notebooks in which he has this two-page pros and cons list, trying to decide whether to get married.