of teachers, the soaring cost of a college education, and our contemptuous and careless discharge of our debt-ridden young people into a world of unemployment, underemployment and bank predation.

Ray Bradbury gave the world another gift, too. He could see the present as a stranger might see it -- as if it were fiction, as if our own lives were being written by some 18th- or 19th-century Bradbury. That kind of vision opened up a million imaginations. (I talked with Paul Krugman about the role sci-fi played in his career choices.)

Back then I scoured books on science fiction -- even tried to write some at age eleven and twelve -- and read something Bradbury had written which stunned me:

... Only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night,one little family.

Ray Bradbury saw the science-fiction aspects of our world. The implications of that are profound. It reminds us that our society, our economy, our world, is a product of human action. That means we can imagine other worlds for ourselves, other stories, other futures.

Better ones.

It was a Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder," that first told the world about "the butterfly effect." In the story a time traveler goes to the distant past, where he's not supposed to touch anything, and makes one simple mistake: he steps on a butterfly. He returns to his own time, where a presidential campaign is underway, and finds that everything has changed. An election considered a shoo-in for the good guy has instead been won by the "iron man"