Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host, author, and one of the most influential foreign policy commentators in America, delivered a commencement address at Bates College built around a single, powerful idea: the human response to problems is always harder to predict than the problems themselves. Zakaria illustrated this with the swine flu pandemic of 2009. The World Health Organization had warned of deaths in the hundreds of thousands, and the virus had genuinely alarming characteristics. But then people acted — particularly in Mexico, which quarantined the infected, provided drugs, and shut down its economy for three weeks. The result was far fewer deaths than feared. The structural problem was visible; the human response was not. He traced this pattern through centuries of history, citing Thomas Malthus, who in the 1760s correctly predicted that England's population would outgrow its food supply. Malthus was right about the problem but failed to anticipate the agricultural and industrial revolutions that solved it. For graduates entering a world of economic crisis and geopolitical uncertainty, the message was deeply optimistic: the challenges are real, but so is the human capacity to respond in ways no one can foresee.