It's the 21st century already. Weren't we supposed to have flying cars by now? What about a moon base? Nuclear fusion? A cure for the common cold? As a kid growing up in the 1970s, raised on "Star Trek" reruns and back issues of "Popular Mechanics", I was always dreaming of the future. Everything I read or saw on TV convinced me that I would grow up to live in a utopian society, because science and technology would soon solve all of the world's problems. Everywhere I turned it seemed that optimistic futurists were touting groundbreaking advances in energy production, transportation, medicine, and space travel that were supposedly only a decade or two away. (For some reason, major breakthroughs in science and technology are always advertised as being about "a decade or two away.") Back then, I had every reason to believe that, by the turn of the 21st century, we'd all be commuting by high-speed maglev trains and hypersonic jetliners, getting unlimited power from solar arrays and fusion reactors, and watching the first humans explore the surface of Mars. But none of this happened. The optimistic futurists (and I'll count my childhood self among them, since I spent much of my time daydreaming about all the wonders the future would bring) got it wrong. But, then again, the pessimistic futurists, with their dystopian prophesies of a future plagued by nuclear war, pandemic disease, and complete societal collapse, also got it wrong. Why? Where did we make our mistakes?
For one thing, we were far too willing to let our hopes and dreams -- or, alternately, our fears and nightmares -- get the better of our dispassionate critical judgment. For another, we tried to model the flow of history as a simple, linear process in which the future can be extrapolated from past and present trends, rather than acknowledging that progress is often complex and non-linear. But our main failing was to give too much weight to the scientific and technological drivers of progress, and not enough to the social, political, and economic factors that shape the course of history. We were so preoccupied with the question of what was scientifically and technologically possible that we completely failed to ask what was economically affordable, politically feasible, and socially desirable. In other words, we focused on how to build cool stuff, not on how to pay for it, who would vote for it, or whether the public even wanted it. After we finally reached the moon, optimistic futurists like me assumed that we would press on to Mars and beyond just as soon as we had the technical capability to do so. It never occurred to us that the space program might get dramatically scaled back due to changing attitudes about the value of human space exploration. In essence, we failed to take into account the simple fact that society's values and priorities change over time. This is arguably the single biggest, and most common, mistake that forecasters make when trying to predict the future.
That's why all would-be prognosticators would be well advised to read this book (along with the authors' follow-up volume, "The Fourth Turning"). The authors' central thesis is that each generation has a very different outlook on life than the previous generation; and these generational differences are what drive social change over time. In fact, the authors contend that each generation will, at least to some extent, rebel against the dominant values and priorities of the preceding generation, which can cause dramatic reversals in social norms and public policies from one generation to the next. This would help to explain why a nation that was once so enthusiastic about putting a man on the moon could lose interest in space exploration so quickly after it had achieved this goal. As one generation comes of age and begins to step into the social roles previously occupied by an older generation, it will bring new values and new priorities with it. It will have its own agenda. This means that long-term projects will almost always face serious setbacks down the road, no matter how popular they may have been at their inception, due to the difficulty of maintaining their support as a new generation of workers, leaders, voters, and taxpayers comes of age. Forecasters who don't take this into account will end up making overly optimistic (or, in some cases, overly pessimistic) predictions.
I'm not going to take the time to analyze, critique, or even try to summarize the various ideas presented in this book. Other reviewers have already done this; and I don't really have all that much to add. Besides, I don't think it's possible to do justice to the authors' thesis in just a few paragraphs. All I'll say is that this book gives the reader a fascinating new way of looking at how history unfolds, and how to think about the future. Many of the ideas presented here are highly contested within academia; but, then again, most new ideas are highly contested within academia -- that's what academia is for: to put ideas to the test. The bottom line for me is that reading this book will give you a new perspective on how the world changes over time; and this may prove useful, especially if you want to be able to predict what the world will be like ten, twenty, or perhaps even fifty years from now. Where most futurists go wrong is to assume that today's dreams (or nightmares) will inevitably become tomorrow's reality. What they fail to realize is that each generation has a different set of dreams and nightmares. Your children and grandchildren won't pursue your dreams; they'll pursue their own. Any long-term forecast that doesn't take this simple truth into account will someday look as naïve as my childhood prediction that, when I grew up, we would all have flying cars.
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Got my book in the mail a full month earlier than I thought. I'm some ways in so far. I could see how this is a very "heady" book and hard to understand, but I've personally had no trouble with understanding it. Eerily accurate describing each generation.
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