Previous: Limits to Growth
As we hurtle towards super-industrialism, a new ethos emerges in which other goals ... supplant those of economic welfare.
One of the healthiest phenomena has been the sudden proliferation of organisations dedicated to the study of the future
To improve education... there should be a `council of the future;' in every school and community
There should be whole new curricula, designed by futurists.
The first thing that strikes us is Toffler's unnecessarily breathless style. Compared with the first half of the twentieth century, the second half was a period of relative tranquility. No-one today would think of the early seventies as a time when we were `hurtling' towards anything.
Secondly, we note that there is no sign of the new ethos he refers to; if anything, the purely economic view of the world has gained popularity.
The third and most striking aspect of these prophecies is their consistently self-serving nature. Toffler styles himself a futurist, and the chief thing he has to say about the future is that lots of futurists should be hired and put in charge of things.
Although his title, ``Megatrends'', suggests the same breathless style as Toffler's, Naisbitt actually begins the book by acknowledging that detailed prediction of the future is impossible, and that the best we can hope for is a clear analysis of the present - which, for ``Megatrends'', is 1982. Even given this admirable caution, his record in distinguishing trends from fads is less than perfect. Trend Two, for example, predicts that the Human Potential movement will grow in pace with the increased use of computers; in retrospect, I think those who can remember the Human Potential movement would associate it with the `Me Decade' of the later Seventies. Far from companies following his Trend Four and going from short-term to long-term planning, exactly the opposite has occurred: the past two decades have seen managers increasingly pre-occupied with planning for the next three months - since in the longer term, they expect to move to another company or retire on their accumulated bonuses. Lastly, Naisbitt's Trend Six sees curative medicine being increasingly replaced by a new public commitment to healthier lifestyles and regular exercise, a prediction noticeably at odds with North America's current swelling to unprecedented levels of obesity.
Previous: Limits to Growth