Social Change

Here’s a new story in the spirit of Dickens’ Scrooge. It seems that bequests to baby boomers are falling short of expectations. I recall that about five years ago a study indicated that some $3 trillion was about to change hands from the WWII generation to baby boomers. Many charities were rubbing their hands together with glee because it was ...

When I commented a few days ago about strategies for dealing with the future other than futuring I mentioned two: quick reactions and resilience. I just thought of a third: muddling through. Probably it is the most common way people, groups and societies move forward. A little planning, a little insight, a lot of wrangling about what to do and ...

A recent opinion-piece in Wired magazine is titled flatly: “Futurism is Dead.” The article condemns the field of futurism and the World Future Society in particular as failures because the record of predictions from professional futurists has been so bad. The great irony is that there has been no publication with as many articles over the past 10 to 15 ...

Something you tend to wonder about when thinking about the future is: how many people will be around and for how long? According to the latest UN projections the world population will reach 8.9 billion folks by 2050 and top-out at 9 billion around 2300. The US will reach about 500 million. Fewer kids and more AIDS will put the ...