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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| The world is getting better, though no one likes to hear it. |
| 2007-10-05 |
| Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal I'm old enough to recall the days in the late 1960s when people wore those trendy buttons that read: "Stop the Planet I Want to Get Off." And I will never forget that era's "educational" films of what life would be like in the year 2000. Played on clanky 16-millimeter projectors, they showed images of people walking down the streets of Manhattan with masks on, so they could avoid breathing the poison gases our industrial society was spewing. The future seemed mighty bleak back then, and you merely had to open the newspapers for the latest story confirming how the human species was speeding down a congested highway to extinction. A group of scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome issued a report called "Limits to Growth." It explained that lifeboat Earth had become so weighed down with humans that we were running out of food, minerals, forests, water, energy and just about everything else that we need for survival. Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book "The Population Bomb" (1968) gave England a 50-50 chance of surviving into the 21st century. In 1980, Jimmy Carter released the "Global 2000 Report," which declared that life on Earth was getting worse in every measurable way. So imagine how shocked I was to learn, officially, that we're not doomed after all. A new United Nations report called "State of the Future" concludes: "People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer." . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 Ironically, one of the few futurists who did get a lot of what he predicted correct was Alvin Toffler, whose Future Shock and The Third Wave have been tremendously influential, if no longer given much attention by the public. Starting out as an associate editor of Fortune magazine, his focus was on the social changes, reorganization and evolution of social patterns based on technology. He and his wife, who write together, have actually been given credit for some innovative philosophical underpinnings in the West, Russia *and* China. They not only were understood by a lot of people, but they coined new words and expressions that even if you didn't get the whole idea, conveyed a lot of it, so you could get the gist of what they were saying. After looking a long time, I managed to get a copy of the short documentary "Future Shock", narrated by Orson Welles, that was almost required viewing for high school students in the US. It is still a fun movie, even if the actors are wearing futuristic versions of 1970s clothing. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-10-05 10:16 |
| #1 "People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer." But, you don't understand. That doesn't sell print or airtime. We have to have a never ending stream of 'crisis' to keep the |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-10-05 08:43 |