Eric Garland's blog

There is a major wave right now of backlash against the shallow analysis of science and technology as a route to understanding the future.

JC Penney's CEO Ron Johnson has made a bold statement regarding the future of the company - that it plans to move all of its inventory onto an advanced RFID system and obviate the need for human cashiers.

I am excited to begin a project this year on bringing jobs to a county in Northern New England, my home stomping ground. I have worked on economic development projects for years as a futurist, from the state of South Dakota to the Prince of Monaco. This year, in 2012, something is different: many people accept that the old methods no longer work.

It sounded like one of the craziest tasks anybody ever dreamed up: Def Leppard is in the process of re-recording, in painstaking detail, its monster-selling albums from the 80s, specifically Pyromania and Hysteria.

There is a lot of chatter in the news from the neo-cornucopians about how "wait, resource scarcity was merely a false alarm, there's more than enough resources to keep growth going for years - like lots of new oil!" When you read the fine print, it turns out that the "new oil reserves" make very little mention of how much oil is going to flow each day, at what cost, and to replace what level of lost capacity in critical places such as Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the U.S.

The Education Bubble caused by credentialism, generational conflict and a receding 20th century economy does not just affect the young. Sure, when we think of "student loans" we immediately think of the standard student coming straight from high school and going directly into the maw of the American university debt monster.

Richard Florida made a lovely cottage industry around telling cities, regions and countries that their fortune rose and fell with the attraction of the creative class.

Given the endless scandals, abuses, and pecadillos of the mainstream banking industry, it comes as no surprise to see a variety of innovations out there.

Josh Brown, the Reformed Broker, has a brief and insightful post about the tension between two of the most important factions in finance, the macros versus the traders.

The world as you know it is completely screwed, so full of internal inconsistencies that the coming decades will be florid with failure after breakdown after predictable catastrophe after mind-numbing disappointment. So smile! Let's have some fun and fix it all!