World Future Society Book Review

Two business trend watchers share their insights into what's happening in the world today and what it bodes for the future.

In a time of rapid and massive change, formal planning is often an exercise in futility, warn Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown in their new book FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change.

"It's not just change that make this so," they explain. "The narrowness of most business planning—or personal planning, for that matter—contributes as well." Weiner and Brown are frequent speakers at the World Future Society's conferences, and Brown is chairman of its board of directors.

According to the authors, planners make three "really big mistakes":

Faulty or inadequate analysis: In making plans, people fail to see situations as they really are. Instead, perceptions are based on hopes and beliefs rather than reality.
Not seeing the big picture—the context. People tend to see things as discrete entities rather than holistically. This failing can be corrected by linking trends and events so that broad patterns and important connections may be observed.
Failing to link information to action. People must consciously ask themselves: "If I know what this means for me, and I have some ideas of what to do about it, and I think I or we can profit from it, why isn't action being taken?" By asking this question repeatedly, the roadblocks to action may be identified and overcome.

The key to avoiding these problems is anticipation, Weiner and Brown say. That means getting good information about what's happening in the world around you and thinking objectively about what it could mean for you. FutureThink helps by providing a wealth of specific insights that Weiner and Brown have gleaned through more than 70 years of trend watching between them. They give many of their insights catchy labels such as "the law of large numbers" and "mainstreaming."

The law of large numbers calls attention to the fact that, when a population is very large, a small percentage can still be an awful lot of people. For instance, if "only" one out of a thousand people in the world is a terrorist, we might consider it a negligible danger, but it would mean we are sharing the world with 6.5 million terrorists!

The Internet and other new communications systems have empowered not just terrorists but demographic groups of all kinds—from sufferers of rare diseases to tiddledywinks players. So people sharing a certain interest can readily make contact with each other, share information, and mobilize to get whatever it is that they want.

Once a demographic group becomes an identifiable and profitable market, it gains respect from business and wider acceptance by the general public; in other words, the group becomes mainstreamed. Weiner and Brown forecast increased mainstreaming of gay households, multiracial households, unwed mothers, seniors cohabiting out of wedlock, and ministers of alternative religions.

Baby Boomers: Healthy, Wealthy, and Lonely?
Weiner and Brown astutely point out the implications of demographic shifts, which can present enormous opportunities as well as dangers in the future. The baby boomers, for example, will become "the healthiest and wealthiest cohort ever to move into old age," but their low birthrate means that, when they get old, they may find themselves with no living relatives.

Coming: A Global
Middle Class

In FutureThink, authors Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown anticipate that the world will have about 2 billion middle-class citizens by 2015.

This figure may seem "impossibly large," Weiner and Brown admit, but it does not seem unreasonable once we recognize that China now has at least 100 million people who are middle-class by Chinese standards. By 2015, a conservative projection of that population based on current patterns of economic growth might be around 250 million. India may well have an equal or larger number, and Latin America might add another 250 to 300 million. Add Europe, North America, Indonesia, Iran, and all the other countries, and the 2 billion figure for the middle seems reachable by 2015.

The values of the middle class include "optimism, belief in freedom and opportunity, materialism, a better life for one's children, ambition, and the importance of education," according to the authors.

"Think, if you will, what this will mean for global economic development. The middle class is a voracious consumer.... It wants houses, it wants cars, it wants vacations in nice places. It wants furniture and clothes and restaurants to eat in. It wants to acquire, it wants to save, it wants to invest. It wants its children to have better jobs.

"The future market for goods and services around the world—from cars and houses (and second homes) to clothes and jewelry to food and wine to exercise equipment and self-help courses—will be immense. Economies that are prepared to respond to this tsunami of demand will prosper in ways they cannot now imagine."

One consequence of the growth of the middle class is that there will be a worldwide "acceleration of aspiration," they write. "Middle class used to be a goal in the U.S.; now it's a launchpad from which to get rich."

Weiner and Brown do not discuss the environmental consequences of the enormous economic growth that they foresee, but it seems to imply an environmentalist's nightmare: a world in which the last remnants of wilderness are paved for superhighways or cut down to make way for shopping centers and McMansions. —Edward Cornish