The Fabulous Future? : America and the World in 2040
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The Fabulous Future? MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_i MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_ii The Fabulous Future? America and the World in 2040 EDITED BY Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro NorthwesterN UNiversity Press evaNstoN, illiNois MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_iii Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2015. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress. Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Morson, Gary Saul, and Morton Schapiro. The Fabulous Future? America and the World in 2040. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015. The following material is excluded from the license: Chapter 6, “Human Rights: Freedom’s Future,” by Wendy Kaminer For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit www.nupress.northwestern.edu An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_iv For our children— Emily and Alexander Morson and Matthew, Alissa, and Rachel Schapiro— and for everyone who will inherit the future we are all making MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_v MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_vi Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. — ofteN attribUted to Niels bohr MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_vii MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_viii CoNteNts Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: The Future of Prediction Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro xv Organization of the Volume and List of Contributors xxxi Part One: Wealth, Health, and Happiness Chapter 1 Wealth The Future of Economic Growth: Slowing to a Crawl Robert J. Gordon 5 Chapter 2 Health Longer and Healthier Lives? Eileen M. Crimmins 23 Chapter 3 Happiness A Happier World? Richard A. Easterlin 33 MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_ix Part Two: Politics, Religion, and Human Rights Chapter 4 Politics The World in 2040 Robert L. Gallucci 49 Chapter 5 Religion The Future of American Religion Eboo Patel 63 Chapter 6 Human Rights Freedom’s Future Wendy Kaminer 79 Part Three: Science, Technology, and the Environment Chapter 7 Science Especially about the Future Mark A. Ratner 99 Chapter 8 Technology The Era of Answers John Kelly III 113 Chapter 9 The Environment Bridging the Gap between Knowing and Doing: The New Environmental Governance Mark R. Tercek and Jimmie Powell 129 MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_x Part Four: Education, Communication, and Society Chapter 10 Education The Future of Higher Education in the United States (and the World) Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro 155 Chapter 11 Communication Media of the Future Arianna Huffington 175 Chapter 12 Society The Future of Fearmongering Barry Glassner 183 Conclusion: The World To Be Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro 199 Index 205 MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_xi MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_xii AckNowledgmeNts This book emerged from an undergraduate course we have been teach- ing together for several years— Alternatives: Modeling Choice Across the Disciplines. One of our favorite topics is the examination of different approaches to predicting the future and to understanding the past. We thank our students and our exceptionally talented teaching assistants for inspiring us to produce this volume. We received great advice and assistance from the staff at Northwest- ern University Press, and we single out in particular its director, Jane Bunker, and assistant director, Henry Lowell Carrigan Jr., along with three anonymous referees who reviewed the volume with uncommon insight. We thank also the wonderful people in the Northwestern Presi- dent’s Office— Judi Remington, Lindsay Rathert, and Paula Peterson— for help in many ways, and especially Geneva Danko, who masterfully organized draft after draft in the most cheerful and efficient manner imaginable. Provost Dan Linzer provided helpful comments on our pen- ultimate draft. Finally, we thank the editors and authors of the classic 1955 book The Fabulous Future: America in 1980. While it is easy to scoff at so many of their predictions, we fully expect that, decades from now, much of what is written here will seem as hopelessly misguided. How could they, and we, miss the obvious? It certainly wasn’t because either volume suffered from the selection of the wrong authors. As was the case in the 1950s, we have here a collection of some of the most thoughtful and influential thinkers in the world. The problem, of course, is that the future remains as unimaginable as ever. One thing we can know is that the future is not a given—it depends on what we do. It does not just happen to us. We make it. While that sometimes terrifies us, it also gives us hope. xiii MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_xiii MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_xiv INTRODUCTION The Future of Prediction Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous. — george eliot, MIDDLEMARCH Everyone questions his memory, but no one questions his judgment. — la roChefoucaUld The future just won’t stay still. We imagine we can predict it, that we can diminish or erase its uncertainty, and that we can mitigate the power of the radically unknown. Almost always, events prove us wrong. Then we forget these mistakes and go on making predictions with undiminished confidence. As Barry Glassner observes in the present volume, predictions of disaster seem to exercise special attraction, as if the more critical the problems we face, the more significant are our lives.1 Today, the media report a wealth of catastrophes. Oil may run out, but no one predicts the end of terrifying predictions: new microorganisms, produced naturally or in some laboratory, and circulating accidentally or by design, threaten the human race; the more nations that have nuclear weapons, the more possible nuclear war becomes. Will the Cuban missile crisis look quaint some day? The older nuclear technology gets, the easier it will become to acquire it. The rise of powers more dangerous, because less given to self- preservation, than the former Soviet Union makes the old strategy of deterrence look less and less viable. So does the rise of terrorists without a state to deter. Or so we are told. xv MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_xv The technology that improves our lives also threatens to destroy them. The more dependent we become on GMOs (genetically modified or- ganisms), the more destructive a disease affecting them might prove. Recent violations of civil and political liberties by the NSA and IRS, as well as corporate spying, suggest the possibility of a new totalitarianism. In 1984, the ubiquitous “telescreens” destroyed privacy, but that image seemed like a paranoid fantasy on Orwell’s part. The cameras everywhere in London, government tracing of emails, and the use of computers to do analysis that only recently required human beings may soon make privacy as outmoded as monks copying manuscripts.2 And what if we are on the verge of reading people’s minds by brain scans? Many kinds of environmental disaster threaten. We read more and more predictions about the effects of climate change, which give us a spectrum of catastrophes. The very actions we take to forestall a disaster may make it more likely (an example given is the use of ethanol) or cre- ate new ones. Some predictors take it for granted that we will run out of natural resources, since the supply of anything is by definition limited. Even when a problem seems to be advancing gradually, it is possible to draw a curve showing rapid acceleration to come. No one ever raised money to solve a problem that wasn’t urgent. We may be at a “tipping point.” How can we tell? Indeed, the very popularity of new terms like “tipping point” and “in- flection point” testify to our recent attitude to the future.3 Even where things seem benign, they may be on the verge of horror. Right or wrong, many people still feel as if the present moment is especially urgent. But might it not be that our view of the present is mistaken, the prod- uct of our temporal and temperamental egoism? Surely the 1930s and 1940s gave more reason for fearing the future than the present does. Is it possible to compare our attitude toward the future with that of earlier times? Every age has its “futuribles” (set of anticipated futures that could happen), so wouldn’t some sort of comparative futurology give us per- spective on our own obsessions about what is to come?4 In 1955, Fortune magazine marked its twenty-fifth anniversary by publishing The Fabulous Future: America in 1980, which brought together some of the smartest and most influential Americans to speculate on the world to come.5 Contributors included John von Neumann, who not only made important contributions to mathematics and physics but also xvi MORSON&SCHAPIRO_P4_xvi founded game theory and cybernetics; David Sarnoff, chairman of RCA, then synonymous with technological progress; Crawford Greenewalt, president of Du Pont; Adlai Stevenson, who was the Democratic can- didate for president in 1952 and would be again in 1956; Chief Justice Earl Warren; AFL- CIO president George Meany; Treasury Secretary George Humphrey; Harvard president Nathan Pusey; and several oth- ers. Their contributions both reflected and shaped the wisdom of the times. They weren’t entirely mistaken. As they guessed, the pace of techno- logical change sped up, polio was conquered, and “calculating machines” were invented. But in detail and in broad conception they were almost comically off the mark.