Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 197–206
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The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
George Friedman. New York: Doubleday, 2008. $25.95. 272 pp.
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years
Vaclav Smil. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. £19.95/$29.95. 320 pp.
What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century
Chris Patten. London: Allen Lane, 2008. £20.00. 510 pp.
One of the perennial problems faced by the professional futures field over the past generation has been a persistent inability to keep the neighbours from borrowing the tools of our trade. Not that we’re not willing to share (far from it) but, as so often happens, they’re often used for purposes not intended, and then returned in disreputable condition.
Complicating this is the fact that the futures toolbox is a motley one, scavenged from every conceivable discipline and included on the basis of what can (more or less) be induced to work, at least on occasion. The instruments are many and varied; the only attribute they share is that they’re all fairly cumbersome and blunt. In the hands of a futurist, computer modelling, Delphi surveys, two-by-two analysis, geopolitical analysis, causal layered analysis, trend analysis, scenario development, strategic planning, social-factors research, expert forecasting and a variety of other techniques are used to winnow down the large universe of possible futures into a smaller, more workable range of plausible futures that suggest useful courses of action. Because these techniques lack precision (this is, after all, the vast unknowable future we’re talking about), and every one of them is plagued with inherent limitations, futurists prefer to use them in broad combination, checking and re-checking one against another to balance out the serious weaknesses that inevitably result when any one is forced to stand on its own.
Unfortunately, business, military and government clients are always on the lookout for the ultimate crystal ball, the one sure-fire easy-to-use forecasting technique that will deliver reliable you-can-bet-the-farm-on-it results. This misbegotten quest leads them to seize on a tool here, a tool there, banging on each one for a while until the built-in problems with it become evident. The string of disappointments with this one-technique-solves-all approach stretches back decades. But the lesson that no single futures technique should ever be trusted as a stand-alone solution still hasn’t been learned, and forecasts based on single-technique analysis are still hot items in the marketplace of ideas.
These limitations are too evident in George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. The author is the founder of the private intelligence consultancy Stratfor, and a popular foreign-policy and defence forecaster. In his newest book, he straightforwardly analyses the interrelationships that govern the world’s geopolitical system, and uses historical behaviour and current strategic imperatives to develop a forecast for the rest of the century.
There is only one scenario in this book: no mucking around with the usual range of best case, worst case, most likely case, plus one or two scenarios involving wild cards that is considered best practice among scenario writers. Friedman justifies this ...
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Sara Robinson is an American social futurist now living in Canada. She is a Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, a think tank in Washington DC, and a consulting partner in strategic policy at the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle.
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