附註:Includes bibliographical references (pages 256-259) and index.
The river and the billiard ball : history, innovation, and the future / Peter Schwartz -- The future of population / Joel E. Cohen -- The future of energy from the perspective of the social sciences / Clark C. Abt -- Modeling climate change impacts and their related uncertainties / Stephen H. Schneider -- The world of work in the new millennium / Richard B. Freeman -- Threats to future effectiveness of monetary policy / Benjamin M. Friedman -- The architecture of government in the twenty-first century / Timothy Besley -- The cybernetic society : western future studies of the 1960s and 1970s and their predictions for the year 2000 / Alexander Schmidt-Gernig.
摘要:Social scientists from various disciplines discuss and offer predictions about the future. Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. But systematic analysis leads to clearer understanding and wiser decisions. Thinking about the future also makes social scientists focus their research into the past and present more fruitfully, with more attention to key predictors of change. This book considers how we might think intelligently about the future. Taking different methodological approaches, well-known specialists forecast likely future developments and trends in human life. The questions they address include: How many humans will there be? Will there be enough energy? How will climate change affect our lives? What patterns of work will exist? How will government work at the local, national, and world level? Will inflation remain under control? Why have past forecasts been so bad? The book concludes with a discussion of the intellectual and historical context of futurology and a look at the accuracy of predictions that were made for the year 2000. Jed.
