What the Future Holds: Insights from social science edited by Richard Cooper
and Richard Layard, MIT Press, $29.95/£20.50, ISBN 0262032945
PROPHECY has not been one of humankind’s more common-or-garden skills. H.G.
Wells—who was, unusually, a talented dabbler in it—summed it up
nicely: “It seems an odd thing to me that though we have thousands and thousands
of professors of history . . . there is not a single person anywhere who makes a
whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new
devices. There is not a single Professor of Foresight in the world.”…
