How the Future Wuz

[lsanderson]

White Collars Turn Blue
By Paul Krugman
Published: September 29, 1996

When looking backward, you must always be prepared to make allowances: it is unfair to blame late-20th-century observers for their failure to foresee everything about the century to come. Long-term social forecasting is an inexact science even now, and in 1996 the founders of modern nonlinear socioeconomics were obscure graduate students. Still, many people understood that the major forces driving economic change would be the continuing advance of digital technology and the spread of economic development throughout the world; in that sense, there were no big surprises. The puzzle is why the pundits of the time completely misjudged the consequences of those changes. More