Yesterday's Tomorrows: 1968-1998

Books that got the future right--and wrong

From the December 1998 issue

(Page 7 of 9)

Reich pictured the America of the future as "an extended family in the spirit of the Woodstock festival." It didn't happen, thank God. At Woodstock, people who took drugs and rolled around in mud were "hippies" or "flower children." Today we call them "the homeless." Fortunately, many of the Woodstock generation grew up, got haircuts, opened money-market accounts, and joined the emerging Republican majority. Some even subscribe to REASON.

Because of Greening, Reich was the most famous professor at Yale Law School at the time that Bill Clinton was attending. Some of Reich's goopier language about idealism seeped into Clinton's rhetoric, but here's one line he won't be quoting: "To be dishonest in love, to `use' another person, is a major crime."

What comes next? That's the question James P. Pinkerton addressed in his aptly titled 1995 book, What Comes Next (Hyperion). The government's vast "Bureaucratic Operating System," he wrote, has degenerated past the point where incremental patches can work. We need a new system that includes privatization, decentralization, elimination of failed agencies, and a fairer way to raise revenue, such as the flat tax.

That's a positive vision of the future, but there's no guarantee that it will come true. Although Republicans have praised these goals, they have lately been timid about acting on the specifics. Too bad. If supporters of free minds and free markets don't act on their beliefs, supporters of bureaucratic government will stay in charge. And the future will bear a depressing resemblance to the past.

Contributing Editor John J. Pitney Jr. is associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Robert W. Poole Jr.

One of the most prescient books of the past 30 years appeared at the end of 1968: Peter Drucker's The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row). At a time when the world of policy and government was dominated by the ideas of people like John Kenneth Galbraith, Drucker challenged the conventional wisdom across the board. He foresaw a half-century of fundamental change, in both the U.S. and the global economy, and in the ideas by which we attempt to make sense of the respective roles of government and the private sector, both for-profit and nonprofit. He identified knowledge as the key factor in economic growth, and he challenged governments to rethink their policies so as not to inhibit the huge changes that would be necessary as societies adjusted to the emerging knowledge-based economy--especially the revolution to be unleashed by widespread access to inexpensive computer power.

For me, Drucker's book first identified the concept of "reprivatization," calling for a fundamental rethinking of government's role (seeing it primarily as policy maker and regulator, rather than provider of goods and services). This insight was one of the critical influences that led me to research and write about privatization, and to set up what became the Reason Foundation.

The booby prize for prescience surely belongs to another 1968 volume, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine). Evincing complete economic ignorance, combined with blindness to demographic evidence already becoming available, Ehrlich presented a Malthusian scenario under which out-of-control population growth would lead to mass starvation. He predicted that even England "will not exist in the year 2000." Despite their obvious absurdity, Ehrlich's views helped ignite today's enormously influential environmental movement.

As for the best book identifying trends that will shape the next 30 years, I want to cheat just a bit by discussing two books. The best book that sets the stage, by documenting the move away from central planning over the past decade, is Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's The Commanding Heights (Simon & Schuster, 1998). The book's central theme is the replacement of the idea of "government knowledge" with the idea of "market knowledge," an insight the authors correctly trace to Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek.

But while The Commanding Heights is reportorial, it is not very analytical or predictive. The most profound book that examines the underlying factors and trends that will shape this country over the next several decades is Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies (The Free Press, 1998). This delightful book is an exercise in applying Hayek's insights about the dynamics of a free market and a free society to turn-of-the-millennium America. If you want to see what "spontaneous order" means when applied to the complex, high-tech world in which we will spend the rest of our lives, you should read this book.

Robert W. Poole Jr. is president of the Reason Foundation.

Virginia Postrel

Thirty years ago, conventional wisdom held that to reap the benefits of science, technology, and markets, we must deny ourselves fun. This repression theory of progress, derived from turn-of-the-century sociologist Max Weber, was just as popular in the counterculture as it was in the establishment. The only question was which side of the tradeoff you preferred.

Among the most influential expositions of this view was Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books). In this 1976 book, Bell embraced the repression theory but observed that rising living standards were eroding the Puritan ethic. Capitalism, he argued, would destroy itself by encouraging hedonistic play: "In America, the old Protestant heavenly virtues are largely gone, and the mundane rewards have begun to run riot....The world of hedonism is the world of fashion, photography, advertising, television, travel. It is a world of make-believe in which one lives for expectations, for what will come rather than what is....Nothing epitomized the hedonism of the United States better than the State of California."

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