Newsweek's Website has an article about the declining fortunes of the field of futurology or futures studies:
http://www.msnbc.com...?0cb=-415104790
Futurology was born during the cold war and initially had an alarmist tinge. In the R&D labs of America’s military, scientists began doing mathematical trend analysis of such questions as: how fast will the Soviets develop new submarines? The Air Force set up the Rand Corporation, and a visionary there named Herman Kahn began developing scenarios for what the world might experience in the event of a nuclear war. A foundation, the Stanford Research Institute, began using similar methods to predict trends in general society: what would the future of transportation look like? “It was quite an idealistic period,” recalls Edward Cornish, president and founder of the World Future Society. “America was going to the moon. There was a lot of money.”
Then futurology hit the mainstream, and started to rise on the pop charts. In 1970 a former Fortune magazine editor named Alvin Toffler published a landmark best seller called “Future Shock,” an epic vision of how the “roaring current of change”—job mobility, the decline of the small town, the throwaway consumer society—had left Americans in a state of “shattered stress and disorientation.”
Thousands joined the World Future Society, where they came up with answers and visions, to which Americans listened quite seriously. There were more best sellers, media attention, the Ford and Reagan visits. Sure, their grandest predictions were of-ten wrong. Columbia University physicist Gerald Feinberg predicted in 1960 that in 2000 a baby would be born on an artificial planet for the first time. But in some sense the early pioneers were influential beyond their wildest dreams. The forecasting techniques spawned by futurologists are widely used in government and private business. Many multinationals employ forecasters who predict 10, 25, even 50 years into the future.
But futurology as a kind of faith is gone. Toffler hasn’t had a best seller in years. No futurist of comparable stature has stepped up to take his place.
Could the decline of futurology reflect a general discounting of the idea of progress?