Volume 11, Number 5 · September 26, 1968
Futurology
By Robert L. Heilbroner
Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Volume XI of the Daedalus Library)
edited by Daniel Bell
Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp., $6.50
Ours is not the first age to believe it could foretell the future. The Greeks consulted the oracles; the Middle Ages the clergy; the Enlightenment the philosophers and historians. The difference is that we ask the scientists. Of the forty-odd contributors to this first report of the Commission on the Year 2000, a group established by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to predict the next thirty-two years, three-quarters are social or natural scientists: economists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, physicists, and the like. Gone are the soothsayers, the clergymen, the philosophers, and all but two historians. No less revealing, we find on the Commission no artists or writers, no politicians or soldiers, no architects or engineers, no businessmen or students.
Review, 2512 words
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