Volume 22, Number 11 · June 26, 1975
How Doomed Are We?
By Emma Rothschild
Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome
by Mihajlo Mesarovic, by Eduard Pestel
Dutton/Reader's Digest Press, 210 pp., $12.95
Two Cheers for the Affluent Society: A Spirited Defense of Economic Growth
by Wilfred Beckerman
St. Martin's Press, 238 pp., $7.95
The metaphors of pessimism have been appropriated, in the past year or so, by the most prominent of political orators. People like Henry Kissinger now complain in public about the prospects for industrial civilization. President Giscard d'Estaing declares, 'When we examine the great curves that project into the future the phenomena of our time, we see that practically all these curves lead to catastrophe.' Fears about the economy and about raw materials, which until recently were expressed only by a few environmentalists, are now commonplace. This new gloom is in large part, of course, a consequence of the recent disturbances which have beset the economies of all industrialized countries. Giscard and Kissinger, seeing recession and wildly unstable prices, scarcity and failures of economic policy, turn to portentous extrapolation.
Review, 5580 words
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