Futurist Edie Weiner on New Trends and Transformations

We recently spoke with futurist Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown. She laid out for us some of her fascinating insights about the five most important social shifts she predicts will take place over the coming years. We will be posting them as a series this week, starting with Edie’s predictions about the economy.

The first important shift is the fundamental transformation of the global economy. This has happened before in our history—we went from hunter-gatherer to agricultural, then industrial, post-industrial, and it shifted again in 1992. We're now going through another transformation, which began about eight years ago. These transformations are caused by disruptive technologies that come together and synergistically create efficiencies that throw a lot of people out of work. And those people don't find work until the new businesses and new industries are created out of those new technologies, and then they're absorbed back in the workforce and we go on. Everything changes when those economies change. There are whole new ways to create products and services and to make money on products and services.

We were tens of thousands of years in the agricultural economy, 200 in the industrial, 45 in the post-industrial, and in 1992, we knew that we had maybe 12-15 years' half-life before we entered another economy. So we predicted that between 2005 and 2007, we would see major layoffs around the globe and structural unemployment. So one of the important stories for today is that the economists keep talking about a recession, but it is not and never was. It is a fundamental, global economic transformation.

The unemployment is structural and everything will change. As part of the changes in the economy, you can't make money on what you used to make money on because of the efficiencies. If you remember back to the first hand-held calculators that Texas Instrument came out with, they cost $1,500. Now, you get more computing power in a singing birthday card. Remember the first portable telephones that came out in the early 90's? They weighed a lot, they cost a lot of money, they were huge, now you can give them away for free, you can't make any money on them. And so, the important thing when you go through these transformations is to know what the new value propositions are going to be.