Looking Down the Road : A Systems Approach to Futures Studies

by Douglas Raybeck

The ability to look ahead and to treat abstractions as serious business is a skill we all need to cultivate. So states the author of Looking Down the Road, a compelling short work involving the grand, if frustrating, human preoccupation with prediction. Raybeck supplies readers with some of the tools and ideas they will need as they attempt to forecast developments that are apt to characterize future society. Looking Down the Road reflects the author's anthropological training as it seeks to elucidate some of the processes and pressures that create social and cultural change.

131 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2000

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book for a class on nationalist, sometime in 2002. I set the book aside for years, planning to read it later to see how some of the author's predictions panned out.

Many of his near-future predictions seemed fairly accurate. His distant one, now more unlikely. But what I really gained from this book was a good understanding of complex systems. How the economy affects morality, affects research, etc.

Reading it now, I can also contrast what has happened vs what he predicted. It highlights some of the major changes over the past decade that have really influenced things. 9/11, oil prices, the housing bubble, being more 'green', the internet as instant communication, mobile phones as computers, globalization of information, the rising demand for education. They are the things that we ignore everyday, but when we stop to notice them, they influence our lives and feed the systems we live in, telescoping into larger changes... down the road.