Yet what is most instructive about The Book of Predictions is not the things that proved true. It’s the bad calculations that must have seemed totally justifiable—perhaps even conservative—at the time of publication. And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the status quo is temporary. The Book of Predictions was released in 1980, so this mostly means a failure to imagine a world where the United States and the Soviet Union were not on the cusp of war. Virtually every thought about the future of global politics focuses on either (a) an impending
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