But society is never static, nor does it keep changing in the same direction for long. This explains the repeated failure of the standard capabilities-and-constraints approach. When it was used in the 1950s in order to look ahead twenty years, it failed to point out nearly everything that was so strikingly new about the 1970s. When it was used again in the 1970s, it said little about what America would become in the 1990s. Needless to say, no futurologist twenty years ago told us where America would find itself today.
