Towards the year 2018

The only real doomsayer was the demographer Philip M. Hauser […] [who predicted] that the distance between the rich and the poor, and between wealthy nations and poor nations, would widen. “Given the present outlook, only the faithful who believe in miracles from heaven, the optimistic who anticipate superwonders from science, the parochial fortunate who think they can continue to exist on islands of affluence in a sea of world poverty, and the naïve who anticipate nothing can look to the future with equanimity,” Hauser concluded.

What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, by Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, 7 January 2018. The article reviews Toward the Year 2018, a group of essays about the future published by the Foreign Policy Association in 1968.