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. With A hundred-year view
Posted Under: Pleasing
One of the more pleasing discoveries made during the period when I was most heavily promoting Buying In was the KERA-Dallas radio show, Think. I enjoyed that interview so much, I ended up subscribing to the Podcast. Which brings me to my point:
On the February 26 episode of the show — archive here — Krys Boyd interviewed George Friedman president and CEO of something called STRATFOR. He has a book out called The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. And that’s what he talked about: His hundred-year view.
I usually have very little patience for futurist types, but I thought this guy was fascinating. Apart from hearing him make the case for why Turkey and Poland are both likely to be rising powers in the century ahead — not something I’ve ever heard before, to say the least — I was interested in his attitude toward the current economic situation. Bottom line is it was refreshing to hear someone talk about that with a longer-term view, as opposed to the nonstop panic on every news site I look at. Oh, he had some interesting stuff to say about solar power via satellite.
Again the audi0-archive link is here. They refresh it as new shows are done and this episode will disappear in a few days. So if you’re interested, grab the MP3 now.
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Reader Comments
you probably know about this already, but after Katrina this guy wrote an interesting article about why there always needs to be a major city where NO is located:
http://www.stratfor.com/new_orleans_geopolitical_prize
Rob – Is there a link out there for the interview you did for Think?
Friedman’s book is good and definitely very entertaining. What’s so strange about it though is that it doesn’t include any references. I mean, Buying In has close to ten pages of them and you were writing about stuff that already happened, not predicting a century’s worth of the future.
The far-sightedness of the book is refreshing but it’s got all sorts of problems. Aside from sources thing, Friedman tends to create these arbitrary cycles and then infers that because they happened before, they’ll happen again. It completely ignores that fact that it was that sort of thinking that fucked up the financial industry to begin with.
Brian: I did not realize that was the same guy! I remember that piece well, it was one of the smartest things written at the time.
Allen: Not that I know of.
Ryan H: Thanks for that, and you raise a point I probably should’ve been clearer about, which is that it’s possible that the guy is just a good talker. That said … he’s a good talker. I don’t know that I’ll ever read his book (again I am not that big on futurist stuff) but I sure enjoyed listening to him.
And having said that … the piece Brian mentions really was a smart and welcome response to the widespread view among many back in the Katrina moment that somehow New Orleans was culturally interesting but otherwise sort of superfluous.