The Futurology Bubble

The 1965–1975 decade witnessed an explosion of activity in the predictive domain. One prominent example was the Commission for the Year 2000, a study-group chaired by Daniel Bell for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Resources for the Future in Washington D.C. and the National Planning Association were also active in future-oriented inquiries. Then too, there was the influential Club of Rome's investigation of the social and environmental import of industrial and technological development, which issued in the widely publicized “Limits of Growth” study. Not to be outdone in the U.S., the Congressional Research Service established a Futures Research Group to provide support for policy deliberations.

In the early 1970s, the Natural Science Foundation launched its project to devise science indicators on the analogy of the economic indications of the Commerce Bureau. And this was filled in 1979/80 by the USF's extensive two-volume study of The Five Year Outlook: Problems, Opportunities, and Constraints in Science and Technology (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1980). All of these studies served the same fundamental objective: to provide guidance about the future as background for public policy formulation.

This diffusion of futurism was bound up with the ever-increasing prominence in all industrialized nations of what might be called the Advice Establishment: academics, working scientists, technical experts, and pundits of all sorts serving on advisory boards, policy study groups, and public commissions developing information, ideas, and speculations to provide guidance about the future as background for public policy formulation. Enthusiasm also sprung up not only for making concrete predictions, but also for projecting scenarios— pictures of “alternative futures” (and of course possible and plausible—not wholly improbable—futures). Developed out of war-gaming techniques, this methodology of possibility projection was initially conceived at The RAND Corporation in California in the 1950s, and was subsequently applied extensively to issues in economics, politics, and international relations.

This rise of a movement—indeed virtually an industry—of “futurism” or “futurology” in the Cold-War period was in fact one of the characterizing features the period, with many writers urging the elaboration and recognition of such a new science, whose prime task is that of forecasting the nature and impact of technical innovations.