When people try to think about the long-term future, by which I mean here looking a half-century or a century ahead, they often suffer a lack of imagination. As a common example, they take today’s problems and just multiply them by a factor of ten. Or they assume that improved central planning, in one form or another, will be how society addresses its ongoing issues involving production and allocation of scarce resources. William Nordhaus (Nobel ’18) offered some thoughts about such long-term projections in his essay “Looking Backward, Looking Forward” (Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2024, 16: 1–20). He wrote:
For anyone who undertakes long-term forecasting, I recommend an evening with Edward Bellamy’s futuristic 1878 novel, Looking Backward (Bellamy 1967). In the novel, Julian West wakes up 113 years later to survey Boston in 2000. He finds a socialist society, complete equality, no pollution, and nationally owned industry. The economy is managed much like an idealized version of Soviet central planning. Money has been replaced by cardboard credit cards that have punch holes like IBM cards. By 2000, the well-oiled machinery produces a cornucopia of … nineteenth-century products.
The economic fantasies in Looking Backward are basically all wrong. Bellamy’s vision did not foresee air travel, nuclear weapons, computers, the Internet, cyberwarfare, current artificial intelligence, or climate change. The vision of comprehensive central planning collapsed with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even with modern supercomputers, the economy is too complex to be managed by the largest and most idealistic of hierarchies. Instead, countries have found the formula
for prosperity in the mixed economy: the rule of law and government support for basic science alongside profit-oriented production and innovation of the market. …Looking Backward reminds us of the profound difficulty of predicting the structure of our societies far into the future. If we go to sleep today and wake up at century’s end, what will we find in 2100? Will it be a dystopian landscape of mass migrations and drowning cities? Will ocean crustaceans be a footnote in the cookbooks? … Maybe, but maybe not. The answers are not in the stars but in ourselves.
