Futurecast

NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Dr. Robert Shapiro's important book Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change Your World by the Year 2020 has been released in paperback. It's a great book, but don't take my word for it, read it for yourself. Some other strong references:

"[Shapiro’s book] is a storm warning at a time when food shortages, higher energy prices and a credit crunch are forcing our heads out of the sand: if readers turn to Futurecast, they will find an argument that gives us a measure of what we should expect from our political leaders - and from ourselves - if we are to continue our civilization on the high plateau we have managed to reach." --The Financial Times

"Rob Shapiro's prescient and insightful book probes the confluence of challenges that society will face in the coming years. He argues that our world has become increasingly interdependent, and we must foster global cooperation to achieve a sustainable existence with equal opportunity for all. Futurecast is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand the world our children will inherit." -- President Bill Clinton

President Barack Obama's superb address Tuesday night had an underlying, unifying logic which some may have missed, but which hopefully those reading this will recognize.  

First, on the financial and economic crisis, he embraced the three basic steps we have urged since last September: on top of a stimulus aimed at long-term investments and helping the states – that’s now done – there will be new requirements that banks getting help from taxpayers use that assistance to expand their lending, and new steps to keep people in their homes and bring down foreclosure rates. It’s just economic common sense – but that’s precisely what most of official Washington casually casts aside in favor of scoring short-term, political points. (Take a look at Gov. Bobby Jindal’s empty and sneering response to the President’s speech. His repeated citing of Katrina as a model for government action, by itself, should be a career-ending act).

The President also laid out a domestic agenda for the rest of his first term, and it looks like the most sweeping since FDR and LBJ. I suppose that personal blogs, by definition, are no place for humility, so here it is straight. The three cornerstone Obama initiatives -- slow down our fast-rising health care costs, expand energy conservation and our use of alternative fuels, and give everybody new chances to upgrade their working skills -- are the exact prescription laid out more than a year ago in my book, Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work. It’s also been a regular theme of this blog and a series of papers issued by NDN.  

Here, too, it’s just economic common sense, for a world being transformed by globalization.  The underlying logic of the President’s program springs from the fierce new challenges Americans face under globalization to their jobs and incomes. Globalization has made competition much stronger, and that competition leaves American businesses and their workers in a bind. Their costs have been rising very fast, especially for health care and energy, but intense global competition makes it harder for companies to raise their prices to cover these rising costs. The result is that the wages of most American stopped rising since about 2002, even as they became more productive. And most can’t find higher wages by getting new jobs, because before the current crisis began, the same forces had made this period the weakest for job creation since World War II.

The President understands that coming out of the current crisis isn’t enough, if we just return to another period of growth without wage gains or healthy job creation. He also understands another theme of Futurecast and NDN's work, namely that about half of Americans also need new skills if they aspire to jobs with a real future. That’s the basis for the third plank of the domestic agenda he laid out last night -- genuine, new access for young people to go to college or receive other, post-secondary training, and new opportunities for everyone else to upgrade their skills. 

President Obama’s first speech to Congress already ranks as the most serious and thoughtful presidential address on the economy in decades. Perhaps it took an historic crisis to break through the political cant and mental laziness that has gripped our economic agenda for so long. But the President is using this moment to put forward not only meaningful answers for the crisis, but serious, long-term remedies for much deeper economic problems which other politicians routinely ignore. That’s presidential leadership of the sort we haven’t seen since, well, FDR.

We at NDN have been promoting a new book called Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work. The author of that insightful book, Robert J. Shapiro, who is Chair of NDN's Globalization Initiative, recently spoke on some of the themes discussed in Futurecast at our March 12th Forum. Check it out below, and be sure to order his book while you watch. Head's up: the video is about 43 minutes long.

NDN is pleased to announce the release of a new book by Dr. Rob Shapiro, Chair of our Globalization Initiative and former Under Secretary of Commerce from 1998 to 2001, entitled Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work. In the coming months, NDN will launch a series of events in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC to mark the release of this important new book that seeks to predict what our world will look like in 2020.

In Futurecast, Shapiro draws upon his unique perspective on American and world affairs to chart the next dozen years of international and national progress. He explores the monumental forces that will shape the fates of the world’s major countries and their people: economic globalization, demographic aging of societies, the rise of America as a sole superpower, threats of terrorism and the promise of technology, and national struggles to maintain access to health care and secure energy sources without destroying the global environment.

We encourage our NDN friends to take a look at Futurecast, which is available for purchase on Amazon.com. The book has received glowing praise from reviewers, economists, and politicos alike. NDN President Simon Rosenberg called it "a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of how the global economy is changing in the early park of the twenty-first century," and Rolf Ekeus, the United Nations High Commissioner on National Minorities, has said that "Robert Shapiro understands the world and all of its complexity, from the rise and fall of nations to the problem of aging populations. No one is better equipped to tell us where we’re headed in the not-so-distant future."

Many of you may already be familiar with Shapiro's contributions to the NDN Globalization Initiative and national discourse on the impact of globalization on the U.S. economy. Shapiro has recently authored two seminal papers with NDN. In The New Landscape of Globalization, he presents a new analysis of how the fundamental dynamics of globalization affect U.S. growth, productivity, wages and job creation, health care and energy costs, and investment in education and human capital. Shapiro's most recent NDN paper, The Idea-Based Economy and Globalization, examines how and why U.S. companies and workers lead the world in developing and applying new intellectual property, and why these leads in innovation constitute a critical U.S. advantage in globalization.

Shapiro has also advised Michael Moynihan, NDN Fellow and Green Project Director, on his recent paper, Investing in Our Common Future: U.S. Infrastructure. This far reaching paper proposes a set of measures to restore our national political will and improve funding mechanisms to rebuild and advance our aging infrastructure. Moynihan calls upon the U.S. government to commit America to a series of environmental goals that would simultaneously green America’s infrastructure and drive important advances in environmental technologies.

We invite you to attend one of the upcoming events to mark the release of Futurecast. As part of NDN’s Bernard Schwartz Forums on Economic Policy, NDN President Simon Rosenberg will host events with Shapiro in San Francisco on Thursday, April 10 and New York on Monday, May 5 (details forthcoming). For more information on these events, please visit our website.

Be sure to pick up your copy of Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work, the new book by Dr. Rob Shapiro, Chair of NDN's Globalization Initiative. Our copies just arrived! If you're going to be in San Francisco, CA on April 10, you're welcome to attend our Schwartz Forum where Simon and Rob will discuss Futurecast.