The futures literature that can be grouped into several sections. Some are very academic and narrowly focused, some are scholarly but cover a range of materials, some are simple collections of facts, and some are more popularized collections. The material below represents the popularized category.

Go to Seminar on Book Reviews

Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. 1982. John Naisbitt. Warner Books.

Identifies 10 major trends shaping the future. These trends are developed from the "ground up" by reading multiple sources of newspapers and other "close to the people" publications. The trends are: industrial society moving to an information society, forced technology moving to high technology, national economy moving to world economy, short term moving to long term, centralization moving to decentralization, institutional help moving to self help, representative democracy moving to participatory democracy, hierarchies moving to networking, power base of north part of U.S moving to southern U.S., and either/or options moving to multiple options.

Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s. 1990. John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene. William Morrow and Company.

This is a new version of the original Megatrends (1982) book. The new trends are: global economic boom of the 1990s, renaissance in the arts, emergence of free-market socialism, global lifestyles and cultural nationalism, privatization of the welfare state, rise of the pacific rim, the 1990s as a decade of women in leadership, the age of biology, religious revival of the third millennium, and triumph of the individual.

The Popcorn Report. Faith Popcorn. 1991. 226 p.

The book is divided into three sections: understanding the future, paths to the future, and getting on-trend, capitalizing on the trends, the new marketing frontier, and future signals. She identifies 10 trends (cocooning in a new decade, fantasy adventure, small indulgences, egonomics, cashing out, down aging, staying alive, the vigilante consumer, 99 lives, and saving our society. Some of the methods they use to identify trends include reading about: food (new products/trendy restaurants, best selling books), new products (successful or not), transformations in family structure, shifts in the workplace, the environment (are people motivated to change?), the economy (is the fear level high?), the overall cultural mood (anxious or hopeful?).

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. 1990. Alvin Toffler. Bantam Books.

Toffler published Future Shock in 1970; this proved to be a very popular book and started him on a series of other books relating to the future. These others are The Third Wave and Powershift. Powershift focuses on the where the "power" will be located, what it will be, and how it will affect others. The book is full of Toffler generated jargon and consists of a series of choppy sections that make interesting reading but are hard to summarize here briefly.

Predicting the Future. 1993. Leo Howe and Alan Wain (ed). Cambridge University Press. 195 p.

The book is a series of essays by experts in the field covering the future of the universe, chaos, comets and the world's end, economy, medical frontier, divine providence, Buddhist predictions, and the last judgement. The authors not the processes for predicting the future are not always the same, and one needs to look at different societies and at different times.

Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse and Envisioning a Sustainable Future. 1991. Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers.

This book is self-identified as a sequel to The Limits to Growth (published by the same authors in 1972). The first book used five variables to model the world from 1900 to 2100: resources, population, pollution, food, and industrial output. This book (20 years later) uses the same variables, updates the data, and uses a computer program (Stella) that runs on a Macintosh microcomputer rather than a mainframe computer. They also add new perspectives (e.g., global warming, ozone depletion), and focus on sustainability. A number of models are presented, using different assumptions. Comparisons are made between the results represented by two books.

Vital Signs 1997: Trends That Are Shaping the Future. Lester Brown, Nicholas Lenssen,, Hal Kane. 1997 (published annually).

Key indicators are described and summarized as: food, agricultural resources, energy, atmospheric, economic, social, and military. They focus on environment, economy, and social to describe the results of the trends found by following the indicators. They conclude we are entering an new era that primarily involves food, energy, and social changes. Both positive and negative trends and outcomes are reviewed.