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In a mass of speculation and extrapolation, the reports forecast many trends that have come true: decentralization, the communications revolution, the rise of services, genetic engineering, threats to privacy, nuclear proliferation. They were optimistic about the economy, predicting huge increases in personal income and the GNP (they forecast an increase to $3.6 trillion, thus falling short of the actual figure, at latest count, by about $5 trillion). They also foresaw a rise in hedonism and a decline in the work ethic. There were the inevitable misjudgments and omissions--especially, as Bell now concedes, a lack of any reference to the dramatic change in the role of women.
As if to make up for that, a group of writers a few years later published the book Woman in the Year 2000. The contributions were cast in the form of fantasy and fiction but largely reflected the familiar feminist gospel. One story involved a girl born at midnight in the year 2000, appropriately named Millenny. When she goes to school, she finds that girls are no longer discouraged from fighting with one another and that boys are no longer looked down on when they weep. On television, violence and machismo have been banned. Safe pharmaceutical contraceptives are available free at banks and post offices. When and if Millenny is ready to get married, she and her partner will negotiate a contract specifying their mutual expectations and responsibilities, a document to be renegotiated from time to time and always subject to cancellation.
Other pieces in the book predicted that conception would take place in laboratories and gestation in artificial wombs, that the gender of babies would be determined in advance, that homosexuality would be universally accepted. Today, two years before Millenny's birth, it all sounds remarkably familiar.
During the 1970s, gloom spread, partly as a result of the energy crisis, and growth was demonized. At the end of Jimmy Carter's presidential term a group of federal agencies submitted Global 2000 Report to the President. It was strongly neo-Malthusian, predicting environmental degradation, overpopulation, shrinking resources and vast increases in poverty unless there were technological breakthroughs and international action. The Carter Administration passed the report on to Ronald Reagan, who ignored it. The doomsayers could not have foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat of the welfare state in most parts of the world, the full impact of the global market or the resurgence of the American economy.
On balance, technological forecasts have often proved remarkably accurate, in outline if not in detail. By contrast, the political forecasts--whether the dreams of brotherhood or the nightmares of Big Brother--have been far more dubious.