Daniel Little — The near future

There is a lot going on in America and the world today: climate change, increasing separation between the rich and the non-rich, entrenched poverty in cities, continuing effects of racism in American life, and a rising level of political extremism in this country and elsewhere, for starters. Add to this politico-military instability in Europe, continuing social conflict over austerity in many countries, and a rising number of extreme-right movements in a number of countries, and you have a pretty grim set of indications of what tomorrow may look like for our children and grandchildren.

How should we think about what our country will look like in twenty or thirty years? And how can we find ways of acting today that make the prospects for tomorrow as good as they can be?

UnderstandingSociety

The near future
Daniel Little

Market liberalization together with technological innovation have resulted in many of the challenges humanity faces, in that the pursuit of efficiency leads to consolidation and elimination of redundancy, as well as negative externalites, that ignore rising risk to vital systems. The only way to address the risk that this engenders seems to be through government action, since markets are apparently not self-correcting in this respect, and there are political obstacles to that happening in the current neoliberal environment.