The Next 100 Years
I liked Greg's habit of posting reviews of the more interesting books we read, so I'll fill in any holes he leaves. We both read the books and he usually beats me to commenting on them, but I noticed he missed a recent one, The Next 100 Years by George Friedman.
The book attempts to forecast the next 100 years from the perspective of politics and economics. Not a subscriber to the Great Person theory, Friedman represents the countries as geopolitical entities with personality. Estimating what happens a 100 years out is of course, crazy, but you can come up with some interesting principles when you reduce down to the basic geopolitical nature of countries and combine that with economic and demographic trends.
Let me give some examples. He predicts a rise and fall again of a Soviet Union. His reasoning is still that Russia feels very vulnerable on 3 fronts: Baltics, Georgian and Belarus fronts, esp with the expansion of NATO and thus will attempt to push back and control extra territory in those directions as buffers. China will soon halt its fast economic rise and possible have a fragmentation due to the economic differences between west and east China (much like our civil war - with very similar reasons). Turkey will become a major player in the Middle East especially as its economy continues to strengthen. World War 3 will be fought with supersonic missiles & planes, space-based lasers and systems, and augmented soldiers around 2050 or so; it will be something of a Japan/Turkey alliance that eventually grows to include Germany (who will lose again for the exact same reasons). Actually as a side note, his description of WWIII sounded a lot like WWII for anyone who has analyzed the war from the perspective of Axis & Allies, the game.
I think he really understands the current demographic trend which is spreading from West Europe to America and then throughout the rest of the world. (This is the trend of greater education for women and the putting off of child birth and the decrease of birth rate which he correctly understands is largely motivated by economics, not morals. It used to be a huge economic BOON to have lots of kids and the woman had to be responsible for the "farm" and house, but now kids with their higher educations and such are a huge economic COST which are put off until the family can afford them.)
Despite the interesting hypotheses he proposes and some decent geopolitical analyses, it is hard to take him seriously. When he does mention the NON geopolitical reasons for his estimates (such as economics), he tends to show some very poor reasoning. Actually, about 100 pages in he explains that stagflation was caused by taxing the rich and that Reagan saved the economy with his successful supply-side economics; both of which are pretty much discredited by reputable economists, so it was hard to take any of his economic reasoning seriously. For another quick example, he compared the drug cartels of Mexico to the prohibition mafia in the US...taking the analogy way too far; one ended so easily and didn't have hugely negative effects, so the other must be the same!
Anyways, not entirely sure I'd recommend, but it was an interesting read between shows of the austin summer musical.
The book attempts to forecast the next 100 years from the perspective of politics and economics. Not a subscriber to the Great Person theory, Friedman represents the countries as geopolitical entities with personality. Estimating what happens a 100 years out is of course, crazy, but you can come up with some interesting principles when you reduce down to the basic geopolitical nature of countries and combine that with economic and demographic trends.
Let me give some examples. He predicts a rise and fall again of a Soviet Union. His reasoning is still that Russia feels very vulnerable on 3 fronts: Baltics, Georgian and Belarus fronts, esp with the expansion of NATO and thus will attempt to push back and control extra territory in those directions as buffers. China will soon halt its fast economic rise and possible have a fragmentation due to the economic differences between west and east China (much like our civil war - with very similar reasons). Turkey will become a major player in the Middle East especially as its economy continues to strengthen. World War 3 will be fought with supersonic missiles & planes, space-based lasers and systems, and augmented soldiers around 2050 or so; it will be something of a Japan/Turkey alliance that eventually grows to include Germany (who will lose again for the exact same reasons). Actually as a side note, his description of WWIII sounded a lot like WWII for anyone who has analyzed the war from the perspective of Axis & Allies, the game.
I think he really understands the current demographic trend which is spreading from West Europe to America and then throughout the rest of the world. (This is the trend of greater education for women and the putting off of child birth and the decrease of birth rate which he correctly understands is largely motivated by economics, not morals. It used to be a huge economic BOON to have lots of kids and the woman had to be responsible for the "farm" and house, but now kids with their higher educations and such are a huge economic COST which are put off until the family can afford them.)
Despite the interesting hypotheses he proposes and some decent geopolitical analyses, it is hard to take him seriously. When he does mention the NON geopolitical reasons for his estimates (such as economics), he tends to show some very poor reasoning. Actually, about 100 pages in he explains that stagflation was caused by taxing the rich and that Reagan saved the economy with his successful supply-side economics; both of which are pretty much discredited by reputable economists, so it was hard to take any of his economic reasoning seriously. For another quick example, he compared the drug cartels of Mexico to the prohibition mafia in the US...taking the analogy way too far; one ended so easily and didn't have hugely negative effects, so the other must be the same!
Anyways, not entirely sure I'd recommend, but it was an interesting read between shows of the austin summer musical.