Sunday, January 26, 2014

The Financial Times on looking into the future "In 100 Years"

Simon Kuper at the FT reviews the recent book of essays ‘In 100 Years: Leading Economists Predict the Future’, by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta (ed), MIT Press

The economist’s guide to the future

Prediction is hard, but so is summary. About my essay, he writes

Roth foresees parents manipulating their children’s genes. Some such methods, he writes, “may come to be seen as part of careful child rearing”. He also thinks people will become more efficient thanks to performance-enhancing drugs that improve “concentration, memory, or intelligence”.
Once humans have more years in good health, they will probably reorder their lives. Roth says that if child rearing takes up less of the lifespan, people may want different spouses for different phases of life. “New forms of polygamy-over-lifetime relationships” could arise, he writes.

You can see a longer summary and a link to the full essay here.


2 comments:

Joshua Gans said...

In 100 years books like this will be available in electronic form!

Might read it then.

Al Roth said...

It will be funny in a different way then...