Recently, I was excited to find a copy of John Naisbitt's Megatrends at a neighborhood used books store. The book is from 1988, and I love reading old futurism. So I plan to use this for blog fodder.

Naisbitt splits the book up into ten chapters, each representing a different trend. The first is the transition between the industrial economy. Naisbitt predicts that people will shift from industrial jobs to jobs in the primary (librarians, teachers, and the like) and secondary (engineers, accountants, and the like) information sectors. He suggests that the information economy will make Marx's labor theory of value obsolete (iffy, information jobs may not add value to a product as directly as a tightened bolt, but analysis, learning, and communication are still plenty labor-y). He predicts (correctly) that personal computers will become ubiquitous, and that key factors driving change will be the increasing speed of news, availability of communication, and abundance of information (shifting the focus from obtaining information to picking through the virtual haystack). He also notes that the deteriorating American educational system is poorly suited to the task (unfortunately, this is still true).

Interestingly, Naisbitt doesn't seem to make the mistake that Cory Doctorow cites in his critique of "information economy" futurism, thinking that such an economy would be based on buying or selling information: Although Naisbitt does talk about selling "knowledge", it's in the context of jobs that add value to traditional economic activities. While he does suggest that such an economy might eventually give rise to novel classes of goods and services, unrelated to industrial production, he doesn't speculate as to what those might be. Perhaps this is because he's somewhat before the personal computer boom, the idea of creative works sold "as information" is still alien. Maybe it wasn't until our industrial economy started to fail that futurists had crazy dreams of an economy run without really producing stuff at all.

Naisbitt misses two significant things in this chapter, though. First, while he anticipates the outsourcing of industrial jobs to developing nations and/or machines, he fails to anticipate the rise of service sector drudgery (which the failing school system actually supports), far more than a "society of clerks" (i.e. accountants, engineers), we've become a society of burger flippers and Walmart employees. Second, he fails to anticipate sustainability issues related to this transition. Does the displacement of industrial jobs create as many information economy jobs? Can the information sectors continue to expand even after the industrial economy hits hard limits? What happens when information jobs, too, can be easily outsourced to machines and/or developing nations?

Overall, this one is surprisingly accurate. The few recommendations he makes are still pretty good today. We need more engineers, more scientists, more education. The problem of transitioning to a sustainable society is not necessarily one of resources or manpower. To some extent, it's a problem of vision (although some are working on that). Mostly, it's a problem of getting to there from here. Knowledge is still what we need.