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Judson Gooding... reporting on the trends.
Future is for sale, and firms are buying
By Philip Nobile Do you ever get the feeling that our government fails to anticipate events, that our national Life contains too many surprises, that many a crisis could be averted with proper planning? So do I.
It seems that Jeanne Dixon is the only person in Washington interested in the future. Couldn't some Cabinet whiz-kid have predicted long ago that pollution, urban riots, energy shortages and unemployment' were around the corner? And if he had, wouldn't our forward-looking congressmen have warned the country of these impending disasters?
Judson Gooding doesn't think so. He says that politicians are more interested in THEIR future than in THE future. To remedy this national, blindness, Gooding, a former Time correspondent, produces a fat quarterly document entitled the Trend Report. He discoveres future trends by surveying with the aid of a small staff 200 daily newspapers.
Several major U.S. corporations pay big money to see the future in Trend Report.. Maybe the White House ought to divert some swimming pool funds into a subscription. Then we might all swim better.
Q. Why are your clients so curious about the future of society?
A. Companies like General Motors, Exxon, Xerox, Bank of America, Squibb, and ITT — all big and diversified are involved in various aspects of the economy and social life and all need to respond to changes if they're going to stay in business. The earlier they know about basic changes in people's attitudes. the better they can serve.
Q. In other words, you help these corporations earn more money.
A. I certainly hope so. But in fact we're trying to make them more responsive to social change. Q. After the civil rights', women's and ethnic movements, what's the next big social upheaval?
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A. There will be increasing emphasis simplicity, low consumption and simplification of life and needs. Partly because of necessity and partly because it's an attractive posture for living.
You see this trend already in small cars, collective dwellings, more gardening, home cooking and the use of trains and buses as opposed to automatic use of cars. This trend isn't a movement as such. but it will affect society greatly.
Q. What trends are no longer trends?
A. Interest in the environment is declining in view of the economy.
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There is less enthusiasm now for experimental education and more .emphasis on learning the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic.
In health care, there is a significant. trend against hospitalization. For the past two decades, the standard medical response to any ailment was to hospitalize. But now we recognize that hospitals are unpleasant, expensive and sometimes dangerous to health. So the trend is shifting to out-patient care.
Q. Speaking of planning ahead, shouldn't someone have warned against the
look in the next election?
Q. But we do have a permanent Civil Service that should attend to such
matters.
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A. I don't think they have been very effective and they cost a colossal amount. For example, the Department of Agriculture has nearly as many employees as there American farmers. Q. The women's movement is the biggest and best organized social force these days. But it seems to have come out of nowhere. How come?
A. These phenomena sometimes arrive in cycles. Suffragettes were
Politicians are criticized for short-range concerns
Ph. D. glut? How prophetic do you have to be to figure out that doctoral jobs weren't inexhaustible?
A. What's more shocking in a physical sense is the tremendous overbuilding of American colleges. A few years ago 350,000 spaces went unused. That's horrendous. Every college thought they would capitalize on the education boom while others lagged behind.
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Q. Why do such snafus occur in the middle of the computer age?
A. Our society is plagued by cyclical overindulgence. Presently we're very busy producing far too many lawyers. Pretty soon there will be a huge surplus.
In the aftermath of Sputnik, we trained thousands and thousands of engineers who eventually lost their jobs when the government cut back scientific programs in the late sixties. Because of the surplus, people stopped going into engineering, and now there's a shortage.
It's really stupid. And we do it all the time.
Q. Isn't it scandalous that the government can't predict and therefore avoid such waste?
A. Not really. The federal government has this terrible problem of two and four-year terms. Everyone is looking at the end of his nose and not much further. So it's not in the nature of our political system to have longrange concerns. The question is: How will things
agitating for women's rights in the 1890s and again in the 1920s. More recently, women took part in various social movements and then began questioning their own individual roles.
Q. Do you suppose women's liberation will have long-range consequences?
A. No, I don't. I don't think many women are concerned with the issues feminists are exercised over. This may be treasonous to humankind, but I also believe that some fundamental biological and economic determinants remain.
For instance,.you hear more and more talk about liberated women stealing jobs from men who are expected to support their families.
Societies don't change that quickly,.even one as mobile and unsettled as
ours.
Q. How do you account for the ascendancy of the homosexual cause?
A. Owing to the general worry about overpopula tion, I have the feeling that any activity that guarantees a population decline has a certain subliminal appeal. During the Middle Ages, when survival required having many children, homosexuality was beyond the pale. Now that the situation is reversed, homosexuals are far more acceptable.
Q. Whatever happened to the sterilization fad? That trend was apparently a flash in the pan.
A. Sterilization is much more significant than most people realize. Reports indicated that as many as two million people, apparently as many men as women, are having their tubes tied every year.
Q. What do you foresee
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in the unemployment tions. We used to call crisis? them food riots. Now
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they'll be called job riots. Q. Any other unhappy signs in your newspaper entrails?
A. The employment levels will improve, but more people will accustom themselves to not A. The trend toward litiworking. Still, many feel a job is an inalienable gation. It's bad because right. When that. right is the courts get cluttered. tampered with, the reacBut in human terms, ramtion is outrage. The tendpant litigation destroys ency is toward violence. understanding and the That's why I've predicted give-and-take "unemployment demonstrapeople.
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