Future: Economic Prosperity or Peril?

What will the economy look like in fifty years? How will our lives as consumers and workers be transformed by the coming innovations in technology, the marketplace, and the workplace? How will changes in demographics and dependency affect our political system? Will economic freedom rise or fall? What, if anything, would greater prosperity do for one’s total well-being?

Future: Economic Peril or Prosperity? poses these and related questions to a diverse group of economists whose predictions will inspire thoughtful consideration and debate. As co-editor Robert M. Whaples writes in the introductory chapter, “The predicted changes range from innocent innovations that will make life a bit more comfortable...to potentially chilling technologies that might strip our human dignity.”

Just as important as the book’s predictions are its insights into how we should think about an uncertain future. As humorist and social critic P. J. O’Rourke shows in his erudite chapter on self-fulfilling prophecies, wildly wrong predictions are not limited to the likes of a Nostradamous or a Karl Marx: even a Nobel laureate economist running a billion-dollar hedge fund can lose the farm (and other people’s money) through an overly confident misreading of the economic tea leaves. And yet, perhaps only by delving more deeply into long-term forecasting, and reflecting on past mistakes, can we minimize the hubris that so often clouds the judgments of prognosticators in academia, business, and—perhaps especially—government.

Informative, contentious, and at times inspirational, Future: Economic Peril or Prosperity? is an invaluable aid for anyone who understands the need to prepare for the future, even if that future cannot be fully anticipated.

Robert M. Whaples is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Co-Editor and Managing Editor of The Independent Review, Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University, Director and Book Review Editor for EH.NET, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. He is the co-editor of the Independent Institute books Is Social Justice Just?, In All Fairness, and Pope Francis and the Caring Society. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has also served as Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Associate Editor of the Business Library Review, Chair of the Cliometric Society, and editor of EH.Net's Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History.

Christopher J. Coyne is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and Co-Editor of The Independent Review, Professor of Economics and Director of Graduate Programs for the Department of Economics at George Mason University, Co-Editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, and Book Review Editor at Public Choice. He received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. He has taught at the University of West Virginia and Hampden-Sydney College, and he has been the Hayek Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University.

Michael C. Munger is Senior Fellow and former co-editor of The Independent Review at the Independent Institute, and Professor of Political Science, Economics and Public Policy and Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program at Duke University. He has been Staff Economist at the Federal Trade Commission, President of the Public Choice Society, and President of the North Carolina Political Science Association, and he has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.