What did the great minds of 1931 predict for the far future year of 2011? An interesting find from a blog called Abnormal Use via a 1931 New York Times story.
Nothing about flying cars or jetpacks–those obsessions seem to have arrived later. I know they were prominent in the thinking of all young futurists circa 1979.
Henry Ford figured the success of our capitalist system would allow for great focus on the finer, non-monetary aspects of life. Glad that one worked out so well:
We shall go over our economic machine and redesign it, not for the purpose of making something different than what we have, but to make the present machine do what we have said it could do. After all, the only profit of life is life itself, and I believe that the coming eighty years will see us more successful in passing around the real profit of life. The newest thing in the world is the human being. And the greatest changes are to be looked for in him.
Scientist Michael Pupin added this unfortunate howler:
This civilization is the greatest material achievement of applied science during this memorable period. Its power for creating wealth was never equaled in human history. But it lacks the wisdom of distributing equitably the wealth which it creates. One can safely prophesy that during the next eighty years this civilization will correct this deficiency by creating an industrial democracy which will guarantee to the worker an equitable share in the wealth produced by his work.
What would he think of CEOs making hundreds of times more than their workers, I wonder? Not to mention that people who aren’t CEOs actively defend it.
