The RAND Corporation is, in many ways, the height of official futurism. Founded by the Department of Defense in the 1950s, RAND has since spun off as its own organization, providing policy analysis for government and business across a spectrum of issues. It has a relatively well-regarded graduate school, the Pardee RAND school, and also runs the Pardee Center for Long Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. So when the Pardee Center released a list of what it considered the 50 most important books for understanding the future, I fully expected it to be full of very traditional perspectives on both the world and its changes. Although this was true for the most part, the list had its own pleasant surprises.
The intent of the list is twofold. The first intent is to act as a reading list for someone who wants to understand at a more-than-passing level the factors that we can say seem to be most pertinent today in thinking about the longer-range human condition. I would hope that anyone who had read all 50 of these books would have a good feel for history, for how to think about the future, for the kinds of trends that are likely to have a serious impact on the future, and for the kind of surprises that might befall us as we move into that future.
The second intent is to put a marker on the wall for such a list and to invite many more smart people to think about how we might improve such a list.
By and large, it's an interesting collection. The few books that I'd consider to be surprising entries on the list are found in areas of particular importance to us here, such as Jeff Sachs' The End of Poverty and Amory Lovins' Winning the Oil Endgame. In general, it's a more varied assortment of books than one might expect from an insititution like RAND, even if it is fairly traditionalist and (as the introduction admits) very Western-centric. It also makes for a good companion to the WorldChanging Reading List generated by the readers in the comments to Alex's post back in October.
Overall, there are eight books in the Pardee Center list that also show up in the suggestions from readers, and another half-dozen or so that I have on my bookshelf. One reason there aren't more is that a good number of the Pardee books are clearly academic or institutional in origin; another reason is that the WorldChanging readers clearly have a more expansive view of what makes for a good book for understanding the changes we're going through. Of course, as the above quotation suggests, the authors of the list await your suggestions as to how to make it better.
I encourage WorldChangers to take a look at the list and find something there that you wouldn't have thought to read, then go find it in the local library. You may not agree with the book's conclusions, but you'll have a better sense of how the people who think about the Official Future come up with their ideas.
