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To the editor:

Of all thesciences or pseudoscience that exist in our modern world, "Futurism"must be one of the most intriguing and fascinating of them all. To beable to predict with some degree of certainty the future and to lookinto your crystal orb and reasonably discern the future course ofevents, is a power much to be admired and eagerly sought for.Forearmed with this knowledge, the future should be assured andshould be ours!

Today withour computer technology and the ability to create model programs andto feed into the device all the alternatives and possibilities oftomorrow is an exciting phenomenon and worthy of pursuance. But, doesit work and is it reliable?

Several yearsago at a meeting Sigma Xi and Resa Society (Research Society forAmerica) meeting in Hartford, I was fascinated by a discussion of the"Science of Futurism." The interesting fact that emerged from thismeeting was that in a retrospective study of the past ten years ofscientific development as compared with the predictions made at theonset of the decade (1960-1970) the futurists were only moderatelysuccessful in their prognostications.

While theywere correct in many of their speculations, they failed to foreseethe development of the Laser technology, which totally escaped theircrystal gazing. It was at that time providing an entirely newindustry of infinite possibilities and with refinements could onlyexpand and expand in the years to come.

In brief, the"futurists" were admitting that the future is essentially impossibleto predict because of the development of entirely new scientificbreakthroughs and concepts, etc., the faintest glimmer of which mightnot even exist on the horizon of our gaze today.

Of all thesciences, perhaps the most inexact is that of economics, andyesterday's basic principles are no longer applicable today. It is soconfusing that new words, i.e. "stagflation" are required to explainthe discrepancies that prevail today.

In a recentissue of the Wall Street Journal an article was devoted to adiscussion of a "Post-industrial Society" that might exist in theyear 2000. Its essence was that of the conclusions reached by a groupof "think tanks," i.e. an eight-year-old, 200 scholar study, "PlanEurope, 2000" by an Amsterdam cultural foundation and two Paris-basedgroups of the 24 nations "Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment" and the private "Hudson Research Europe, LTC."

Among theirconclusions was that the year 2000 would not bring a better life andthat our industrial society of today would decline with the passageof time. The emergence of the third world industrial competition withits vast reserves of natural resources and unlimited cheap laborwould simply provide too much competition for western Europe and theUnited States which were becoming more and more of a welfare societyand whose chief preoccupation was no longer maximum productivity butmerely the transfer of funds from the haves to the have nots.

Our laborunions were demanding more and more for less and less, and in thefuture would provide no real competition for either theunderdeveloped third world nations or the cool efficiency of easternEurope and Russia's centralized socialist economies.

The articlealso pointed out that the population of the western allied nationssuch as the United States, Germany, and England, was decliningsignificantly while that of the underdeveloped nations was stillincreasing. Numbers, to be sure, are no longer all too important, butcheap labor in the world of tomorrow can be meaningful in an economiccompetitive society.

The finalconclusion of the article was that Western Europe and the UnitedStates' next phase will be a modernized more tolerant version of"Seventeenth Century in New England" in which cars and classroomswill give way to bicycles, small farm communes, and return to smallscale efficient manufacturing. Trade unions will ultimately be eitheran archaic phenomenon or else taken over and administered by an elitesocialist government.

I'm sureother think tanks like the Rand Corp. may have other predictions butall are fraught with the problem of man's inability to comprehendhimself and his inability to solve his political differences and livetogether! As noted above, it is difficult enough to foresee man'sfuture scientific accomplishments but virtually impossible to predictman's political future.

As I glimpseinto the future with my imprecise lenses, it appears that only theWorld Federalists and similarly minded people have sufficienthistorical perspective and a vision of tomorrow to provide a safepath for the next generation of man.

Charles E. Jacobson Jr., M.D.

45 Wyllys St.

Manchester, CT