Tag Archives: Joel Kotkin
Why Kotkin’s Book Won’t Be in My Basket at Checkout
A recent book by Joel Kotkin that is receiving critical acclaim is entitled The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Penguin Press, 2010). You can read two reviews of the book below and decide if it sparks enough interest for you to read it. I have chosen not to do so, and of course, it will not be featured at the First Friday Book Synopsis in Dallas.
I enjoy being upbeat and optimistic. I like sunny forecasts. But, this is a genre of books that I find myself increasingly uninterested in. My major reason for doing so is that the future is difficult to predict, and very few who try to do so in writing ever get it right.
I guess I lost my enthusiasm for this type of book with The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Layden, and Joel Hyatt (Basic Books, 2000). When I read and presented this book, I was pretty excited about its content. Ten years later, we can see that the impact better leads to a different title: the short boom. All the predictions were fun to read and energizing to visualize. But, much of what we read there just did not materialize.
Admittedly, books that predict the future are difficult to write. There is certainly a skill in examining trends and patterns, then using sign reasoning to leap forward to visualize another time and place. There are plenty of people who get energized by these titles. I just happen not to be one of them.
I remember the old phrase, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” Unfortunately, writing about it does not create it. It simply writes about it. They write. We buy. Then, we get let down.
I want to be clear. I am not criticizing Kotkin’s book. I haven’t read it. I don’t plan to. I can’t criticize a book that I haven’t read. All my best to him for his success with the book. I think that there will continue to be enough interested readers to keep it on the best-seller list for awhile.
You can make up your own mind about what you think of this genre of books.
After you read the reviews below, let’s talk about it.
From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
A Quote for the Day — from David Brooks
This comes from a column about “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” by über-geographer Joel Kotkin. The column is titled: Relax, We’ll be Fine. Here’s the quote:
In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.