BOOK REVIEW : Hollow Predictions About America

American Renaissance: Our Life at the Turn of the 21st Century by Marvin Cetron and Owen Davis (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 320 pages).

There are 55 stars on the flag on the cover of “American Renaissance: Our Life at the Turn of the 21st Century” by “futurologists” Marvin Cetron and Owen Davis. One of the extra stars stands for Puerto Rico, and the other four stand for Canada which--so Cetron and Davis fatuously but confidently assert--will join the United States sometime near the dawn of the 21st Century.

Why Canada “minus Quebec, which will become, we are told, independent” will join as four states rather than two, six, eight or 12, or why it will join at all, our authors never tell us. They live in a happy land above the clouds where such mundane questions are not raised; where the laws of history, logic and arithmetic do not hold; where America’s most pressing problems will disappear in a decade--and where bad prose, sloppy editing and wishful thinking add up to a book.

“Futurology” is a discipline--we do not say a science--concerned with making predictions--in this case about the year 2000. The discipline lends itself to two kinds of predictions: the obvious and the venturesome. The obvious predictions are the most common, although not always the safest. One simply extrapolates a given trend into the future and--presto!--the predictions appear. Thus Cetron and Davis can tell us that there will be more old people in the year 2000 than there are now. There will be more need for nursing homes, a shortage of qualified workers to staff them, and greater trouble paying the health-care bills of the elderly. In perhaps the most competent of the 22 chapters of this book, the authors look at additional implications of demographic changes now under way in the United States.

This kind of trend-spotting is the lower futurology, and our authors have higher aspirations. At their most interesting, futurologists apply the principles of history, economics, sociology and technology to imagine possible futures that can help guide our actions in the present. “Predictions” of this kind rarely are fully justified by events, but often contain insights of great importance and interest.

This is the level of futurology to which Cetron and Davis aspire, and this is the level at which they fail--painfully, publicly, utterly. They want to make the case for America’s coming recovery from its troubles of the last two decades, but their understanding of the problems is so clearly superficial that their optimism rings hollow. Unintentionally, they have written a book from which only pessimists and cynics can take solace.

Take economic competitiveness, for example. Many observers have been troubled by the difficulties American industry has had in coping with international competition. Clearly, if such difficulties continue, it will be difficult to finance a rising standard of living for American workers. This development would be bad news not only for them but for all those who make their living selling workers cars and consumer goods, tending their illnesses and building them houses. Cetron and Davis acknowledge the problem, but make a diagnosis that economists of every school would consider foolish, and predict a cure based solely on wishful thinking.

Their “diagnosis” begins with the colossally silly statement that “each nation that makes a place for itself in international commerce reduces the market for American goods and so cuts into our standard of living.” The Smith family might as well say that every dollar the Joneses make is one less dollar for the Smiths. Actually, of course, the prosperity of the Joneses is good news for the Smiths, and the growth of other countries is good for the United States. In both cases, the greater incomes of our trading partners mean more opportunities for us to sell goods to them. Prosperity is contagious--that is why American administrations, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democratic, have tried to increase international trade for the last 50 years.

So far, so bad. But when “American Renaissance” ventures into the field of international relations, it gets even further out of its depth. Japan “may soon collapse,” say the authors in a one-page mini-essay stuffed with embarrassing mistakes. Why is Japan in decline? Declining competitiveness with East Asia (actually, Japan maintains healthy trade surpluses with most of the newly emergent countries), rising unemployment at 4% (actually, Japanese unemployment is at 2.2%, down from 2.4% in the last year) and slowing gross national product (actually, Japan’s growth at 4.8% in the last 12 months remains the highest, by far, of any major industrial nation). “American Renaissance” also points to the graying of Japan as a source of weakness, but fails to mention that unlike the United States, Japan is a net international creditor with approximately $10 trillion in total savings to support its retirees.

According to “American Renaissance,” at or near the turn of the century, Japan will decline, Canada will join the union, and the Soviet Union will cooperate with the United States to police the developing world. Maybe--but Cetron and Davis’ error-filled and superficial analysis fails to persuade.

A strong case can be made that America’s decline is not anywhere near irreversible, and that a new and better world is just around the corner. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t make that case. Badly conceived and poorly organized, it is--or ought to be--an embarrassment to its publisher, its editor, its authors and their fellow futurologists and optimists everywhere.