2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything

“The average lifetime of a company on the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has declined from sixty years to a mere ten years”

“The reality is that the United States lacks a centralized gun registry, which seriously limits the ability of law enforcement to prevent and investigate crimes in a country with 4.5 percent of the world’s population but 42 percent of the civilian-owned guns.”

“Coco Chanel famously said that “after forty nobody is young, but one can be irresistible at any age.”

“The promise of blockchain technology for gun control continues to be stonewalled, just like other attempts at reining in the availability of guns throughout America.”

“Middle-class parents have been forced to invest more in their children while being guaranteed less by employers and the government,” writes journalist Patrick A. Coleman in Fatherly.”

“The middle class tend to be interested in spending money on leisure and entertainment. They leave behind much bigger carbon and digital footprints”

“As the number of women of influence grows, will it become the new normal for women to be accepted as leaders?”

“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. —PLATO”

“So can we arrive at a general principle as to why e-books have flopped in developed markets while audio and video streaming have triumphed? The technology commentator and best-selling author Edward Tenner argues that there are several reasons people are sometimes reluctant to abandon an old technology in favor of a new one. The first involves the potential vulnerabilities of the new thing. For instance, the fax machine is now a museum piece, but for a while people continued to prefer it over emailing scanned documents out of security concerns. Another potential reason involves aesthetics and nostalgia. Although dwarfed by music CDs and streaming, vinyl record sales continue to grow within the niche market of music aficionados. And despite improvements in automatic transmissions, certain car lovers prefer stick shifts. Perhaps the key to understanding format resilience is that technologies rise and fall as part of ecosystems, rarely on their own or by themselves. Those ecosystems need to evolve quickly, through open innovation, in order to appeal to new generations of users, transforming the landscape in the process. E-book platforms have remained fundamentally closed to external innovators, especially on the software side. As a result, the functionality of e-books remains limited. Moreover, research indicates that reading a physical book enables the reader to absorb information more efficiently than reading the same book on an e-reader or a tablet. “The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized,” argues Abigail Sellen, a scientist and engineer at Microsoft Research Cambridge in England. “Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don’t think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book.”

“So what’s behind the extraordinary resilience of this format made possible by Johannes Gutenberg’s five-hundred-year-old innovation?”

“the most important thing to be successful is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will”

“most immigrants are people who have either few skills or very high-level skills and, as a result, do not have good employment prospects in their home countries. By contrast, their compatriots with intermediate levels of skills—such as handymen or mechanics—have plenty of job opportunities available in their communities of origin, and thus tend not to migrate”

“Breakthroughs occur not when someone works within the established paradigm but when assumptions are abandoned, rules are ignored, and creativity runs amok”

“think tank New American Economy estimates that though 8 million undocumented workers contributed about $13 billion in payroll taxes in 2016, they generally cannot claim Social Security benefits.”

“Since the baby boomer generation, the middle-income group has grown smaller with each successive generation”

“It is worth noting that the fiscal impact of immigrants is more positive at the federal level—given that most of them are of working age—than at the state and local levels, which fund the education of their children.”

“job losses generate should be mostly directed at technological change, not immigration”

“why e-books have flopped in developed markets while audio and video streaming have triumphed?”