Thanks for the review, Nick Rose. I haven't read the book so can't say much, though you seem either to have maintained a high degree of tolerance, or the book is better than it sounds. Futurologists annoy me as a) the future is never that easy to predict, and b) if you get it wrong it doesn't matter.
I like your Marxist point at the end, that revolution is never going to take place spontaneously, and that power has to be wrested from capitalists. But I can't help thinking life's just too short for such self-sacrifice, and humanity en masse is hardened, by nature, against hardship. Tyranny has always enjoyed an easy road and will continue to do so under the current dispensation.
On the other hand I agree that the most stable inequities are never far from exploding.
Altogether the author seems too optimistic and it seems to me we're living in the end times for the vast majority.
Change will be primarily a geological force, rather than a social one.
I would like to have seen more on the issue of entropy, which I've tried to canvass myself in these generally conservative and minimifidianist pages. So you're pissing in the wind of course.

The single problem that is blindingly obvious to those with even rudimentary knowledge of history and economics is that the "utopia" proposed by Eisentein and Nick Rose is utopia only to a select few.

Similar Utopias were envisioned by the likes of Marx, but the numbers of people dissatisfied with the uniformity trying to break out rapidly threatened to bring these societies down. The only way to maintain them was to instituionalise a level of brutality that is unimaginable today.

The premise of the article, i.e. that economies should be shaped to suit man is correct, unfortunately for the author, we are probably already there.

I see from most of the comments thus far that capitalist indoctrination still has most folks firmly in its claws and ideas of how we might create a better world, a more peaceful, community-oriented world are vigorously attacked and dismissed.

Again it proves that most people are not educated. Most people can't think or question. They love the same old, same old and see ideas-people as threats to their rigid little world views or perhaps their share portfolios or religious superstitions.

Thanks Nick for providing this review. Many of the ideas put forward have similarity to my own view of this ugly, chaotic, divided world and what needs to be done to improve it.

Making greed a crime would be a good start on the road to peace and unity. Taking all assets from the rich and redistributing them would be another step forward as would disbanding all corporations.

And if honesty, compassion and generosity again became values that people embraced, we might be able to save our world from the coming nuclear holocaust.

David G

"Again it proves that most people are not educated." I assume that everyone that does not agree with you is ignorant. Certainly it appears that this applies to you.

What qualifies you to make such sweeping statements?

I don't debate with shadows, Shadow Minister, or those who engage in childish insults!

DG,

So you are happy to dish it out, but turn tail and run when someone challenges your implication that a failure to embrace such tripe is a sign of poor education.

You then follow this up with pompous motherhood statements such as "making greed a crime would be a good start"

What was Marxism trying to do and where did it get them?