Revisiting George Friedman's The Next Decade

After publishing his geopolitical forecast for the twenty-first century in The Next 100 Years (2009) George Friedman endeavored to provide a more detailed, explanatory and prescriptive discussion of his expectations for the next years, The Next Decade (2011).

This being 2022 we can look back and consider how he did. My thought is that while he made some good points in the book he did not do very well, particularly where his larger and more radical predictions were concerned. Consider the following:

* Friedman predicted that in the wake of the Great Recession the balance of power in economic life would shift back from the private sector to the public, with coming years looking something more like the post-war period. Of course, no such thing happened. The neoliberal model may stand in lower credit with the general public than ever, but it remains the conventional wisdom of business, government, academia, the media--and the few compromises required by policymakers hewing to the line have been slight indeed. (Britain, for example, may have left the EU--but the neoliberal standards of privatization, deregulation, profligacy with corporate welfare and stinginess with the general public, remain the order of the day, as does the foundation of economies on globalization and financialization.)

* Friedman envisioned the U.S. facing a rapprochement between Russia and Germany producing a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. Of course, the reality has been quite different.

* Friedman, who has never let go of his once headline-grabbing and since much derided vision of the U.S. and Japan as geopolitical rivals (The Coming War With Japan), or hewing to a pessimistic appraisal of China's prospects, once again predicted China's proving an also-ran in the 2010s, and the U.S. becoming more concerned with checking Japan's power instead. Again, this is not exactly how things have gone.

As readers of this blog know I think it simple-minded to sneer at prediction, and even forecasting, as so many do (with outrageous smugness). After all, as Nicholas Rescher made clear, we have no choice but to constantly make choices based on expectations of future conditions and the future outcomes of our choices, and most of the time we are correct. (For example, when we go to work in the morning we expect that our workplace will be there and be operative, and we are usually right about that.) In fact we take our capacity for correct prediction so much for granted that we are only aware of making predictions when we face the relatively small number of matters where prediction proves trickier. Still, the difficulty does not in itself give us an "out," and we still find ourselves forced to choose, with our only choice making as accurate a prediction as we can, not least by learning from our past mistakes in such situations. And for me that, and not the denigration of prediction, is the reason to revisit Friedman's work and consider where he went wrong--which, it seems to me, was in his simply reasoning from the wrong premises and indulging biases that had proved unhelpful in the past (his superficial grasp of political economy, his attitude toward Germany and China, for example, his endless attempts to rehabilitate his prediction about Japan). Alas, incorrect premises and problematic biases are not at all rare in the business--and unfortunately the media has been more inclined to simple-mindedly make such "experts" into authorities rather than appraise what they have to offer.