Category Methods

The origins of futurism

Bruce Sterling, the celebrated science fiction writer and author of Tomorrow Now, explains why you don’t need to be clairvoyant to predict the future. The article is part of the Futurism series in Smithsonian Magazine. “The fifth and final method…

Meet the 2020 Chinese consumer

By 2020, Chinese consumers will join the ranks of the world’s choosiest and most sophisticated consumers. In the March 2012 report “Meet the 2020 Chinese Consumer” Yuval Atsmon, Max Magni, Lihua Li and Wenkan Liao of McKinsey China contemplate the…

It’s cooperation, stupid

The argument of this pamphlet, written by Charles Leadbeater for IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research, the UK’s leading progressive thinktank) is that we should jettison the assumption that humans are selfish, first and foremost. Instead, we should start…