Well-intentioned, occasionally useful, but...

books:

	• The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next James Taylor, Howard Means, ... Harperbusiness, 1997 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Well-intentioned, occasionally useful, but...

You really have to approach this book with your baloney detectors on 'High.' There's a lot of excellent, insightful analysis on what's going on with the change 'jerk' (where 'jerk' is defined as the rate of change of the rate of change -- the acceleration of acceleration) of recent years, where changes in technology drive societal changes at an expanding pace. There's also a whole lot of unfocused hogwash and one-true-wayism; these kids take themselves quite seriously, in that bedrock way that people who think they *don't* take themselves too seriously sometimes do. You can sift through the bullpuckey to find a good haul of useful nuggetry, but if you swallow this book whole, you'll find that the sharp corners don't go down so easy.

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Interesting and insightful but overly wordy

In short the book could have been about 60% shorter. At times the hypothesis drawn are illuminating but very often the authors are spending entirely too much time to support their insights. My feeling is that anyone reading a book such as this doesn't necessarily need a whole lot of convincing as long as there is some sound rationale and telling examples to support the theories.

Having just completed the book I would recommend that anyone interested in picking up the book just look at the last 15 pages to get a sense of the nature of the book where the authors make predictions regarding the next 500 months and the next 500 years.

There are however some very keen insights on the power and use of technology (connectivity), tribalism, the role of corporations and government, business and social constructs, the importance of constant education, the nature of chaos, the power of the consumer... and almost all of this is addressed from primarily a marketing perspective.

There was very little that was written that I disagreed with but I feel like the same thing could have been said in many fewer words.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

The future is already prologue. Were in the midst of a sea of change in human history "The Five-Hundred-Year Delta" is a point in time when the three great rivers of thought that have shaped our culture (Reason, Market Economy, and Social Organization) converge as they come to their ends. This watershed period heralds a time of change so swift, so massive, that by century's end it will have swept away nearly the entire underpinnings of modern life. We will shift from a Reason-based mode of thought to a Chaos-based one; Producer-controlled markets will collapse into Demand-controlled ones; and our social, political, and economic organization will fracture.