Growing Pains: The Outlook on Development Revisited‪.‬

Statements about the future almost always involve extensions of the past. They may be complicated extrapolations, incorporating rates of change and even identifying turning points, but they are extensions of the past nonetheless. Few individuals genuinely identify true discontinuities, and they are usually dismissed as crackpots or are admired as intellectual entertainers rather than as serious futurologists. Some extensions of the past rely implicitly on a model of the social system under consideration, with its own dynamics and constraints. Others rely on analogies across apparently different social systems at different stages of their evolution. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]