Clarke, Richard A. and R.P. Eddy (2017) Warnings: Finding  Cassandras to Stop Castrophes. New York, NY: Harper-Collins Publishers, 405 pages

Cassandras are or should be a proven technical expert, but may have an off-putting personality, should be data driven, orthogonal thinker, questioner, sense of responsibility, and anxiety about the problem. Unfortunately, the biggest phonies are ones who have a small think tank, have a number of sources that they can plagiarize, and make many predictions in the form of e-mails to selected believers. With so many predictions, they are bound to be right on one of them. Once that prediction is correct, they self publish a book on the next big problem.

If they are right once, surely they will be right again. They sell the book, a CD, other material related to their next projection. Unfortunately, the authors place Paul Ehrlich as one of the phonies. What Ehrlich did was to put rapid population growth on the map, and his error should be corrected as time moves on as one third of the species are now dying off because of population growth.  Ehrlich used bombast to sell the book. He was wrong on his dates of the 70’s and 80’s in terms of starvation. About die-offs, however, we now have 7.5 billion people on the planet. Borlaug was the genius to invent a new agricultural strategy that perhaps saved 1 billion people.

On the other hand, Clarke the first author carries his own baggage of controversy and criticism as witnessed in the Wikipedia article on him. . With 30 years of conservative military experience, one aspect of part of conservatism is to have over population as a way to drive down wages and increase profits.

The authors also introduce Isaiah Berlin a Liberal political commentator who in the 40’s, 50’ to the early 60’s was very well known. He discussed among Cassandras the “hedgehog” and the “fox.” The “hedgehog” makes one spectacular projection and is never right again. When hedgehogs are compared with college sophomores, the students are more often correct. The foxes are a cosmopolitan group that has individual characteristics discussed above. They are more likely to be accurate.

The two  authors also discuss wild cards that can dramatically change the future. It would appear that this type of futurism deserves our tax dollars, but also should be read with caution. What this reviewer should note, that most projections lean more to the negative by most people’s values than to the positive. The positive popularizers started declining in the 70’s.

Please buy this book.

Prof. Joel Snell

Emeritus

Kirkwood College

Cedar Rapids, Iowa