When we launched a series of improvements to our Trends Journal last summer, we promised you we would hold ourselves accountable for the forecasts we made and the quality and accuracy of our analyses. Here’s a look back at what we forecast a year ago and how we did. — Trends Research Institute staff The...
Tag: winter2014
Post
Grim trend lines with glimmers of opportunity
This is my 34th year of forecasting trends. For the past dozen or so, when analyzing the trends that would shape much of the year ahead, I would say, “How sad, the future looks less promising than the past.” Unfortunately, I’ve been right. Each year ends worse than the year before. And I’m not alone. Along with indisputable...
Post
Our Top Trends for 2013, revisited
When we launched a series of improvements to our Trends Journal last summer, we promised you we would hold ourselves accountable for the forecasts we made and the quality and accuracy of our analyses. Here’s a look back at what we forecast a year ago and how we did. — Trends Research Institute staff The...
Post
Digital learning’s golden era
If you can recall the Golden Era of comic books or remember a time before anti-smoking laws all but obliterated matchbook advertising, you may have been tempted to learn to draw at home. The Famous Artists School was, perhaps, the most well known of all the correspondence schools. It offered an art and illustration course...
Post
Older adults come of age in social media
Not long ago, older folks were ridiculed as being technologically too clueless to program the clock on a DVD player. Now people 55 and older are the fastest-growing group adopting social media: more than 43 percent of Americans 65 and older are using Facebook and its cohorts, compared to just 1 percent in 2008. The...
Post
The rise of the Boomer Renaissance
You already know that a number of economic dynamics are forcing aging boomers to entirely rethink retirement and stay in the workforce far longer than they had expected to. And, of course, you know that our longer lifespans have all but obliterated traditional thinking about when it’s time to call it quits. But what is...
Post
Shape of the future: Global Chinatown
Not too long ago, the 20th century was called “The American Century.” Not only was Uncle Sam the world’s military superpower from the end of World War II through the next several decades, he was an unstoppable economic heavyweight. But after years of squandering the nation’s precious human, scientific, technological and economic resources on waging...
Post
Populism is powerful and growing — but it’s not everywhere
Your life is storybook-perfect. Contentment nourishes your soul and permeates the world around you. You love your job. You earn more money than you ever imagined possible and have accumulated more wealth than you’ll ever need. You have the perfect family, too. The ties that bind you and your spouse are as romantically strong as...
Post
The haves and have-nots: Trouble in Slavelandia
Welcome to the world of Income Inequality. Today the phrase seems to be on everyone’s lips — Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and radicals, millionaires, billionaires, the broadcast talking heads — and all over your browser and Twitter feed. President Obama has proclaimed Income Inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” and made it clear that Democrats will...