Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.
--George Friedman
George Friedman looks to the future in his provocative new book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century and offers a preview of what we can expect to happen around the world based on an exploration of history and geo-political patterns dating back hundreds of years. He shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era and shatters some of the out-dated assumptions which still linger from our past.According to Friedman, in the century ahead, there will be wars fought from space, between nations that are friendly with each other today. Populations will decline and industrialized nations will compete for immigrant labor. Poland, Turkey, Mexico and Japan will emerge as great powers.
Dr. George Friedman, the founder and chief executive officer of STRATFOR, a global intelligence company based in Austin, TX, will be the featured speaker at the UTB/TSC 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series. He will speak at 7 p.m.,Tuesday, Oct. 13, at the Science, Engineering and Technology Building Lecture Hall.
Advanced ticket purchases are recommended for the evening lecture as there is limited seating.
General admission tickets are $150 per person and include admission to the post-lecture reception in the courtyard of the Science, Engineering and Technology Building.
Individual sponsor tickets are $250 and include admission to the pre-lecture reception in the third floor conference room of SETB, the post-lecture reception, and preferred seating.
Books will be available for purchase at the evening lecture.
The Distinguished Lecture Series supports the President’s Circle and provides support for student and faculty trips, research and projects for which state funds are not available.In conjunction with the fundraising event, Freidman will speak to high school and college students in a separate lecture. The winners of the Distinguished Lecture Series essay contest will be announced at the student lecture on Tuesday, Oct.13 at 10 a.m. in the Jacob Brown Auditorium.
For more information and to purchase tickets, call the UTB/TSC Office of Development at (956) 882-4332
And, if you can't make the lecture but are interested in the book, we have it on hand at Paragraphs.
2 comments:
Hi Joni,
I waited to vent my spleen until after the show of the 13th, and while I was impressed, I really don't think any future projections really mean anything. The "global warming" people got into the same kind of shamanism and it ran a lot of people off -- today in America, a reputed poll says that only a third of the people thing global warming is man-made.
Nobody predicted the intense economic meltdown of the current recession, for example. Only a handful of MIT researchers were able to detect the global crisis about 16 months before it occurred. STRATFOR didn't acknowledge that right away, since it main mission is to provide military intelligence and resell it to governments.
The shamanism,the hubris of war, and the over-confidence in "new ways of examining data" are not as wonderful as they are cracked up to be -- just my opinion.
sam
Were you able to attend this lecture? I tend to agree with you but it is always fun to hear what the so-called experts have to say.
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