Today, hands wring over epidemics of obesity and the wreckage of too-abundant fossil fuels. Only two of the world's big oil and gas companies, Saudi Aramco and Exxon, are more valuable than Novo Nordisk, the maker of weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.

Nations now panic over the worldwide slide in birth rates and their shrinking and aging populations. This trend, by the way, is one I once dissected at length in two future-focused books -- China, Inc. and Shock of Gray. I can be smug at how much I got right, but I am also aware of what my own futurism was blind to. I predicted that shrinking birth rates would grip the whole world, but I didn't foresee how many adults -- in some countries nearly 40% -- would choose to have no children at all.

I predicted correctly that China's one-child-per-family policy would push Chinese families to invest ever more in the education of their children in order to ready them for the global market. I didn't foresee that millions of college-educated but professionally frustrated young Chinese (the so-called rotten-tail kids) would prefer to remain unemployed for years instead of taking jobs they regard as beneath them. Or that they'd stay dependent on their parents, unmarried and childless.

I certainly didn't foresee that in America, prosperity and low unemployment would dissuade young men from going to college, or that "The Uneducateds" would brandish their lack of degrees as a political virtue and then be puffed up as vanguards of America's great-again rejuvenation.