116 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY American life to re-think how they operate. For example, higher education should create “a more realistic map of excellence.” Research in education and business should adjust to falling birth rates by investing to insure that as people live longer and healthier through the development of new technology that it makes such quality of life possible and the aging population less of a burden on society. He readily admits, as should most of his readers, that he does not know or understand what that technology will be. However, like the development of space technology storing and converting solar power that he suggested as a possibility in The Next Hundred Years and now seems to be closer to fruition, he believes that American creativity and inventiveness will provide that technology jump to replace the microchip as the invention driving the next socioeconomic cycle (233). Friedman is careful to note that he has not delivered conclusions about climate change as part of his equation for the future. He appears to suggest quietly that technology and American ingenuity may well provide an adaptive method to deal with the future impact of climate change, such as the previously mentioned space social energy conversion technology (225). Friedman concludes on a positive note. He believes that once the United States has weathered the “storm” of the 2020s and early 2030s, the country will witness another surge of immense progress and decades of calm before the emergence of another socioeconomic cycle around 2080. In a large sense, he is bullish on America’s future for the same reasons that he interprets the past. He believes that the geopolitical forces that forged the United States, a moral and constitutional foundation, and continued American cowboy, inventor, warrior persona will provide the kind of creativity and flexibility that carried the country from its colonial past to awkward empire presently and into a continued position of national prosperity and global leadership. This reviewer does wonder how long Friedman’s analytical tools of approximately 50-year social-cultural cycles and 80-year political-institutional cycles will remain relevant. This is especially true given the rapid change both the U.S. and the world currently experience and the explosive exponential growth of knowledge in science and technology. This experiential whirlwind that has increasingly occurred in recent years may drive cycles that develop so rapidly as to render Friedman’s predictive model ineffective for understanding the future. This reviewer also wonders where the current pandemic fits into this model and if it will alter or hasten the cycles to which Friedman refers. The suspicion is that he would insist that the pandemic fits exactly into his cycle of storm in the 2020s that will lead to the ultimate calm he anticipates in the 2030s. So, what conclusions might be drawn, especially for our current setting at DBU, its mission, and the constituency it serves? While some will quibble with BOOK REVIEWS
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