Paul Krugman blows his own trumpet slightly as he resurrects a futurist piece he wrote in 1996. The conceit is that it's written in 2096, looking back...

When looking backward, you must always be prepared to make allowances: it is unfair to blame late-20th-century observers for their failure to foresee everything about the century to come...

The future, everyone insisted, would bring an ''information economy'' that would mainly produce intangibles...But even in 1996 it should have been obvious that this was silly...The billions of third-world families that finally began to have some purchasing power when the 20th century ended did not want to watch pretty graphics on the Internet. They wanted to live in nice houses, drive cars and eat meat...

Soaring Resource Prices

The first half of the 1990's was an era of extraordinarily low prices for raw materials. In retrospect, it is hard to see why anyone thought that situation would last. When two billion Asians began to aspire to Western levels of consumption, it was inevitable that they would set off a scramble for limited supplies of minerals, fossil fuels and even food...

The Environment as Property

... Today, of course, practically every environmentally harmful activity carries a hefty price tag... Once governments got serious about making people pay for pollution and congestion, income from environmental licenses soared. License fees now account for more than 30 percent of the gross domestic product, and have become the main source of Government revenue; after repeated reductions, the Federal income tax was finally abolished in 2043...

Krugman's five also include the rebirth of the big city, the devaluation of higher education and the birth of the celebrity economy. What other big trends would you add to the list? Ubiquitous surveillance, novel power sources and increasing longevity would be my picks.

"The future's already here", said William Gibson; "it's just unevenly distributed".

I'm off for the next two weeks, but the rest of the Risk team will be picking up the slack in my absence.