CHAPTER 3

        GLOBAL CONFUSION, 1980:  A HARD LOOK AT THE GLOBAL 2000 REPORT


             Chapter 1 examined the generation and transmission of false

        policy-relevant information in the context of the government

        vanishing-farmland scam.  In this chapter I describe another

        instructive case: the famous 1980 Global 2000 Report to President

        Jimmy Carter.

             Global 2000 was the classical government-produced and

        environmentalist-engineered false forecast of doom, drawing the

        appearance of validity from its thick size, hundreds of tables,

        computer gobbledygook, and hundreds of advisers with fancy

        credentials, and official imprimatur.  It sold in the millions of

        copies, and copycat reports were produced by many other

        countries' governments.

             The study of Global 2000 that follows is almost as I wrote

        it in 1981.  The main change is that I have updated the graphs.

        (I have also switched the location of one section.)  I have made

        no other changes because the analysis proved to be exactly

        correct in all details.  As I then predicted, every single

        proposition in Global 2000 has proven wrong - perhaps a world

        record.  But getting it right where Global 2000 got it wrong was

        no great intellectual feat, and I certainly was not the only one

        who saw things that way; all one had to do was study the long-

        term trends up to that time and project them into the future -

        which is also the key to making correct predictions starting

        now.

             But as I also predicted then, the critique and the

        subsequent experience of Global 2000 proving wrong would bounce

        off that Global 2000 like a pebble off an elephant, and it would

        remain the common wisdom until displaced by another fearsome

        "official" report, which turned out to be the Brundtland Report

        later in the decade.  So it happened.  And the individuals and

        institutions who produced the discredited Global 2000 Report are

        still the gurus that in 1995 the press turns to most frequently

        for their "expert" opinions.

             In addition to the essential information that they

        represent, the trend data contained in this chapter are useful

        because they show that such trends are reliable; updating them

        from 1980 until the writing of this book implies no differences

        in interpretation, as you can see.  If trends in the social

        sciences are to matter at all, they must cover many decades and

        even centuries; only then can one feel any confidence in them;

        reports of scary recent blips based on a few years' data turn out

        to be false scares just about every time.

                                       ***


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