The Most Probable World

Chase is a social critic and veteran popularizer whose positivism has outlasted his reformist zeal - he makes few radical criticisms or predictions. Ten current trends are analyzed and forecasted here with statistical flourishes. The variables are familiar: conservation, demography, the nature of the economy, the arms race, automation, man's fate. The proposals are also quite reasonable - all students should have a thorough grounding in the "new science, as well as the "new politics" (with emphasis on the U.N. and international law) and the "new economics" (based on a mixed-economy model). In an epilogue, he projects the next generation's scene which will feature noiseless subways, no t.v. commercials, "new towns" which will serve as satellite population centers for drastically urban-renewed, carless cities; while the U.N. will move to an island in the Indian Ocean. Though it blurs the distinction between adjustment to a "most probable world" and the recommendations for ensuring certain probability valences, this is an entertaining futurama of What-Life-Will-Be-Like-In-2000. (Kirkus Reviews)