• by January 18, 2001

There's more information in this 21 page report from The Futurist than you may want. On the other hand, there's probably something important buried in here that will be extremely helpful to a marketer, planner or buyer for the development of strategies in the future. So, here are some interesting excerpts. Tomorrow we'll continue with even more excerpts, and we encourage you to read the whole report.

For four decades, Forecasting International Ltd. has conducted an ongoing study of the forces changing our world. Veteran forecaster Marvin J. Cetron of Forecasting International Ltd. and science writer Owen Davies describe some of these trends for our long-term future:

- Real per capita income in the United States should stabilize at a growth rate of about 1.45% per year through most of the next decade.

- Consumer inflation in the United States has just barely begun to be felt. The price of consumer goods other than food and energy was actually declining in the late 1990s.

- Improved manufacturing technology will continue to boost productivity and reduce the unit cost of goods. The globalization of business will keep pressure on salaries in the developed countries. Thus, both prices and wages should remain under control.

- Automobile sales will slow as the useful life of cars stretches from its current average of about nine years to a bit more than two decades.

- The growing concentration of wealth among the elderly, who as a group already are comparatively well off, requires an equal deprivation among the young and the poorer old.

- The world's population will double in the next 40 years.

- Those over age 65 made up 12.4% of the American population in 2000. By 2010, they will be 13%; by 2020, more than 16%. The number of centenarians in the world will grow from 135,000 in 2000 to 2.2 million by 2050.

- The growth of the information industries is creating a knowledge-dependent global society, and telecommunications is removing geographic barriers. By 2005, 83% of American management personnel will be knowledge workers.

- By 2005, half of all knowledge workers (22% of the labor force) will opt for "flextime, flexplace" arrangements, which allow them to work at home, communicating with the office via computer networks.

- In the United States, the so-called "digital divide" seems to be disappearing. In early 2000, a poll found that, where half of white households owned computers, so did fully 43% of African-American households, and their numbers were growing rapidly. Computer competence will approach 100% in U.S. urban areas by the year 2005.

- Eighty percent of U.S. homes will have computers in 2005, compared with roughly 50% now. No fewer than 80% of Web sites are in English, which has become the common language of the global business and technology communities.

- In the United States, five of the 10 fastest-growing careers between now and 2