Foresight on our Future Economy
/Based on Imagining After Capitalism by Andy Hines
Jim Golembeski, guest author
Twenty-five years ago, as Director of the Bay Area Workforce Development Board, I experienced, along with my colleagues, the shockwave of local plant closings and worker dislocation as new technology and economic globalization drove overwhelming economic changes we hadn’t seen coming. We weren’t looking for the signals back then; we didn’t know how.
Even before that, our country was hit by one economic shock after another. Consider the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s that cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion to bail out the financial system and keep the economy from falling apart. Ten years later, the Dot-Com Bubble and Bust followed, creating major economic disruption. 2008 brought the Housing Bubble crisis that led to the Great Recession, again asking taxpayers to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue the financial system by bailing out some of the wealthiest individuals and companies in the country.
In 2025, though, we don’t have to keep going through life wearing a blindfold. We have resources like Andy Hines, head of graduate studies in Foresight at the University of Houston, and his brand new book, Imagining After Capitalism. It’s an excellent primer on applying the process of Strategic Foresight to an issue as global as what a future economy might look like post-capitalism – in a new economic order!
What drew me to Hines’s book? As a board member of Envision Greater Green Bay and a member of the Upward Mobility signals team, I frequently find myself discussing why so many of our citizens seem to be stuck in poverty despite repeated indications that economic prosperity is just ahead. I have quoted the United Way ALICE study regularly as a signal that our economic system is not working for too many workers and their families. Hines’s book looks beyond the band-aids and finger-pointing to provoke broader thinking and raise new possibilities for our community, our country, and our world. I’d like to share some of his insight with you by taking a closer look at this excellent book.
As an Envision board member, I’ve been trained in Strategic Foresight based on the University of Houston approach. I’ve learned to identify “signals” of trends and developments to create a vision for adaptive change toward a preferred community future. Specific skills we’ve learned include framing, scanning and researching, futuring, visioning, designing and adapting. By now Envision Greater Green Bay has provided Strategic Foresight training to 175 individuals from 78 local businesses and organizations, offering workshops several times each year at a reasonable cost. University of Houston and Andy Hines have become household words for us.
The mission of Envision Greater Green Bay is to prepare community leaders in Northeast Wisconsin to systematically drive decisions toward a preferred future. We do that in two ways:
We strengthen the regional community by using the University of Houston’s Strategic Foresight methodology to build a preferred community future.
We provide Strategic Foresight training opportunities to area businesses, nonprofits, governments and educational institutions.
Through the Strategic Foresight process, learned from experts like Andy Hines, we identify three “horizons” for framing our discussion:
Horizon 1 is the baseline of the current situation.
Horizon 2 is the transition zone in which disruption, possible collapse, and initial adaptations occur.
Horizon 3 is the transition to a new equilibrium through transformation, usually two decades or more in the future
Strategic Foresight is designed to create the “guiding images” that lead toward the Horizon 3 transformation. The old adage is “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” It is not a simple process. Imagining After Capitalism is an excellent guide to working through the details of identifying and reading the signals and then planning to create a preferred future instead of letting history unfold on its own terms.
Particularly noteworthy is Hines’s thorough attention to the scanning and researching step. This is the phase of the Foresight process that identifies ideas, trends, pilot projects, and insights (“signals”) that indicate future opportunities for our regional economy. Applying Strategic Foresight to as large a topic as our current capitalist system makes the book all the more intriguing. Hines notes, the top 0.1% wealthiest individuals continue to amass a greater percentage of national assets each year. Such events are signals that capitalism as we have known it is in trouble. This is the Horizon 1 baseline Hines begins with.
As stated above, his review of the literature (scanning and researching) is impressive. Wonderful ideas and projects are scanned. Using that information, he steps through the Horizon 2 scenarios during the transition stage to arrive at what a Transformational economy might look like in Horizon 3. His analysis leads him to three “guiding images” for the future which he examines in great detail:
Circular Commons
Non-Workers Paradise
Tech-Led Abundance
The book can be a bit dense to read at times, but Hines carefully takes the reader, step by step, through the process. Simply observing the Strategic Foresight process in action is, itself, enlightening, to say nothing of using it to work through an interesting and provocative topic. Again, I cannot help but think of the economic pain we went through in northeast Wisconsin 25 years ago that might have been averted had we paid attention to the signals and taken action earlier to adapt to the new reality.
Hines’ purpose is not to denigrate capitalism. In his view, it has been an effective economic system that has created wealth and has been vital to human development. At the same time, it is showing signs of significant stress and even decline that cannot be ignored. I highly recommend Imagining After Capitalism.