Blue-sky thinking

Parents couldn't possibly borrow any more - Or could they? The Contrarian Investor, David Stevenson, does some blue-sky thinking and imagines what the future might hold. And it's not that far-fetched!

I once had the great privilege of meeting a real in-the-flesh futurologist. I was thoroughly enjoying the experience until the point at which he angrily reminded me he was actually an imagineer: “My job is not necessarily to predict the future but to imagine it,” he proclaimed before sipping his cafe latte with extra skimmed soya milk. The careful delineation between the imagineer (to imagine the kind of world our children will grow up in and how they will touch/feel/ experience it) and the futurologist (taking existing trends and mapping forward) is, I suspect, as thick as Gordon Brown’...