The recent election in Japan is extremely significant.  It indicates that the country is beginning to catch up to the rest of the world.  In my book “The Shift Age” and my speech with the same title I speak about the “Threshold Decades”, a 20 year period from 1985-2005 when the developed countries of the world moved from the Industrial Age into and through the Information Age.  Japan at least geopolitically has finally moved into this time, long after it should have done so.

Future historians will look back at the Threshold Decades as the threshold between the room of the …

As a futurist I write and speak about long term trends.  As an advisor and speaker to CEOs, I am looked to for more short term trends and forecasts.  Last September, when the growing recession went into a global financial meltdown after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I was constantly being asked about what was going to happen economically, about what was going on, how bad would it be and how long it would last.  This led me to look both deeply and widely across the global economic stage to develop forecasts and predictions.

As I consume media widely these past …