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This paper aims to present “Bouncecasting,” a seminar gaming foresight approach useful for examining “wicked problems” where the path to the future is uncertain and malleable and where major stakeholders may have different preferences for different futures. The approach gets its name because it goes back and forth between forecasting and backcasting, provides for give and take among different groups of stakeholders and creates and compares multiple scenarios depicting plausible futures.

After defining Bouncecasting, presenting its main features and providing a recommended way of conducting Bouncecasting studies, the approach is illustrated by four Bouncecasting projects conducted between 1998 and 2004.

The four projects taken together show that Bouncecasting can be used to address a range of wicked problems in a practical way. The projects considered in sequence show the evolution of the method.

Bouncecasting is a way of doing foresight that examines in an integrated way multiple characteristics of a policy problem, thereby providing promising solutions for complex issues. Although there have been over a dozen Bouncecasting studies conducted by the author and different sets of colleagues, this is the first general description of the approach.

The science of Foresight differs from the commonplace notion of what a science is because it is a metadiscipline – a logical type of science higher than the logical type of disciplinary sciences. It is practical, uses transdisciplinary processes that combine scientific disciplines and often examines counterfactuals in a scientific manner. This study aims to demonstrate that Foresight is a science, by presenting a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science.

The methods of scientific education that have served us well in the past are inadequate for metadisciplinary sciences such as Foresight. The paper discusses what metadisciplinarity is, using a variety of examples, and distinguishes it from disciplines and ways of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Understanding the essential characteristics of Foresight as a metadisciplinary science leads to identifying current best practices and possible educational innovations in undergraduate education that will facilitate obtaining Foresight skills. Throughout the paper, examples are drawn from the education and professional experience of the author in the USA and Europe.

This paper demonstrates that Foresight is a science and presents a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. It identifies barriers to those innovations and approaches to overcome them.

This viewpoint paper clarifies the meaning of the terms interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity to identify the essential characteristics of Foresight as a science. Then, it identifies and advocates needed changes in North American higher education to provide earlier and more efficient opportunities for Foresight researchers and users to obtain the skills they need.

The debate about the future of the death penalty often focuses on whether its supporters are animated by instrumental or expressive values, and if the latter, what values the penalty does in fact express, where those values originated and how deeply entrenched they are. In this chapter, I argue that a more explicit recognition of the emotional sources of support for and opposition to the death penalty will contribute to the clarity of the debate. The focus on emotional variables reveals that the boundary between instrumental and expressive values is porous; both types of values are informed (or uninformed) by fear, outrage, compassion, selective empathy and other emotional attitudes. More fundamentally, though history, culture and politics are essential aspects of the discussion, the resilience of the death penalty cannot be adequately understood when the affect is stripped from explanations for its support. Ultimately, the death penalty will not die without a societal change of heart.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to give a concise account of the current global climate situation, its previous history according to the palaeoclimate record, and climate scientists’ predictions of the consequences of various scenarios of global climate change. Then to explain why so many people continue to be oblivious to the enormous risks of continuing with business as usual.

The approach is through a comprehensive study of the relevant evidence and the scientific and scholarly literature, interwoven with philosophical reflections on their significance.

The findings are as follows: the evidence for the anthropogenic nature of global warming is overwhelming, and the prognoses for continued burning of fossil fuels (sea level rise, extreme weather, etc.) are dire. The denial stems in large part from the undue influence of climate scepticism movements, lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industries, combined with a variety of psycho-social and economic factors.

The implications are several. Given the complex nature of global warming, scientists need to do a better job of communicating their findings to the general public, and scholars and academics need to find ways to expose the machinations of the fossil fuel industries. And given the global impact of climate change, citizens of the developed nations need to see that a radical change in their behaviour is demanded not only by considerations of social justice but also even by their own self-interest.

The value of this philosophical approach is that it affords a more comprehensive view of the situation around global warming than we get from the more specialised disciplines.

There has recently been a flurry of interest in analysing trade policy regimes and their particular historical expressions among economists. This has been provoked in part by new developments in trade theory such as those based on the concepts of increasing returns and market structure, and in part by more awareness among the general public on development issues. For example a significant empirical study of the late nineteenth century concluded that a previously identified positive correlation between tariffs and growth was surprisingly robust (O’Rourke, 2000, p. 473). The previous study had concluded that: The reintroduction of protective tariffs (around 1880–1890) in the ‘less developed’ countries coincided in each case with a total reversal of the economic trends: growth accelerated and the pace of innovation and investment speeded up (Bairoch, 1972, p. 211).Hence protection was associated with high rates of economic growth at least for less developed states such as Germany and the USA in the period specified. This was in contrast to an identified negative correlation observed for much of the twentieth century, one predicted by the conventional neoclassical theory of free trade.

A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.

The chapter contends that although Israeli reality is replete with legal issues, very few films deal directly with the law or with a legal process as a central theme. Contemporary Israeli films are not very different from the early Israeli films in their embracement of a national heroic narrative, which typically leaves very little space for legal issues. The chapter demonstrates the absence of law from Israeli cinema by looking closely at war films, which are probably the most popular and influential Israeli films. War films reflect and in the same time participate in the construction of the Israeli collective consciousness, wherein the army experience is central. Tracing the way in which law is presented (or lacks representation) in them may shed light from a new angle on the role of law in shaping social and political norms in Israel.

CORPORATE STRATEGISTS ARE NOT CELEBRITIES. They're rarely household names. But, increasingly, it's their work that is shaping America's corporations—allowing them to compete in a decade that's turning out to be far more challenging, stressful, and, nonetheless, exciting than we'd expected. In an effort to ferret out strategic planning's unsung heroes, to put titles to challenges, names to titles, and faces to names, we cast a wide net. We scoured the business press. We checked in with our advisory board as well as our regular and occasional contributors. We asked subscribers, Wall Street analysts, academics, and even the people we interviewed for other articles. In particular, we were looking for individuals whose names are not familiar, who bring unusual backgrounds to their tasks, who have recently taken on new assignments, or who, because of the company they work for, face remarkable, difficult, and unusual challenges. According to our sources, those strategists we found, whose names, titles, and challenges appear on the next four pages, share a unique capacity for visualizing where they want to be, for solving problems, and then for doing what is necessary to carry their visions through. We'll be charting their success—watch for updates in JBS as the year goes on.