A History of the Future

Rana Dasgupta’s absorbing essay [“The Silenced Majority,” December] leaves an important issue unresolved: What will the Western working classes do when they realize they’ve lost? What forms will their lives take? These aren’t questions that traditional academic disciplines are well equipped to answer, if only for lack of data.

I don’t have the answers, of course, but it’s crucial that we begin to consider the possible outcomes. As we do, we’ll probably want to follow Dasgupta in looking beyond recent events. Taichi Sakaiya’s 1985 The Knowledge-­Value Revolution, or, a History of…