Herman Kahn - Later Years

Later Years

With the easing of nuclear tensions during the détente years of the 1970s, Kahn continued his work on futurism, with speculations about a potential Armageddon. The Hudson Institute sought to refute popular apocalyptic essays such as Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" (1968), Garrett Hardin's similarly reasoned "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the same year, and the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" (1972). In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress; the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future. In his last year of life (1983), Kahn wrote approvingly of Ronald Reagan's political agenda in The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, and bluntly derided Jonathan Schell's claims about the long-term effects of nuclear war. Kahn's 1976 book The Next 200 Years, written with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176. He also wrote several works on systems theory, including the well-received work Techniques in System Theory, as well as a number of books extrapolating the future of the U.S., Japanese and Australian economies.

Kahn died of a stroke in 1983, at the age of 61.