University of Denver’s Pardee Center Publishes Landmark Report

Denver University’s Pardee Center for International Futures, a partner institution of the Boston University Pardee Center, has just published the first in a series of reports on “Patterns of Potential Human Progress“ (PPHP). The first volume in the series, focussing on Reducing Global Poverty, has been jointly published by Paradigm Publishers and Oxford University Press in India.

This is the first volume in an ambitious new series Patterns of Potential Human Progress inspired by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) and other initiatives to improve the global condition. The first and most fundamental of these goals reducing poverty worldwide is the focus of this book.

Using the large-scale computer program called International Futures (IFs), developed over three decades at the prestigious University of Denver Graduate School of International Studies, this book explores the most extensive set of forecasts of global poverty ever made providing a wide range of scenarios based on an authoritative array of data. It transcends the $1 a day baseline measure of poverty and probes important concepts like income poverty gaps and relative poverty.

The forecasts are long-term, looking 50 years into the future, far beyond the 2015 date set out by the MDGs. They are geographically rich, spanning the entire globe and drilling down to the country level, including one of the most important global focal points, India. The poverty forecasts in this book, and all the volumes in the series, are fully integrated in perspective across a wide range of human development arenas including demographics, economics, politics, agriculture, energy, and the environment.

Full of colorful and thoughtfully designed graphs, tables, maps, and other visual presentations of data and forecasts, this large-format inaugural volume ensures that the Patterns of Potential Human Progress series will become an indispensable resource.

The series of reports promises to be a landmark endeavor that explore prospects for human development – how development appears to be unfolding globally and locally, how we would like it to evolve, and how better to ensure that we move it in desired directions. The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) annual Human Development Report (HDR) heavily influenced this series. Although our volumes are totally independent from the HDRs, they share the UNDP’s attention to different specific issues each year. In this case, however, the analyses are forward looking with a time horizon of fifty years further into the century, making the series something of an HDR plus fifty. The country-specific tables accompanying the volumes constitute the most extensive available set of long-term forecasts across multiple issues of human development.

Each volume will be global, long-term, and integrated in perspective across a wide range of human development systems (namely systems such as population growth, the spread of education, the advance of health, the growth of economies, and changes in governance patterns). This first volume focuses on poverty reduction, recognized in the Millennium Development Goals to be the foundational human development goal. The next will look at the future of global education, and the third will turn to prospects for global health.

Among the philosophical underpinnings of the IFs project are the beliefs that (1) prediction is impossible, but forecasting is necessary for understanding change and to support policy making; (2) analysis should always be built around alternative possible futures; and (3) the tools for forecasting should be fully open and transparent (IFs with Pardee is freely available to all users).