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Route to the Top. Corn Products Co. has set up a Brussels headquarters to coordinate operations in 14 European countries instead of having all report to New York. Sperry Rand's computer and office-equipment sales forces in 18 nations are now run out of Lausanne; Merck Sharp & Dohme recently established an office in Brussels to supervise six European subsidiaries. Says Professor Raymond Vernon, international trade specialist at Harvard Business School: "For the first time in history, we're seeing global strategy in terms of corporate entities. What you are seeing is a fundamental reorganization...
...obsolete, giving way to hovercraft that ride on air. Planes carrying 1,000 passengers and flying just under the speed of sound will of course be old hat. The new thing will be transport by ballistic rocket, capable of reaching any place on earth in 40 minutes. In Rand's Delphi study, 82 scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base will have been established long before A.D. 2000 and that men will have flown past Venus and landed on Mars...
That closer inner space, the ocean, will be even more radically transformed. Rand experts visualize fish herded and raised in offshore pens as cattle are today. Huge fields of kelp and other kinds of seaweed will be tended by undersea "farmers"-frogmen who will live for months at a time in submerged bunkhouses. The protein-rich underseas crop will probably be ground up to produce a dull-tasting cereal that eventually, however, could be regenerated chemically to taste like anything from steak to bourbon. This will provide at least a partial answer to the doomsayers who worry about the prospect...
...general, drug control of personality will be widely accepted well before the year 2000. If a wife or husband seems to be unusually grouchy on a given evening, says Rand's Olaf Helmer, a spouse will be able to pop down to the corner drugstore, buy some anti-grouch pills, and slip them into the coffee. Or a lackadaisical person could be dosed into a sense of ambition. Electrical stimulus of brain areas has been shown to produce responses of fear, affection, laughter or sex arousal; such techniques, says Yale's Dr. Jose Delgado, "will certainly increase...
...movements to break up big organization. But the skeptics are plainly in the minority. Some futurists, like Buckminster Fuller, believe that amid general plenty, politics will simply fade away. Others predict that an increasingly homogenized world culture-it has been called "the culture bomb"-will increase international amity, although Rand's experts rate the probability of major war before the end of the century...