Jack Of All Trades

By WALTER SHAPIRO

TITLE: PREPARING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

AUTHOR: PAUL KENNEDY

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 428 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: This is an egghead coffee-table book that all will discuss, many will buy, yet few will manage to finish.

British-born Yale University historian Paul Kennedy became a mass-market commodity with the publication of his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in 1987, a cross-century, cross-cultural study of the vital link between economic and military power. So what if Kennedy -- never a popularizer -- force-fed readers far more about the Habsburg Empire than most of them ever wanted to know? What mattered was that his thesis (a debt-ridden U.S. was fast running the risk of "imperial overstretch") perfectly captured the edgy mood of the late Reagan years, as opinion leaders began to brood that it was twilight in America.

With Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Kennedy has fallen victim to the academic version of imperial overstretch. The genesis of the new book, as Kennedy explains, came during a 1988 conference when he was criticized for not addressing "those forces for global change, such as population growth, the ; impact of technology, environmental damage and migration, which were transnational in nature." Perhaps a more modest scholar than Kennedy might have responded that he was, for all his erudition, primarily a historian and not an agronomist, a climatologist or a demographer.

Instead Kennedy began "initial readings in subjects (global warming, demography, robotics, biotech) that were then totally foreign to me." His goal was to learn enough about these scientific and transnational factors to try to divine the quality of life in different regions of the planet through the middle of the next century. In an era when knowledge is narrowly compartmentalized, Kennedy warrants praise for the breadth of these polymath ambitions, aided though he was by five research assistants. But ultimately what mars Kennedy's book is that his grasp never fully equals his global reach.

For all his skills as a synthesizer, Kennedy primarily assesses and passes on received opinions. This often leaves him tentative just at the point when the impatient reader, perhaps unrealistically, demands certainty. Take Kennedy on climate change: "Little of this is clear at present, although once again most scientists guess that the effects of global warming will be deleterious rather than beneficial." Or his view of the fate of the former Soviet Union: "So severe and complex is the crisis that the only certain fact is the existence of innumerable uncertainties."

When Kennedy does offer firm predictions, he falls into the trap of most consensus forecasters: projecting current trend lines ad infinitum. There are few surprises in Kennedy's universe -- no new ideologies galvanizing the masses of the Third World; no medical breakthroughs to forestall the graying of the developed world; no method to recycle wealth from North to South. Global population pressures represent the strongest aspect of Kennedy's bleak portrait of life in the next century. Small wonder that he begins with a tip of the hat to Thomas Malthus' dire -- but ultimately incorrect -- late 18th century prediction of worldwide starvation. "The world's population was less than a billion when Malthus first wrote his Essay ((on Population))," Kennedy notes. "Now it is heading, at the least, toward 7 or 8 billion, perhaps to well over 10 billion." But elsewhere Kennedy has the intellectual honesty to admit that such population projections can be grossly inaccurate, missing such behavioral trends as a sharp drop in the Brazilian birthrate in the 1980s owing to the introduction of cheap birth control.

There is little in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century that will surprise a faithful reader of newspaper op-ed pages or a regular viewer of public- television chat shows. Yet once again Kennedy may resonate perfectly with the national psyche; his concern for the environment, education and the economy mirrors the visionary world view of the incoming Clinton Administration. Not a cheerleader by nature, Kennedy makes scant secret of his skepticism: "In the unlikely event that government and societies do decide to transform themselves, we ought to recognize that our endeavors might have only a marginal effect on the profound driving forces of today's world." If Kennedy truly feels that fatalistic, one fears that his next best-selling synthesis -- coming out around the turn of the millennium -- may be titled The Rise and Fall of a Great Planet.