"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

A new release in the Quality Chasm Series, Priority Areas for National Action recommends a set of 20 priority areas that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other groups in the public and private sectors should focus on to improve the quality of health care delivered to all Americans. The priority areas selected represent the entire spectrum of health care from preventive care to end of life care. They also touch on all age groups, health care settings and health care providers. Collective action in these areas could help transform the entire health care system. In addition, the report identifies criteria and delineates a process that DHHS may adopt to determine future priority areas.

In the United States, the size and composition of the federal budget is arguably the most important single issue of the 1990's, yet most debates and commentaries on the subject are largely uninformed. Virtually no one - whether government official, member of Congress, journalist, or taxpayer - seems to understand how the budget is put together and what it means. This is hardly surprising, since the budget has become extraordinarily complicated. The structure of the budget reform act of 1911 has been maintained, with the changes of additional reforms (1974, 1986, and 1990) piled on top of it, while virtually nothing has been discarded. Most people are distressed at the enormous size of the federal deficit and perplexed because highly touted plans and agreements to bring the deficit down result in an even higher deficit. Why does this happen? Why is there a growing deficit amid cries of underfunding? Why is there general agreement on a format that has proved so misleading? This book comprises a series of essays about the federal budget - how and why it has grown so large, why most "deficit-reduction" measures are either shams or predestined to fail, and why understanding budget issues is so difficult. The authors offer a new perspective, a microbudgeting approach, which requires examining in detail how the federal government makes its budget decisions. Macrobudgeting, which is concerned with totals rather than parts, has prevailed for more than a generation in both Democratic and Republican administrations; the deficit-reduction drives of the 1980's, for example, failed because the parts added up to more than the targeted totals. By contrast, microbudgeting breaks the budget down into its basic elements, carefully reviews the assumptions underlying each program or account, and critically examines the methods by which savings are computed. Using this approach, the authors demonstrate that it is possible to understand the budget process and to make informed decisions on issues of public policy. Individual essays focus on such topics as: the changing Congressional budget processes that have been critically important in contributing to the federal budget deficits that have persisted since World War II; the origins, uses, and abuses of budget baselines; and the myth of the budget reductions of the Reagan presidency.