A close alignment with my own preference for predicting a new status quo on the back of a liberalised free market, Fareed Zakaria's Post-American World argues not for the collapse of nations or even America but that certainly it's total dominance over economics and politics is being weakened.
This will mean more than another nation stepping up to the fill the void. The philosophies of the rising nations of China and India will actually change the way we think of superpowers. China's foreign investments don't demand social or cultural change unlike the US' policy of spreading their own model of democracy to nations deemed wanting. He also believes that government intervention is ultimately responsible for the extremes of the failings of free-market capitalism, in particular, the US brand of interventionism and had the conditions been present in China then the collapse could plausibly have been avoided.
One disagreement I have is over Zakaria's state-centricism. He talks of countries as still remaining the dominant global power entities while downplaying the role of transnational actors such as the UN, Multinational Corporations and activists - the type of bodies I see as becoming more powerful while those entities restricted by political boundaries become weakened.
It's good to find other sources, as always, often from varied and surprising sources that lend a new angle to my project, or certainly point to similar thinking dimensions. The problem remains however of how to reconcile this great theoretical economic future work with design principles that can lead to an engaging reality.
Sliced analogies or vignettes seem to lose some of the lustre and grandiosity of looking at the entirety of a situation - zooming out and seeing the whole world and all of history in one vision is something not easily achievable and possibly what I'm struggling with at the core of my work, and also something which I've only found approachable through large blocks of text.