Interesting... My son said a while ago that he attended a lecture where the speaker reckoned that with the internet, recording of just about everything, databases being interpreted for reason such as the Tesco knowledge of their customers, public health observatory etc, that Asimov's psychohistory concept could become reality in a small way. (We have a few decades at best, Seldon & co had a few millennia.)

This is, in a way, Asmimov's possible move from author to visionary. His contemporary Arthur C Clarke was always thrown in his face for envisaging satellites whereas Asimov's fiction relied on more fantastic concepts. However, his non fiction more than made up for it. When my youngest started putting his physics PhD thesis together, I advised him to read "The Stars in their Courses." It is an excellent example of explaining complicated concepts in lay terms.

Mind you, at the risk of exciting our armchair socialists.... Karl Marx pointed out that free market economics is self defeating, and the rise of multinationals, merging and defeating each other will lead to the same totalitarian state that socialism would give, but without the inferred equity.

Makes you wonder if Asimov, Marx or Adam Smith invented psychohistory!