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The Big Picture
I was about to go down the badger hole and lose another day of my one, short, precious life to the news cycle and the scandal du jour, but something stopped me. (Divine interference?) My finger was just about to click on that headline, when a voice in my head said, “In twenty years’ time, if you’re lucky enough to be around then, will this matter?”
Probably not.
It made me wonder what will, though. What’s the big picture? Do these headlines suggest any larger, more important trends? Or are they entirely ephemeral?
The question was perhaps on my mind this morning because yesterday the Atlantic linked to two reports I’d never seen. One was the National Intelligence Council’s 2000 forecast about the world in 2015 — their predictions about the way the world would look by now. The other was their recently-released forecast on trends from now to 2035.
Here are the important trends, in the NIC’s view:
The rich are aging, the poor are not. Working-age populations are shrinking in wealthy countries, China, and Russia but growing in developing, poorer countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia, increasing economic, employment, urbanization, and welfare pressures and spurring migration. …
The global economy is shifting. Weak economic growth will persist in the near term. Major economies will confront shrinking workforces and diminishing productivity gains while recovering from the 2008-09 financial crisis with high debt, weak demand, and doubts about globalization. China will attempt to shift to a consumer-driven economy from its longstanding export and investment focus. …
Technology is accelerating progress but causing discontinuities. Rapid technological advancements will increase the pace of change and create new opportunities but will aggravate divisions between winners and losers. Automation and artificial intelligence threaten to change industries faster than economies can adjust, potentially displacing workers and limiting the usual route for poor countries to develop. Biotechnologies such as genome editing will revolutionize medicine and other fields, while sharpening moral differences.
Ideas and Identities are driving a wave of exclusion. Growing global connectivity amid weak growth will increase tensions within and between societies. Populism will increase on the right and the left, threatening liberalism. Some leaders will use nationalism to shore up control. Religious influence will be increasingly consequential and more authoritative than many governments. …
Governing is getting harder. Publics will demand governments deliver security and prosperity, but flat revenues, distrust, polarization, and a growing list of emerging issues will hamper government performance. Technology will expand the range of players who can block or circumvent political action. …
The nature of conflict is changing. The risk of conflict will increase due to diverging interests among major powers, an expanding terror threat, continued instability in weak states, and the spread of lethal, disruptive technologies. Disrupting societies will become more common, with long-range precision weapons, cyber, and robotic systems to target infrastructure from afar, and more accessible technology to create weapons of mass destruction.
Climate change, environment, and health issues will demand attention. A range of global hazards pose imminent and longer-term threats that will require collective action to address—even as cooperation becomes harder. More extreme weather, water and soil stress, and food insecurity will disrupt societies. Sea-level rise, ocean acidification, glacial melt, and pollution will change living patterns. …
The bottom line: These trends will converge at an unprecedented pace to make governing and cooperation harder and to change the nature of power—fundamentally altering the global landscape. Economic, technological and security trends, especially, will expand the number of states, organizations, and individuals able to act in consequential ways. Within states, political order will remain elusive and tensions high until societies and governments renegotiate their expectations of one another. Between states, the post-Cold War, unipolar moment has passed and the post-1945 rules based international order may be fading too. Some major powers and regional aggressors will seek to assert interests through force but will find results fleeting as they discover traditional, material forms of power less able to secure and sustain outcomes in a context of proliferating veto players.
Before reading their predictions in detail, though, read the 2000 report. Given how hard it is to predict the future, I thought it was pretty good: They identified quite a few of the big trends.
But unsurprisingly, they also missed some big things. Overall, they were excessively optimistic. For example: “Biotechnology will drive medical breakthroughs that will enable the world’s wealthiest people to improve their health and increase their longevity dramatically.” Sadly, no — life expectancy in the US is actually falling. We seem for now to be up at the limit of medical advances that increase life expectancy. Maybe by 2035.
They were, however, too pessimistic about AIDS. They expected the disease to “decimate the economically productive adult population,” of Africa. Instead, we’re reading news like this.
They missed critical economic trends, too. “The global economy, overall,” they surmised, “will return to the high levels of growth reached in the 1960s and early 1970s.” Financial crises, they thought, wouldn’t be too destabilizing: “The global economy will be prone to periodic financial crises, but its capacity to correct itself will remain strong.”
Nope.
They were roughly right about the Middle East:
Global trends from demography and natural resources to globalization and governance appear generally negative for the Middle East. Most regimes are change-resistant. Many are buoyed by continuing energy revenues and will not be inclined to make the necessary reforms, including in basic education, to change this unfavorable picture. • Linear trend analysis shows little positive change in the region, raising the prospects for increased demographic pressures, social unrest, religious and ideological extremism, and terrorism directed both at the regimes and at their Western supporters.
And their predictions about terrorism, migration, and the social effects of Internet technology were in the right ballpark. For example:
Societies with advanced communications generally will worry about threats to individual privacy. Others will worry about the spread of “cultural contamination.” Governments everywhere will be simultaneously asked to foster the diffusion of IT while controlling its “harmful” effects.
They were wrong about the EU:
Members of the European Union will tackle the most ambitious agenda, including significant political and security cooperation. …
Europe’s agenda will be to put in place the final components of EU integration; to take advantage of globalization; to sustain a strong IT and S&T base to tackle changing demographics; and to wean the Balkans away from virulent nationalism.
EU enlargement, institutional reform, and a common foreign, security and defense policy will play out over the next 15 years, so that by 2015 the final contours of the “European project” are likely to be firmly set. Having absorbed at least 10 new members, the European Union will have achieved its geographic and institutional limits.
Although they did see a hint of what might be coming:
… leaders in some Central/Eastern Europe countries will be susceptible to pressures from authoritarian, nationalist forces on both the left and right. These forces will capitalize on public resentment about the effects of EU policy and globalization, including unemployment, foreign ownership, and cultural penetration.
And they were quite wrong about Russia:
Russia will be unable to maintain conventional forces that are both sizable and modern or to project significant military power with conventional means.
For some reason, they seemed to think a unified Korea was within the realm of imagination:
A unified Korea with a significant US military presence may become a regional military power. For the next 10 to 15 years, however, knowledgeable observers suggest that the process of unification will consume South Korea’s energies and resources.
(That surprised me: I have no memory of any sane person talking about a unified Korea in the near future in 2000. Do you? Were the analysts overly influenced by German reunification, perhaps?)
And this one-line appraisal is not inaccurate, but a bit understated, all things considered:
Afghanistan will likely remain weak and a destabilizing force in the region and the world.
Read the report, and tell me how you think they did. Then read their predictions for 2035.
Here are a few lines that struck me:
During the next five years, the global economy will continue to struggle to resume growth, as the world’s major economies slowly recover from the 2008 crisis and work through sharp increases in public-sector debt. … most of the world’s largest economies are likely to experience, at least in the near term, performance that is subpar by historical standards. …
… the development and deployment of advanced information communication technologies (ICT), AI, new materials and manufacturing capabilities from robotics to automation, advances in biotechnology, and unconventional energy sources will … raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. Such developments will magnify values differences across societies, impeding progress on international regulations or norms in these areas. Existential risks associated with some of these applications are real, especially in synthetic biology, genome editing, and AI. …
… [The] gap between government performance and public expectations—combined with corruption and elite scandals—will result in growing public distrust and dissatisfaction. It will also increase the likelihood of protests, instability, and wider variations in governance. …
… The risk of conflict, including interstate conflict, will increase during the next two decades due to evolving interests among major powers, ongoing terrorist threats, continued instability in weak states, and the spread of lethal and disruptive technologies. … Noncombatants will be increasingly targeted…
… As budgets for national space agencies plateau, private industry will fill the void and pursue serious programs such as space tourism, asteroid mining, and inflatable space habitats. …
… Tensions over managing climate change could sharpen significantly if some countries pursue geoengineering technologies in an effort to manipulate large-scale climate conditions …
… Unaddressed deficiencies in national and global health systems for disease control will make infectious disease outbreaks more difficult to detect and manage …
… Beijing and Moscow will seek to lock in temporary competitive advantages and to right what they charge are historical wrongs before economic and demographic headwinds further slow their material progress and the West regains its footing. …
… Moscow will test NATO and European resolve, seeking to undermine Western credibility; it will try to exploit splits between Europe’s north and south and east and west, and to drive a wedge between the United States and the EU. …
… India will be the world’s fastest growing economy during the next five years as China’s economy cools and growth elsewhere sputters, but internal tensions over inequality and religion will complicate its expansion.
… the rise of violent religious nationalism and the schism between Shia and Sunni are likely to worsen in the short term and may not abate by 2035. …
… Religion will become a more important source of meaning and continuity because of increasing information connectedness, the extent of state weakness in much of the developing world, and the rise of alienation due to the dislocation from traditional work in the developed world. …
Quite different in tone and emphasis from the first report.
Do you think they’re missing anything obvious? Or overstating anything that won’t really amount to more than a flash in the pan?
Published in General
Claire, in twenty years time almost everything in politics will be insignificant. If you look at it that way, 95% of everything on Ricochet is a waste of time. : ) And predicting the future is the biggest waste of time of them all.
The only thing of lasting value is your family and your faith.
I think they are leaving out how increased interconnectedness reveal just how terrible other people are, exasperating discord and catalyzing conflict.
Definitely. There’s really something to that.
Diversity plus proximity equals war.
I honestly believe that mark zuckerburg has done the world as much or more harm as any combination of living dictators and tyrants. His hellspawn has done nothing except give people reasons to not get along.
The fact he is rich has left me in a keirkegaardian hellscape of absurdity.
I get these things regularly but fortunately don’t have to read them because they make my head explode. If I had the mental energy, which I don’t but you do, I’d go back over many years of these things and look for systematically wrong predictions and try to make sense of any patterns of error. There may be few or none, inertia drives things until it doesn’t. Only one thing endures, human nature. Even culture can go off in different directions such as the M.E. because of oil prices, or America’s urban blacks who were soaring ahead after the war then hammered by everything. Speaking of which, some things that seem like new trends are just reactions to past economic or technological realities that have been around long enough to form new interests and stir up group formation and reach politics or cause the disintegration of traditional relationships and culture. The reality that gave rise to them may have long passed and something new is stirring.
May I ask why do you write this about Zuckerburg?? Thanks!
“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus”
Blaise Pascal quotes (French Mathematician, Philosopher and Physicist).
Current trends will continue unless they don’t. Innovation will be a factor. It will again be a lousy decade if you are both Shia and a Taurus. With a Gemini in the White House all bets are off with Putin being a Libra–‘Nuff said, right? Putin also has same birthday as Heinrich Himmler and the even more loathsome Simon Cowell. Expect conflict.
China is currently run by a Gemini born in the Year of the Snake (Surprised? Of course not.)
Leo, Sagittarius, Cancer, Virgo, Aquarius, Capricorn and Pisces: Increase your cache of ammo and MREs. Think about a cheery wallpaper for the bunker.
Taurus: Plow on as if nothing is wrong. It may work for a while this time.
Gemini: Fire that second therapist. The additional sessions are just confusing you.
Aries, Scorpio, Libra: Think about a move to the countryside outside the likely fallout zones.
Ocean acidification? Ocean acidification!? The 1990s called and they want their environmental panic attack back.
It would be nice to see one of these things that says “The increase in global communication will lead to the realization that governments do not solve problems; they monkey with parameters thereby creating new problems without alleviating the old, then propose a new wave of parameter-monkeying to solve those.”
I’m not holding my breath, no matter how much carbon dioxide I’m emitting.
WheelTug will have revolutionized the commercial airline industry and made a member or two of the Ricochet family fabulously wealthy in so doing.
Well, this is what happens when people are told that government will fix everything. Politicians raise expectations, and then can’t deliver. This is why conservatives advocate for small, limited government.
Someone has to tell the disappointed masses that they’ve been too damned gullible in believing politicians. Instead of being angry at politicians for not delivering on their promises, someone needs to put the blame on the people for believing this crap.
This is what education is supposed to do … teach people how to tell the difference between truth and falsity. But instead of teaching people how to discriminate for themselves, our education establishment and media insist that they can do that job of truth-finding — on the public’s behalf, of course. That’s the source of all the other corruption.
Without the time for lengthy reading, did they predict the Islamic extremism/ISIS problem would result in an entire country’s citizens, along with many other countries, immigrants fleeing to the West and that enormous impact, due to a lack of cohesive effort to confront this problem?
Also, while marriage and having children are on the back burner in developed countries, they continue in poor countries, hence the lack of a workforce to replace the aging populations. Also the latest mindset of irresponsibility, entitlement and obsession with entertainment, drug legalization and gains without working are contributing to this lack of workers problem.
Lack of transparency in government and the financial sectors also lead to uneven trade deals, enormous debt, and continued resources being depleted to restore balance, just to catch up. Is there a tipping point?
In this they were not entirely wrong – Russia’s power projections (so far) have been limited to the near-abroad (Syria) and their own border expansion (Ukraine, Georgia). Their carrier had to be towed at least part of the way to Syria. We have not seen them attempt anything at longer ranges (yet).
Aside from China’s economy, what did they say about China’s military? (don’t have time to read their reports right now).
I saw a lot of this in the 90s – predictions that when Kim Il Sung or Kim Yong Il died then the Norks would collapse. In this they were spectacularly wrong, but I still do wonder how long China will tolerate Nork’s erratic behavior.
I still agree with the basic idea that there are two ways to make a living: one is through work, the other is through investment. And all of the trends for the last thirty years show that making money through investment is dependable (discounting the normal spikes and valleys), while making money through labor is increasingly difficult.
I’d argue that automation is a key driver of that wedge. Automation rewards investment, but displaces jobs. As automation increases, it will increase company profits but will cut jobs. The gap between investors and laborers will just grow more intense.
In turn, I’d guess that sooner or later, laborers will attack automation somewhere. Automation may very well replace those low-wage globalization-fueled jobs around the world … and those workers aren’t going to like it. If history is any guide, some demagogue will emerge to exploit that resentment.
This is sad because I’ve never even heard of any of these things.
That’s just embarrassing.
Yes. I suspect the internal cost of foreign deployments are much greater than we imagine. The Russians are notoriously poor at funding operations and maintenance. They will be paying for Syria one way or the other for the next few years. Deferred maintenance undermines readiness. And they lost 3 (4?) fighter jets.
Claire I too can get so into being sure I am up on the latest news, the latest political revelation, making sure I understand the arguments of the day, and that I get all the trending cultural references. But, at the end of the day, if I choose to devote my life to that and relationship with God and with love ones suffer, I have made a poor choice. Matt Drudge is not going to visit me in the hospital. Charles Krauthammer isn’t going to come see me when I’m down and discouraged. Fred Barnes won’t be patiently listening to me repeat the same stories he’s heard 1000 times when I’m old and have dementia. I won’t be sharing a beer with the fox news round table to celebrate the birth of my first grandchild or my retirement. Bill O’Reilly won’t be taking a walk on the beach with me. we have to invest our lives in real people. If you have family start there. Of course the same with friends. If I don’t have family or friends. I need to look at those around me who have real needs and start to meet them, love them, encourage them.
I vote 5 for the “Idiocracy” result but 3 is far nicer to contemplate.
If Bill O’Reilly and I take a walk on the beach together, only one of us is coming back.
People still like saying “in the end, we’re really all alike“, but growing interconnectedness and social media are showing how different we all really are. It’s a lot easier to maintain concord in a society when we are not exposed relentlessly to each other’s deepest thoughts.
But, then again, the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades:
Not exactly. This is from 2008, and I think the trend continues:
The “medical advances” that tell us how to improve life expectancy for large numbers of people are not very advanced. Not necessarily easy for any given person to implement in his/her own life, but unless your health falls apart significantly (as in @therightnurse ‘s recent post) not conceptually difficult.
Increasing implementation across the population as a whole is a problem of culture, including education, and economics, not really that of medical technology as we tend to think of it.
Darn near as embarrassing as our new Littoral Combat Ships.
Thank you, Percival! Full belly laugh. If you need a second…
We have had our delightful concept of the demise of the nation state in the West while China moves forward on the old model of nationalism. The wake up period will not be pretty.
Russia is a problem with declining power as the oil market continues to increase supply.
Islam will continue to be the danger point for the West. China will tolerate no nonsense from Islam.
The global warming nonsense will abate as the next cooling period begins in earnest. I do expect there will still be climate change conferences even if glaciers advanced on Manhattan.
With any luck the conferences will BE in Manhattan and the conferees will get iced.
I think these scenarios are to extreme in both direction. Things are never as bad or as good as people predict.
The middle ground is that AI kills 90% of repetitive jobs – including most professional jobs such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants – while at the same time making productivity skyrocket for the remaining workers in those jobs. The rest of the population will be living on Basic Minimum Income supplemented by person-to-person service and entertainment jobs. As for the biosingularity ideas, I doubt this will happen. The human brain is already an amazing computational system. I doubt we will be able greatly improve on it without a complete redesign.