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?