A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (12 page)

Where the status of women is particularly dire — from North Africa to northern India, whatever the prevalent religion — deprivation is even harsher.

Given these terrible disparities, population movements speed up. By 2008, especially in Africa, more than a fifth of the inhabitants live far from their birthplace. This is also the case with a fifth of Australia’s inhabitants, a twelfth in the United States, and a twentieth of European Union residents.

Moreover, violence has never abated. While there is currently no declared war, the waning of East-West conflict has cast a pitiless light on the gap between North
and South. Civil wars flare everywhere, from the Balkans to Latin America, from Africa to the Middle East.

No sooner has the Berlin Wall fallen in July 1991 than Iraq — one of America’s new secular allies — believes it can profit from America’s support to seize Kuwait’s oil. After the Gulf War (in the course of which U.S. troops are stationed near Saudi Arabia’s Holy Places), it has to abandon the effort. Shortly thereafter, Sunni and then Shiite pirates — used by the United States in the seventies to counter Soviet influence — turn against Washington. Attacks aimed at driving the “infidel” from holy ground and then from Arab lands multiply. In the first years of the third millennium of the Christian era, in Arabia, Africa, New York, then in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, a part of Islam, once so deeply hostile to the Soviet Union, becomes the enemy of capitalism, of the United States and its allies. On September 11, 2001, pirates obsessed with theology turn to nomadic methods (civil aircraft) to destroy sedentary monuments (the New York towers).

Once again, the United States must now increase its security expenses to protect itself domestically and to attack abroad those it designates as responsible. It therefore declares an open-ended war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq. Quagmire: the projected cost of the war in Iraq alone is estimated to cost over three trillion dollars, 2.5 percent of the American GDP. Once again, for the ninth time, the defense costs of a core threaten its survival.

In all, the mercantile order has thus far known nine successive forms around nine cities: Bruges, Venice,
Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, Boston, New York, and finally Los Angeles.

The future, which seems to smile endlessly upon America, should nonetheless seek inspiration in the lessons of the past. It could in fact, for better or worse, resemble it: should the ninth form decline a tenth would appear, amid new geopolitical, economic, technological, and cultural upheavals, with a new core and new losers.

The history we have just outlined will help us trace that of the future and detect its dangers, so that hopefully we can master them.

A
s we have seen, history viewed over the long term has hitherto obeyed a few simple rules. Since the emergence of democracy and the market, evolution is moving in one single direction. From generation to generation, it spreads individual freedom and channels desires toward their mercantile end. From century to century, farmers have migrated into cities. From century to century, the forces of market democracy have coalesced into an ever-growing and more integrated market around a temporary core. To assume power over the mercantile world — to become its core — a city or a region must be the biggest communication center of its day, and must be endowed with a very powerful agricultural and industrialized hinterland. This core must also be capable of creating banking institutions bold enough to finance the plans of an innovative class, putting new technologies to work, allowing the transformation of the most daunting services into industrial objects. And finally, the core must be able to exert political, social, cultural, and military control over hostile minorities, lines of communication, and sources of raw materials.

Today, everything seems to indicate that Los Angeles, the ninth core of the mercantile order, will be able to maintain that role for years or even decades.

But the current form of capitalism lives under the same threats as those that finished off previous forms. Its security is imperiled, its innovative class can no longer be trusted, industrially promising technical progress is slower and slower, and financial speculation is out of control. Disparities worsen, anger rumbles, and deep indebtedness piles up. Most disturbing of all is the flagging of the core’s will to persevere at the top.

One day, in thirty years at the most, this ninth form (just like its predecessors) will bump against its limits. Once again, the market will work against the core: a new technology will replace other services with other industrial products. After the automobile, household equipment, and nomadic objects will come other major objects launched by a new core, ideologically, militarily, and culturally more dynamic, and centered around another project.

Before this happens, countless events will occur, most of them in history’s direct line.

Never has the Californian innovative class been so inventive, rich, and promising. Never have Californian living standards been so high. Never have the profits of the great American corporations reached such peaks. Never has the military and technological might of the United States been greater. Never have industrial and
financial innovation been so triumphant. Never has the United States so clearly dominated the world — militarily, politically, economically, culturally, and even, to a certain extent, demographically: today it is the world’s third most populous country, and with around 350 million inhabitants it will still hold that rank in 2040.

What is more, there is no credible rival on the horizon, either in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. And it seems that no other model for development is even imaginable. Therefore (at least until 2025), the wealthiest people and most central banks will still consider the United States and the dollar as their best economic, political, and financial refuge. (Witness the recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar and the decline of the euro since the 2008 financial crisis began.) In particular, the American tax system (soon to do away with the essentials of the inheritance tax) will attract exotic fortunes even more powerfully than now. American universities will also be able to reconstitute the country’s innovative class by recruiting some of the world’s best students — who will then stay on to create.

Los Angeles will remain the country’s cultural, technological, and industrial center, Washington its political capital, and New York its financial metropolis. The United States will long control defense technologies, data transmission, microelectronics, energy, telecommunications, aeronautics, motors, materials, guidance systems. It will maintain its role in world production for a long time. Its deficits will go on functioning as devices to spur consumption in the United States and production elsewhere. In all, during the next two decades at least (and even if U.S. growth might be temporarily
interrupted by financial crises, recessions, or conflict), the essentials of cultural, political, military, aesthetic, moral, and social happenings will simply accentuate the primacy of the United States.

This primacy has been sustained by the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. He will have to face huge financial, economic, monetary, and social issues. Obama's leadership of America will also represent a serious shift from an emphasis on American hard power to a more cooperative power. This shift will occur through a slow decrease in military spending and stationing of troops overseas to a stronger emphasis on European-style diplomacy and welfare statism. Obama may represent, therefore, a first step in the transition from global superpower to the future cooperative status of the United States, more focused on domestic matters and ready to accept more multilaterism in the international arena.

For as long as it is able to defer other futures (and we will return to this), world growth will remain at its present average of roughly 4 percent per year. In 2030, if current trends (which give only a very vague notion of the future, even one twenty years from now) persist, world GDP will have grown 80 percent, and the average income of every inhabitant of the planet by a half. In 2060, China and India alone will account for roughly half the world’s GDP. A significant section of the poorest will have entered the market economy as workers and as consumers. Products adapted to their purchasing power (food, clothing, housing, medicine, appliances, financial products) will be commercialized. Emigrants will finance their countries of origin by sending their
savings home. Microcredit (which already gives access to financing for a working implement to more than 100 million entrepreneurs) will expand by 2025 to at least 500 million heads of families. Microinsurance will guarantee minimum social cover to the poorest of families. Even if half the world’s population will still be surviving on only $1.25 a day by 2025, the share of world population participating in the market economy and knowing how to read and write will have increased considerably.

Along parallel lines, this economic growth will extend democracy’s scope — no authoritarian government has ever resisted abundance for too long. The most recent of them (from General Franco to General Suharto, from General Pinochet to General Marcos) proved incapable of exploiting rapid growth in order to maintain their control over the middle classes. Most countries not yet market democracies (China, North Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Pakistan, even Iran) could join their ranks. Governments, institutions, administrations, police, and judiciary apparatus will heed elected parliaments, but they will no longer obey single parties or theological authorities.

During these two next decades, the European Union will probably be no more than a simple common economic space, enlarged to include the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine. Even if its currency is likely to be used increasingly throughout the world, the union will most probably fail to build integrated political, social, and military institutions for itself. For this to happen, its security must be put under serious threat, which will not be appreciated until later, when the second wave of the future (which we shall soon
examine) begins to break. In the absence of a modernized higher education system and the ability to kindle innovation and welcome foreigners, the union will continue to fail both at assembling a new innovative class and at luring back the researchers and entrepreneurs who have crossed the Atlantic. In the absence of an adequate demographic dynamic, the replacement of past generations will not be guaranteed, particularly in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Germany. If current trends can be projected ahead, the union will account for only 13 percent of world GDP — as against 31 percent today. The per capita GDP of a European will be only half that of an American, compared with 70 percent today. This will also lead to lower-quality public services, from transport to education, from health to security. In a confrontation between Flanders and Wallonia, Brussels (after many ups and downs) could become a European federal district bereft of national ties. Naturally, a strong-state political upheaval could change this likelihood.

Eleven other economic and political powers will emerge — Japan, China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Korea, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico. Later on I shall call them the
Eleven.
In twenty or twenty-five years, all of them will be market democracies or leaning heavily in that direction. Below them, twenty other fast-growth countries will still suffer from institutional weaknesses. These countries include Argentina, Iran, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and Egypt. Still other countries, more modest in size — such as Ireland, Norway, Dubai, Singapore, and Israel — will play a special role.

Asia will dominate. Two-thirds of the world’s commercial exchanges will be transacted across the Pacific. In a little over twenty years, Asia’s output will surpass half that of the rest of the world. Thirteen of the twenty biggest container ports (including Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nagoya in Japan, Pusan in Korea, Kaohsiung in Taiwan, Dampier in Australia) are in Asia. Pusan (Pusan Newport) and Shanghai (Yangchan) are already capable of handling ninety containers per hour. Immense port and airfield infrastructures are still to be developed there.

In 2025, China (with almost a billion and a half inhabitants) will be the world’s second-ranking economic power. At the present pace, its GDP will outstrip Japan’s in 2015 and America’s in 2040. Its share of world GDP, currently at 4.5 percent, will rise to 7 percent in 2015 and will be close to 15 percent in 2025. Its average standard of living should by 2050 rise to one-half that of Americans. Even if China’s annual growth rate is half that of today, by 2025 it will have an annual per capita income of six thousand dollars. Hundreds of millions of Chinese will by then belong to the middle class, and several tens of millions to the upper classes. China will then have an excess in the balance of capital. It will continue to finance the U.S.’s deficits, just as if the two countries had a long-lasting pact aimed at maintaining world growth to their own benefit — until they reach the day when they feel strong enough to come to blows. From the Philippines to Cambodia, China will become the leading investor in the region, to the detriment of Japan and the United States If they are able to master their rural migrations, China’s coastal regions will even
become the meeting point of a innovative class from every corner of the globe, and in particular of returnees from the Chinese diaspora.

The Chinese Communist Party will be less and less able to organize urban life. It will be forced to leave power to elected officials in every city. Unless it reforms, it will fail to resolve its present immense difficulties: 90 percent of Chinese still have no retirement plan or health insurance; half the urban and four-fifths of the rural population have no access to medical care; half the country’s five hundred biggest cities lack drinkable water or a sewage system. China will have to build an urban infrastructure, consolidate monetary stability, fight corruption, put a permanent stop to corruption in public finance, find work for hundreds of millions of peasants flowing into the cities, reduce the income gap, improve the education system, train many more managers, reform an obsolete public sector, and install a judicial system capable of protecting private and intellectual property — a wealth of tasks practically impossible under a single-party government. Around 2025 the Communist Party, by then in power for seventy-six years (no other party in the world has ever remained in power for more than seventy years), will in one way or another fade away. Great disorder will reign for a time, as has so often been the case in the country’s history. A new democracy might even emerge, looking very much like the warlord-dominated democracy of 1912. If China then fails to maintain its unity (a possibility that cannot be discounted), it will participate in the general process of nation-deconstruction (we will return to this in the next chapter). In order to survive, the Chinese
Communist Party might also (as we will see) be tempted by a foreign adventure, such as invading Taiwan or Siberia.

India — with its 1.4 billion inhabitants — should be the most populous nation on earth by 2025 and the third-ranking economic power behind China and the United States. By 2010 its growth rate will surpass China’s, but because of its superior population growth, its per capita GDP will remain lower than its neighbor’s. Many of India’s businesses, such as Tata, Infosys, or Mittal, will rank among the world’s largest. For this scenario to happen, Indian democracy must surmount major challenges, very similar to those facing China. It must finance urban infrastructures, find alternative energy sources, construct highways and airports, launch a long-term cleansing of public finances, and reduce disparities among regions and social classes. If the central government fails to do so, the situation might lead, as in China, to a splintering of the country. Remember: India has been united only since the end of British colonial domination.

As for Japan, it will go on aging and declining in relative value, despite the economic strength that will continue to maintain its ranking as one of the very first global leaders. Unless it plays host to more than ten million foreigners or manages to boost a birth rate already in decline, its population will shrink. Although it is exceptionally well placed to dominate future technologies, from robots to nanotechnologies, Japan will not succeed in making individual freedom its predominant value. It will suffer increasingly from an encirclement complex — by North Korea’s arms, South Korea’s
products, and China’s investments. It will certainly react militarily by endowing itself with every kind of weapon (nuclear ones included) in an increasingly defensive and protectionist strategy. This could cost it very dearly on the economic front. By 2025 it is conceivable that it will no longer be the world’s fifth-ranked economic power.