THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (122 page)

In the West, the growing inequalities of wealth and personal safety were dissolving the bonds of civil society in state after state. Riots, kidnappings of wealthy persons, the anticomputer terrorism of the technically sophisticated New Luddites, the green terrorism of the “Boy Scout” movement (no relation to the twentieth century group of child explorers), begging in the streets of the wealthiest capitals, and anarchy in the poorest ones—all these were accepted as the inevitable costs of rapid growth and rapid change. There even came a point, during the worst of the terror attacks on the United States, when it appeared that New York and Washington would be depopulated like Rome during the plague, but this did not happen.

Globalization—and its terrors—were of necessity an engine of change, and the resulting dislocations were taken to be unavoidable. The bottom line was that even after an American stock market collapse in 2005 and a worldwide recession that had lasted throughout 2007, most persons were wealthier (had more consumer goods, more leisure time), healthier (owing to computer-enabled methods of preventive medicine that earmarked individual vulnerabilities before they became acute), and better educated (again owing to computer innovations that gave every child several hours of individual instruction daily for fifteen years and provided access to an almost infinite amount of information) than ever before. Led by the United States, virtually every state in the developed world and many outside it adopted a hands-off attitude toward popular culture and behavior.
Affirmative action, anti-abortion laws, narcotics and prostitution prosecutions, and subsidies for the arts all vanished.
The withdrawal of the state from enforcing particular sectarian views did not mean that pressure groups declined.

On the contrary, by 2010 everyone in the former First World seemed to believe in something—often so intensely and parochially that political
systems all across the developed world were deadlocked. NGOs, however, flourished. These began reaching out to the Third World. In Africa and Latin America, philanthropic groups supported both Christianization and de-Christianization, attempting to change people's religion either to some form of Christianity (including Mormonism) or to some “indigenous” sect thought to have been threatened by Christianity (including animism). To these causes were added Green concerns (reforestation, restoration of species, soil depletion headed the list), inoculation against infectious diseases, and famine relief.

Indeed the proliferation and profusion of NGOs in the developed world led a large number of countries in the developing parts of the world to devise cultural policies catering to First World interests.
Some countries legalized assisted suicide; some instituted Islamic legal and cultural rules; some hosted genetic engineering projects ranging from modified crops to organ harvesting; some virtually became theme parks.

NGOs also led the movement to improve health in the developing world. In many countries, rapid urbanization had outrun the capacity of the urban infrastructure and social services to cope, leaving cities to incubate disease and without adequate sewage or health facilities.
NGOs organized treatment centers, and in some states governments virtually ceded their health policies to these organizations
, which had the resources to alleviate disease but not the legitimate power to resolve the underlying problems that had created the crisis.

By 2025 the world's population had increased by 50 percent since the year 2000, to a level of about 7.5 billion. The most dramatic demographic event in the first quarter century, however, was a precipitous drop in population growth. This drop did not occur uniformly. The states of the developed world lost population share, going from 21 percent to 12 percent—since 1650 it had hovered between 34 percent and 26 percent—and aged at a faster rate than any other group of states. Within the group of developed states, however, there were significant differences. Japan and Italy, whose low population growth was a source of anxiety at the turn of the century, aged rapidly, Japan overtaking Italy. Except for Poland and Moldova, the European populations of the former Warsaw Pact uniformly declined. In 2020, Britain and France had a high average age among industrial countries; that same year the United States had the youngest average age. And even within a single state, there were large variations:
the relative youth of the American population derived from a high rate of immigration
.

In this period
a number of less developed states stabilized their populations
—China, Taiwan, Korea, Algeria—and their birth rates actually began to decline. Other states—India, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil—continued to grow and then leveled off in the 2030s and 2040s. Some states—Nigeria, Zaire, Ethiopia, Rwanda—experienced a largely unchanged, high fertility
rate, but their population levels suffered owing to various catastrophic events.

These population variables set the terms of the differential growth rates that occurred in the first part of the twenty-first century, as the world in 2025 saw a falling population for the first time in four centuries. In the northern-tier developed states, the demand for consumer goods was faltering as the population aged; in the less developed southern-tier states, increasing population pressures drove up the price of foodstuffs. Nevertheless both sectors—with the exception of some African states—were linked by multinational commerce, opening up vast consumer markets in the South, to which genetically engineered grains and proteins were ultimately exported. By 2020, 70 percent of the world economy was in the former Third World and China.

There were some unattractive aspects to this flourishing trade. For example,
organ farms (really “hospitals” that removed organs from paid donors) arose in Pakistan, the Philippines, and various other states to supply First World demand for transplants
, though these were ultimately replaced by transgenic methods using animals.
Some states acquired needed capital by locating nuclear waste sites on their national territory and by permitting mineral-extraction methods that were outlawed elsewhere
. Russia for a time in the 2020s was taken over by a raw-materials development company that employed political prisoners as workers in mines and wholly corrupted the Duma by giving members “derivative” subsoil rights to the petroleum and minerals beneath Siberia.
In Russia at this time, a new form of civil right was introduced, permitting any citizen or registered company to buy shares in the state, thus giving weighted voting according to the number of shares purchased
. Unsavory as this sounds, it did have the result of efficiently extracting the abundant raw materials of the Russian state, which had hitherto frustrated most attempts at development. Moreover, the privatization of the state brought sufficient capital to the country through foreign investment that perennial Russian agricultural shortfalls were finally halted through a program, of genetically engineered hybridization.

Pakistan and India joined in a free trade area
in 2010, providing the crucial momentum that made India the world's largest single market by 2025. Other, intermediary states flourished in the new environment of general free trade: Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, Algeria. A global hiring program operated on the Internet allowed anyone anywhere to access job opportunities worldwide and to receive a one-year “green card” once employment assured, as part of a universal reciprocity regime for jobs. By 2040, the number of nominal citizens and resident citizens combined of the top fifteen formerly Third World countries surpassed year 2000 levels of GDP per capita for First World countries.
¹⁰
In these rapidly developing countries, the proportions of GDP derived from industry and manufacturing hit the conventional maxima for a developed, postindustrial state, giving way to the relative rise in services that seems characteristic of affluence.
¹¹
Successful economic reforms in these states—especially the
free trade areas of India-Pakistan, China-Taiwan, Korea-Japan, and Singapore-Malaysia-Indonesia-Thailand
—prompted the election of politicians committed to economic reform. Increases in successful free-market reform yielded increases in individual freedom. Third World development spurred demand for First World products that became, as the century wore on, ever cheaper.

By contrast, per-capita consumption in the First World shifted as more emphasis was placed on quality-improving investments such as child safety, preventive medical care, and lifelong education.
Environmental quality was monitored and protected by licensed entrepreneurs who held various resources (for example, air quality) in trust for the state
. The 2020s also saw a number of innovations in civil society:
violence prone adolescents—identified by genetic screening at birth—were monitored when convicted of violent crimes, and their activities circumscribed through various electronic means
; the most serious offenders were exiled to other countries in exchange for cash payments, and there typically turned to agricultural or military duties. In some countries,
medical and education vouchers were earned through the avoidance of legal “demerits
” so that citizens with a record of infractions were barred from schooling beyond high school and from all but some inexpensive forms of acute care, unless they were able to secure a source of funds of their own. This rather draconian system was to some extent mitigated by
a system of behavior bribes whereby nonviolent offenders were paroled to specialized private corporations where they were maintained as wards of the market
, in comfortable circumstances performing menial tasks, so long as they refrained from further offenses.
Drug offenders were either exported to states that had legalized drug use, or confined to privately run “Virtual Holiday” camps
where nonlethal drug use was permitted. By these various means, prison populations were dramatically reduced (though some increased crime did inevitably accompany this reduction).

The universal communications made possible by the ubiquitous (and cheap) handheld wireless computer/telephone/television tied the world's cultures together as never before. The reach of a single language—English—embraced 60 percent of the world's inhabitants by 2040. Only one region seemed impervious to the general economic upturn, and from that continent came the horrors that haunted the society of market-states.

In Africa, the greatest increase in population during this period occurred, from 642 million persons in 1990 to 2.25 billion in 2050, an absolute increase of more than 1.5 billion and a percentage growth (253
percent) that was more than twice as great as the rise in total population of the underdeveloped countries (including China and India) taken as a whole (109 percent). This growth was uneven, largely owing to AIDS deaths in some sub-Saharan states. Nevertheless Nigeria alone exceeded 500 million people at the end of this period. This enormous influx of population into the ecosystem of the African states accelerated the process of deforestation that was already well underway in the 1990s. One result of this deforestation was the triggering of the first twenty-year drought, which began in 2007 – 08. This drought brought about a shortage of fresh water that was so severe that even the development of genetically modified hybrid strains of sorghum and cassava were unable to alleviate Africa's grain shortfalls. Indeed, the availability of water proved to be the principal bottleneck to agricultural progress in many areas of the globe in the first two decades of the twenty-first century before laser-fusion technology made desalinization practicable. By that time, Africa had been struck with a new plague, the so-called weather epidemics of the mid-2020s.

“Weather epidemics” are so named owing to illnesses that appear to arise from unusual disturbances in the weather patterns of a given ecosystem. It is still not clear whether the bizarre weather conditions that began in the winter of 2026 were the result of covert experiments by private companies that went awry, or were another consequence of deforestation or of the
intense development without environmental quality restraints that took place on the west coast of Africa in the beginning of the century
, or of some combination of many unknown causes. In any event, a general malaise leading to extreme enervation, but usually not death if dehydration and starvation were treated, struck the African continent below the 10th parallel. Although there were deaths in the tens of thousands, the worst consequences of the weather epidemics, like those of the twenty-year droughts, were avoided by
a voluntary system of secular tithing in the developed world, stimulated by advertising campaigns and administered through various NGOs, including the Red Cross.
The ability to transmit worldwide the images of starving African children through wireless handheld communicators, enabling First World individuals to “adopt” and monitor particular children in the refugee camps, stimulated a response from the international public that dwarfed anything that governments were prepared to do. The money thus raised was used to bring food, medicine, and water to the dyshygenic new cities of West Africa, and to the swollen refugee camps of Central and East Africa.

Medical historians now believe, however, that it was an indirect consequence of this inspiring outpouring that led to the third and most lethal of the plagues to strike Africa. There is an emerging consensus that it was the pirating of portable X-ray machines from the Red Cross facility at Kinshasa and their subsequent misuse that resulted in the mutated virus known
as OOA-V. Like HIV, this virus can be transmitted through sexual contact and thus spread quickly through the polygamous societies of Africa, before leaping the Atlantic and turning up in the Caribbean. But this time,
unlike the HIV crisis of the late twentieth century, the disease had been identified and definitively traced. Simple sputum tests were given to passengers of air or ocean craft; whole countries were quarantined
(Equatorial Guinea being the first). The medical infrastructure of the African states, still reeling from the weather epidemics, was completely overwhelmed. This time, there was no commensurate outpouring of aid from the northern-tier states.
Such funds as their people were willing to spend on the problem were spent on prevention and quarantine measures
. By the end of the decade—2049—OOA-V had claimed, directly or collaterally, something approaching twenty-six million lives and it appeared still unchecked.