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2012 E-Book-Ausgabe (EPUB)
E-Book-Ausgabe 2012
2012 Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, Gtersloh
Responsible: Jonathan Stevens, Ole Wintermann, Tom Fries, Anneliese Guess
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ISBN : 978-3-86793-470-1
www.bertelsmann-stiftung.org/publications
www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/verlag
Foreword
Thinking about our global future is often a recipe for vertigo. Although the individual words are simple, the concept is larger and more complex than we as individuals first realize. This book sets out to help us understand how to shape our global future by examining the intersecting megatrends which will greatly impact our world.
Throughout its history, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has tackled a range of major global issues, albeit most commonly in isolation from one another. This elicited the question: Could we design a project that examines our global future through the dynamic interactions among megatrends rather than by looking at each trend individually? From that simple thought experiment, this multi-year project began as an earnest attempt to create a different prism through which tomorrows world could be viewed.
We selected six megatrends for analysis, each chosen through a process of prioritization. We do not portend that these megatrends are the only issues that matter, but we feel that each is particularly important in shaping our global future. One chapter is devoted to each megatrend, and each chapters author defines the current state of that megatrend and examines its potential interactions with other megatrends in the future. Thanks to the excellent work of Michael Mandelbaum, who wrote the introduction, and Nigel Holmes, who designed the infographics, we can review and reflect upon the interactions between megatrends from a macro level.
This book would not have been possible without the assistance of our partners. We wish to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for its generous support of the project even before it launched. Their advice has allowed us to think big in terms of the dissemination and distribution of the ideas presented here. We are also grateful to the Searchlight grantees, who have contributed ideas and perspectives from their regions around the world. We must, as this book shows, move beyond thinking locally if we are to cooperate and cohabitate on this planet, and develop a truly comprehensive view of the future.
Special thanks go to our own trans-Atlantic staff. The Future Challenges teams in Germany and Washington, DC, consistently overcame linguistic and time-zone issues. More often than not, they turned their differences into strengths.
This project took the efforts of many to create. We hope it enriches and engages you, and encourages you to think and act in ways that secure a better future.
Aart de Geus
Member of the Executive Board
May 28th, 2012
Andreas Esche
Director, Measuring Globalization Effects
Table of Contents
Introduction
Michael Mandelbaum
Ever since the ancient Greeks consulted the oracle at Delphi for portents of what was to come, humans have sought to know the future. The future is the place, after all, to which we all aspire to emigrate. We have a natural interest in what we hope will be our home.
The future, in its precise details, is unknowable. Prediction is an art and an uncertain, erratic, unreliable one at that not a science. But the world of the decades to come is not completely opaque. While we cannot know everything about that world, we can be reasonably confident about some things. We cannot know what will happen, but we can have a good idea of what can happen, what may happen and even what is more likely than not actually to happen.
For example, the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor on December 17, 2010, which led to political upheavals that removed or threatened long-ruling dictatorships in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya and Syria, could not have been and, indeed, was not predicted certainly not by those with the highest stakes in these events, the regimes that were toppled. But the conditions in which these uprisings took place and that made them possible stagnant economies, large numbers of young people with no prospects in life and oppressive, corrupt, illegitimate governments could have been, and were, observed, described and even measured. The specific spark that touched off what became known as the Arab Spring could not have been foreseen; the kindling that fueled it could have been and was, in fact, well-documented. The future is created by human choices within a context established by broad social and economic forces. The choices are frequently surprising, but the context is not. The context until the midpoint of the 21st century and beyond will be, in no small part, the product of six major global trends. They are the subjects of this book.
Its first chapter, written by Jack Goldstone, concerns demography. This is the most reliably predictable of all the six trends. Many of the inhabitants of the world four decades hence are already alive, and the number that will join them during that period can be forecast with considerable accuracy because birth and death rates change only very slowly. The size and distribution of the worlds population will be determined, as the chapter shows, by the consequences of the great demographic transition now under way, in which birthrates and death rates both decline. Where the transition is most advanced, in the rich countries, populations will both age and shrink. (The United States will be a partial exception. In 2050, Americans will be older than they are now on average, but there will be more of them.) Where its effects are only beginning to be felt, in poorer countries, populations will continue to grow, in some places rapidly. The great shifts of population from younger to older age cohorts and among different countries will, as the author shows, reconfigure our world in ways that give rise to new social and economic challenges with which governments will have to grapple. Between now and the year 2050, we will see unprecedented increases in older groups demanding pensions and health care in the rich countries, a huge youth surge in the very poorest countries, and the emergence of billions of new consumers in markets for food, energy, manufactures and services in the successful developing countries. The numbers of those seeking international migration and of swelling new and existing urban centers will likely increase dramatically as well.
In the next chapter, Benjamin Wittes writes about one of the most pressing security challenges the world will have to face: the wider distribution and lower cost of technologies that have benign but also destructive uses. The fissionable material on which nuclear power reactors run but which is also crucial for nuclear weapons is the most dramatic example, but not the only one. Biology produces both medical miracles and deadly pathogens. Cybertechnology connects the world but can also disrupt, at great cost, the many connections it creates. Where once the greatest threat to people and property came from the large, well-organized military forces fielded by sovereign states, Wittes argues, in future decades, the chief danger may come instead from disaffected, resourceful, determined individuals and small groups.
