A Glimpse of 2020

Abstract:

To help get our bearings in a complex and ever-changing world, it is useful to ask what the world will look like in a decade or two. Forecasting the future accurately is of course impossible. And of course we cannot forecast surprises, by definition. But by projecting known trends and tendencies, it is possible to say a remarkable amount about the broad outlines of the world one to two decades from now. In particular, we can identify with high confidence four factors, which we hardly notice from year to year, but which accumulate relentlessly over time, such that by 2020 they will have profoundly transformed the world as we now know it. The four factors are population growth, growth in per capita income, increasing international mobility among national firms and individuals, made possible and driven by both technological changes in transportation and communication, and the aging of existing political leaders (as well as everyone else).

For concreteness, I will focus below on the year 2020. The year should not be taken literally, but as the rough mid–point of one to two decades from now. That looks beyond the immediate issues of today, and allows the cumulation of small annual changes in the trends mentioned above. But it is also a comprehensible distance into the future, the same distance as the year 1988, which many adults can remember, is into the past.

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