There are Bad Omens
The 21st Century, as we all know, has started with very bad omens. In the year 2000, Neo-Cons took over the government of the only superpower left after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR.
Then came 9/11 that most of the world condemned and in the U.S. created a sense of patriotism; in an appalling turn of events President George W. Bush and his group managed to use the tragedy to infuse fear and create a panic situation that sent human rights and progress back half a century. They not only used 9/11 to disregard the Constitution of the United States of America, the United Nations and the Geneva Convention; they managed to present their immediate response to 9/11 and the actions that came after as their greatest triumph. Moreover, to make things worse, Bush’s administration messed up the wars it started and everything it came into contact with.
With two wars raging, the Palestinian occupation by Israel still a protracted problem, that some say created, but that at least stimulated the Islamic kind of terrorism, and the worst economy in half a century; President Obama took office in 2009. He has good ideas and better intentions, but the corruption in Washington is widespread and the Republican Party has proven to be a highly motivated enemy of progress. They are opposed to basic research on principles that it goes against their religious beliefs; and, 3 of the 10 Republican candidates for president in the last election raised their hand asserting that they did not “believe” in Darwin’s theory of evolution! Is it blatant ignorance or just plain political hypocrisy?
The world is facing a financial crisis that seems to be pointing to a crisis of capitalism. Capitalism was created to deal with the need for capital by the Industrial Revolution, to start and expand industrial plants in order to produce goods, now it has overextended its reach by allowing the banking and investing system to create money. One thing is to raise capital to produce and sell goods; but using capitalism to create capital without the production of anything seems to be very wrong. It is like making a loan without backing it with assets or like a government printing out excess money.
To make matters worse, since the Reagan years, when “trickle-down-economics” was introduced, there has been little “trickle-down” and a lot of “let’s trickle-up to the wealthy” making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Wages have not grown in real terms and the only salaries that have grown, a lot, are those of the CEOs and top managers.
When a few years ago the bankers started giving away money in the form of easy to get refinance mortgages, driven most probably by their motivation to get good quarterly numbers and so get huge bonuses, people were happy to get money to spend and forgot about the downward salary trend. The resources of families are now being hit hard and the economy in general is going to most probably be stagnant in terms of real growth on “Main Street”.
Salaries and wages will stay down for a while keeping the economy flat because there will be no more easy mortgages to compensate. This situation must be changed; but with a flat economy and the money in the hands of the “let’s not trickle-down” gang there is little hope. Maybe, after a while, they will realize that to really make a lot of money goods must be sold and paid for; capitalism needs consumers!
The fast development of cybernetic solutions is going to create other obstacles for a recovery of wages, especially low wages. As soon as these robotic solutions get to the level where it is cost effective to substitute humans with semi-intelligent machines in simple jobs, it will be done. Millions of jobs fall into categories that could be at risk of being lost. In the past new types of jobs have been created when a given category is replaced by machines. However, now there is a different type of machine that replaces intellectual labor as well as the physical type.
Times up to 2030 will be interesting. New technologies that are spurring a plausible wide-ranging paradigm shift will be in the stage of adolescence with all the aches associated with it. Social change will not be well defined and it will be sporadic, if at all. In addition, the economy, especially when dealing with banks, will continue to be beyond any doubt global; if left on its own, short-term profit and further domination by the wealthy is all we can hope for.
Why be Optimistic
Doomsayers say that only a cataclysmic population reduction would make a difference in getting rid of climate change and preventing water scarcity or land shortages over the next decades. There are almost 7 billion of us now and we expect more. To reduce the impact of these problems in the short term there will be a need for miraculous improvements in technology and changes in lifestyle.
Technological and engineering miracles can happen when three factors are present: readily available technology, money to support that technology, and energy to run it. Political and social will must also be present, but money regularly buys that too.
The world needs techno miracles. It has always needed them and sometimes they do happen. Nobody will deny that the industrial, communications and transport systems that exist today are a miracle and that they do work. You use your cell phone to call a Blackberry or a land phone without even thinking about it, take a plane to a place 10,000 miles away, and drive a car or a truck or store food in your fridge. All these use energy but we do not think too much about it. We have reason to believe that techno miracles will be even more plentiful in the future. There are reasons to be optimistic.
Capitalism, in its pure form at least, also works on a foundation of optimism. Imagine, would you invest your fortune in any capitalistic undertaking if you knew for sure that the end of the world was close? On the other hand, would anybody be concerned about the stock markets if they believed that the markets were doomed anyway? No, we humans are made to be optimistic about the future, otherwise we would not have children or go to work or buy goods. Not only humans; life is optimistic!
Considering that we are born optimists and that the world, its technology, humanity and life will continue to thrive during this 21st Century let us put things in perspective and try to make the best of the world and our future lives as we humans have always done. It could be close to or after 2030, but conditions will improve dramatically!
Excerpt from “The History of the 21st Century: the best that civilization has ever seen” by Humberto Contreras — for sale at amazon.com and lulu.com.