A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (13 page)

Among the other Eleven, South Korea will become one of Asia’s leading powers. Its per capita GDP should double between the present and 2025: it will be the new economic and cultural model, and will impress the world with its technologies and cultural energy. The Korean model will be increasingly studied in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even Japan as the success story to emulate, rather than the American model. The life span of Korea’s success story will depend on its ability to forge a pathway between two catastrophic scenarios: first, a reunification process brought about by the sudden collapse of the North Korean government; and second, military (and perhaps nuclear) escalation provoked by the inability of the North Korean regime to face its problems squarely — which would obliterate more than fifty years of the South’s economic miracle.

By 2025, Vietnam will have more than 125 million inhabitants. If it succeeds in reforming its political, banking, and education systems, if it manages to build highway infrastructures and fight corruption, it will become Asia’s third-ranking economy. In any event, it will certainly be a major actor and a magnet for foreign investors.

Indonesia will suffer from virtually insoluble problems: corruption, the weakness of its educational system,
serious ethnic tensions among its hundred nationalities. If it manages to surmount them (which appears unlikely), it will become a great world economic power — and most assuredly in the Islamic world — for by 2025 it will have 280 million inhabitants. It possesses an abundance of natural wealth to help the process along (oil, gas, gold, silver, nickel, copper, bauxite). The likeliest outlook is that, as with China and India, growth will not be enough in the long term to calm the archipelago’s separatist claims. Indonesia, like China, India, and so many others, may later break up into a score of smaller entities. We shall be returning to this.

Russia could rediscover a better demographic equilibrium and use a part of its oil income to foster its development. In 2008 it became the world’s leading producer of black gold, outstripping Saudi Arabia (producing almost ten billion barrels per day, some 10–12 percent greater than Saudi Arabia), and its leading titanium producer. In 2025 its GDP should overtake those of Italy and France. Thanks to the cash reserves piled up from petroleum sales, it will have the means to purchase Western Europe’s industry, which would cost it less than modernizing its own factories. Petroleum will continue to supply half its fiscal revenues. Like the other Eleven, it will have to put in place an urban infrastructure, a judicial framework protecting private and intellectual property, a modern banking system, and above all an improved health system. Russian life expectancy (which by 2008 had shrunk to fifty-nine years for men and seventy-two for women) will begin to rise again. In 2025 its population should stabilize at around 120
million, as against 142 million today. As we shall later see, Russia will also have to face new threats — Muslims from the south, Chinese from the east.

In Latin America, two powers will stand out in about 2025. With 125 million inhabitants, Mexico could achieve a GDP surpassing that of France. But the country will experience difficulties in avoiding unchecked growth in its cities, and in putting an end to very serious pollution and extreme disparities among its social classes and ethnic groups. Anti-American political revolts might hamper its growth and could even threaten its alliance with the United States. Brazil (with 229 million inhabitants by 2025) could then become the world’s fourth-ranking economic power, behind the United States, China, and India, and ahead of Japan. Most important, it will become one of the giants of agriculture and agrobusiness. If we extend current trends (which, we should remember, give a very hazy idea even of the immediate future), its GDP will surpass Italy’s by 2025, and then those of France, Great Britain, and Germany. To succeed in this, Brazil too will have to overcome challenges that today seem almost insoluble. It must install an urban infrastructure, build a solid and effective state, fight corruption, improve its education system, reform its obsolete public sector, and develop its export industry.

Unlike the other continents, Africa will probably fail to generate broad middle classes, although it may still experience very strong economic growth — largely balanced by even stronger population growth. In 2025 the continent will have more than 1.4 billion inhabitants.
Nigeria, Congo, and Ethiopia will by then have joined the ranks of the world’s most densely populated countries. Even though Africa’s soil contains 80 percent of the world’s platinum and 40 percent of its diamonds, even though Africa’s forests overshadow unexploited resources and tourist wealth, even though China, India, and other countries (in search of the raw materials they need) go there to build low-cost infrastructures, the African continent will still fail to become an economic player of global importance. There are many reasons for this. The climate hampers the organization of labor; climatic upheavals (we will return to them) will lead to a 20 percent reduction of harvests in semiarid zones and the destruction of exploitable lands in humid regions, so that in 2025 Africa will be able to feed only 40 percent of its population. Its active population, decimated over the centuries by the slave trade and today by AIDS and other pandemics, will remain insufficiently trained. Once again, the elites will emigrate. Most African countries continue to be ravaged by political disorder, corruption, and acts of violence. Many “artificial” countries patched together during the colonial era, such as Nigeria and Congo, will teeter on the verge of explosion. In 2025, the continent will still have a per capita income below a quarter of the world average. Half of all Africans will go on struggling to survive with an income below the poverty threshold; the figures for malnourished children could climb as high as forty-one million. Only a handful of African countries will rise above this fate: South Africa (with a per capita GDP which will be higher than that of Russia), Egypt, Botswana, and
perhaps Ghana. The other African countries will be threatened by blow-up — yet fragmented, they will be at risk of becoming nonstates.

And finally, the Arab world’s share of world GDP will increase, but lethargically, with population increase counterbalancing that of productivity. In the absence of political stability, of a legislative framework, of separation of the religious and the secular, of implementation of the laws on men’s and women’s rights, the Arab per capita GDP will not rise as fast as that of the rest of the world — except in the northwestern Maghreb. There, the probable reconciliation of Algeria and Morocco will create the right conditions for a common market with the countries on the southwestern shores of the Mediterranean, and very promising cooperation with the countries of southern Europe. Next door, Turkey and Iran will be on the way to becoming major powers.

In all, this enduring world growth — the longest-lasting and the highest in the history of humanity — will go hand in hand with a tremendous acceleration in the implementation of globalization and the merchandising of time.

People’s time will be increasingly expended on commercial activities, which will replace services, whether gratis, voluntary, or forced. Agriculture will be increasingly industrialized; it will send hundreds of millions of workers toward the cities. World industry will be increasingly global, with borders ever more open to capital
flows and goods. More and more easily, factories will migrate to wherever the overall cost of labor is lowest, in other words to East Asia and then India. The most sophisticated services and research centers, and the headquarters of the biggest corporations, will move into countries of the southern hemisphere where English is (and will remain) one of the national languages. In every local market, corporations will offer no more than the market studies necessary for the commercialization of their products as well as post-sale services.

Innovations will multiply with increasing swiftness. The cycle from creation to production and commercialization of food products and clothing will shrink from a month to four days; for automobiles and household products, already reduced from five to two years, it will soon be six months; for medicines it will fall from seven to four years. The life span of commercial brands will also be shorter and shorter; only the best ensconced and the best known globally will resist this lure of the new. The life span of buildings and houses will also be shorter. Shareholders in the big corporations will themselves be increasingly volatile, capricious, disloyal, and indifferent to the long-term needs of the businesses in which they invest, caring only for the immediate benefits they hope to receive in return. Bankers will insist that businesses reveal their accounts at ever closer intervals. Corporate leaders will be increasingly judged on short-term criteria, and will only keep their jobs for as long as they respond to a versatile market. Competition among workers, both in the workplace and in the search for work, will be increasingly harsh. Even more than today, knowledge (under permanent challenge from innovations) will be a major player. Early training will remain essential: everyone will have to retrain
himself in order to stay employable. The long-term decline of birth rates and continued rise of life expectancy will lead to a shorter work year but a longer working life span. Retirement age will rise to seventy for all those whose work is neither arduous nor harmful to themselves or others. The oldest will serve as tutors, communicators, or consultants. The “wellness” industry will become a major enterprise.

It will become harder and harder to discern any difference between work, consumption, transport, entertainment, and training. Consumers will play an expanding part in conceiving products increasingly made to measure and available just in time. Consumers in the core and the “middle” will remain deeply indebted without — as Tocqueville thought long ago — feeling any more burdened by their debt than by a self-imposed limit on the consumption frenzy. Consumers will remain the masters and their interests will outweigh those of workers.

More than half of all workers will change their residence every five years, and they will change employers even more frequently. City dwellers in the northern hemisphere will finance their principal residence more and more through easily transferable mortgage credits.

More and more, city dwellers will live far from the centers: a household living within the city in 2008 will live eight miles from the center ten years later — and twenty-five miles farther out in 2025. New professions will surface to structure the logistics of this nomadic trend.

The ninth form will also go on creating the conditions for increasingly solitary urban living in smaller and smaller apartments, with increasingly fleeting sexual or
romantic partners. Fear of being tied, flight from lasting attachments, and obvious indifference will become (are already becoming) forms of seduction. Apologia for the individual, the body, and independence.

Individualism will make absolute values of the ego, the self. Eroticism will become an openly sought field of knowledge. Apart from incest, pedophilia, and sodomy, the most diverse forms of sexuality will be increasingly tolerated. Nomadic ubiquity and virtual communities will create new opportunities for encounters, paid or not.

The secondary residence, inherited from previous generations, will become the principal habitat, the only fixed point for city dwellers. Tourism will evolve into a quest for silence and solitude; sites (religious or secular) for meditation, isolation, retreat, or inaction will proliferate. The sedentary lifestyle will be the last privilege enjoyed by children. They will often live with their grandparents while their parents — more and more likely to be separated — will take turns spending time with them.

Transportation will require increasing time; it will become a place for life, encounters, work, shopping, and entertainment. The time spent on commuting will be counted as working time, the way night and Sunday work have become universally accepted. Travel will turn into a major component of university and professional education; people will constantly have to demonstrate aptness for traveling in order to stay employable. Every European city with more than a million inhabitants will be connected through a continent-wide network of
high-speed trains. More than two billion passengers, most of them business tourists, will fly every year; air taxis will enjoy massive patronage; at any moment, more than ten million people will be in the air. Pilotless city vehicles (much less costly than those now in use), made of lightweight materials, energy-efficient and biodegradable, will be the collective property of subscribers who will turn them over to others after each use.

New property legislation will emerge. It will give access (in every new place of residence) to housing of predetermined quality and size, and detached from a concrete site. In particular, the dematerialization of information will make it easier to move from ownership of data to its use, giving access to culture, education, and information. Verification of intellectual property rights will also be increasingly difficult to guarantee.

In every consumer sector, very low-cost products will be put in circulation. They will admit the poorest people of every country into the market economy, and will allow the middle classes to devote a shrinking part of their income to the purchase of food products, computers, cars, clothing, and household equipment.

The bulk of middle- and upper-class income will be used for the purchase of services such as education, health, and security. To finance them, the share of taxable income will increase, in the form of taxes and contributions. More and more people will opt for entrusting their risk coverage to private insurance companies, which — to the detriment of nation-states — are growing ever more powerful. Commercial, digital, and financial exchanges will increasingly take place beyond the reach of states — thus depriving them of a significant
slice of their tax revenue. Public administration will be overturned by the use of new methods of communication (particularly of the Internet), which will permit the running of public services at lower cost and with immediate results.