There are several powerful currents which are now conjoining and
carrying all of us along helplessly in advanced countries into a
brand-new era. How powerful they are and will become relative to one
another we can't possibly say. We can only juggle them around in our
heads individually and try to imagine what the new era might be like
in vague outline. But the currents themselves are easy to identify
(in my opinion). They are:
1. Automation continuing apace, already producing in the last 20 or
30 years a surplus in the working population of advanced countries,
mainly so far at the top and the bottom of the adult age range but
will gradually spread upwards from the school-leaver as life-time unemployment;
2. The rising power of the scientific class mainly within
transnational corporations, and a correlated diminution of
credibility of the nation-state political class which is still
overwhelmingly non-scientific despite the 300 years of industrial revolution;
3. A rising demarcation of wealth and income between what can be
called a new meta-class (at present about 20-30% of existing advanced
country populations) and the remainder for whom there's no hope given
our present dysfunctional state education systems;
4. A reduction in family size, and thus indigenous populations, of
advanced countries and, by way of the protection of jobs, a
consequent rise in anti-mass immigration protest (which the political
class is only just waking up to);
5. Increasing urbanization of the masses and a corresponding
diminution in the daily time, space or energy able to be devoted to
new consumer goods (if indeed any uniquely new ones exist any longer);
6. Innovation will increasingly switch from consumer goods to
production and delivery systems. The present composition of GDP
inputs (70% and 30% respectively) is likely to reverse within the
next 50 years; the increase in the standard of living of countries,
regions, cities, localities in the longer-term future will be better
described in terms of the increasing energy efficiency of the
necessary work to sustain them in their varied leisure pursuits
rather than in monetary terms as now measured.
7. Many policies and functions are decreasingly carried out by
nation-states and increasingly by specialized lateral transnational
agencies; the remaining basic functions (e.g. civil protection) will
be increasingly carried out by re-shaped and re-sized governances.
Some sort of picture emerges in my mind and, maybe, one might have
arisen in yours (or you may well dispute some of my projections!).
Meanwhile, and quite separately from the above trends, we'll all have
to experience what is likely to be a catastrophic breakdown in our
present world currency system when governments finally realize that
they can't get out of trouble any longer by printing more banknotes
or inventing more varieties of pseudo currencies (e.g. special
drawing rights [SDRs], troubled asset relief programs (TARPs),
quantitative easing [QE] -- and the most risible one of them all so
far, the European financial stability facility [EFSF] which, it
seems, has died a death before it was able to be born!).
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/11/
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