I don't think I have any strong objections to your list here, but I
will add that a strong component sculpting our future is very likely to
be a sharp rise in transportation costs, particularly for long distance
bulk shipments, so both resources and commodities are going to either
be local or expensive. I wonder, with the advance of computer driven
"micro-managed" custom design, whether the result will be not a return
to distributed industrial age style factories, but rather more local
smaller, largely automated manufactories which create individually
specified items, rather than mass produced identical ones. And of
course, along with this must come more locally produced energy and
food, both necessities which I expect will require a fairly large
footprint on the local real estate, to the point where we may see them
clashing over access to terrain.
-Pete
On Sat, 19 Nov 2011, Keith Hudson wrote:
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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