Outlook 2013

INTRODUCTION

Human actions could become more accurately predictable, thanks to neuroscience. Nano-sized robots will deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to their targets. And though many recently lost jobs may never come back, people will find plenty to do (and get paid for) in the future.

These are just a few of the forecasts you’ll find in this latest edition of Outlook, a roundup of the most thought-provoking possibilities and ideas published in THE FUTURIST magazine over the past year.

The forecasts collected in the World Future Society’s annual Outlook reports are not intended to predict the future, but rather to provoke thought and inspire action for building a better future today.

The opinions and ideas expressed are those of their authors or sources cited and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Future Society. For more information, please refer to the original articles cited. Back issues of THE FUTURIST may be purchased at www.wfs.org/backissues.

Your feedback is welcome! Please e-mail your comments to letters@wfs.org.

—THE EDITORS

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

Many recently lost jobs may never come back, but there’s still a future for work. The economy may become increasingly jobless. Rather than worry about unemployment, tomorrow’s workers will focus on developing a variety of skills that could keep them working productively and continuously, whether they have jobs or not. It’ll be about finding out what other people need done, and doing it. —James H. Lee, “Hard at Work in the Jobless Future,” Mar-Apr 2012, pp. 32-33

Corporate reputation ratings will be even more transparent with augmented reality. In a “Rateocracy,” where organizations’ reputations are quantified, data could be included in geographically based information systems. You might choose one restaurant over another when your mobile augmented-reality app flashes warnings about health-department citations or poor customer reviews. —Robert Moran, “‘Rateocracy’ and Corporate Reputation,” World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, p. 12

Virtual games could accelerate real economic growth. Games played on mobile devices are increasingly enticing players with discounts, coupons, and other real-world rewards. As players use their phones to pay for the games and make purchases, bypassing credit cards, bank accounts, and cash, the so-called virtual economy could grow from $3 billion in 2009 to $300 billion in the next 10 years, predicts Kiip co-founder Brian Wong. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 6

Money and even cash will still exist by 2100. Money will increasingly move to digital forms for legitimate transactions, but cash will still be the lifeblood of the black-market economy. Society will likely embrace barter, at least at the peer-to-peer level, but public services such as defense and justice will still be supported via taxes. —Stephen Aguilar-Millan, “Will We Still Have Money in 2100?” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 43

India will become a hotbed of “invisible innovation.” Rather than focusing on tangible consumer products like the iPad, innovators in India emphasize processes that improve efficiency. Future success will depend on modernizing the nation’s university system as well as its intellectual property laws. —Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam, authors of India Inside, reviewed by Rick Docksai, May-June 2012, p. 54

Upscale opportunities in resource recovery will abound. Going beyond using post-consumer waste to make more stuff—often of inferior quality—upcycling is about harvesting resources to make new products of higher commercial value. For example, the social enterprise Back to the Roots company sells kits that allow people to use recycled coffee grounds for growing gourmet mushrooms. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-Aug 2012, p. 2

Sex workers in developed countries will become more responsible for their own branding. With more technologies available to them to work as independent entrepreneurs, sex workers will adopt retailing trends like collective discounts, online reviews, and strategic partnerships. By 2030, mainstream companies will increasingly invest in pornography (such as purchasing product placements) and even sponsor sex workers. —Emily Empel, “The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry,” May-June 2012, p. 39

Career “paths” will become patchwork pieces. Baby boomers’ future career trajectories will more resemble a lattice than a ladder, with more lateral moves on the way up. For younger generations, it will be more of a patchwork quilt: multiple jobs stitched together to form a more flexible work environment. —James H. Lee, “Hard at Work in the Jobless Future,” Mar-Apr 2012, p. 35

Shake-ups in the “C Suite”: New corporate leaders with new skills are on the way. Corporate futures will be shaped by leaders adept in social networking, content management, data mining, and data meaning. Look for such job titles as Earned Media Officer, Chief Content Officer, Open-Source Manager, Chief Linguist, and Chief Data Scientist. —Geoffrey Colon, “Shakeups in the ‘C Suite’: Hail to the New Chiefs,” World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 6-7

ENERGY

Subways, trains, and diesel trucks will become future sources of energy, not just consumers. Since most of the stored energy that vehicles use is wasted as heat spilling out from tailpipes, engineers at BMW, Ford, GM, and other manufacturers are seeking systems to recover thermal energy. For example, a system under development at Dynalloy Inc. would recover heat from a car’s exhaust system, generating enough power to run the car’s audio or air-conditioning systems. Trains would generate even more recoverable waste energy, since they are operated continuously. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 7-8

Future cars may become producers of power rather than merely consumers. A scheme envisioned at the Technology University of Delft would use fuel cells of parked electric vehicles to convert biogas or hydrogen into more electricity. And the owners would be paid for the energy their vehicles produce. —Tomorrow in Brief, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 2

Noise vibrations and other “junk” energy will be harvested from the environment. Researchers at Georgia Tech are developing techniques for converting ambient microwave energy into DC power, which could be used for small devices like wireless sensors. And University of Buffalo physicist Surajit Sen is studying ways to use vibrations produced on roads and airport runways as energy sources. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 9

Buckypaper—a smart, superlight material—will increase energy efficiency. Industrial-grade carbon nanotubes are becoming more affordable. One promising use is Buckypaper, which appears flimsy but is 100 times stronger than steel per unit of weight. It can conduct electricity like copper and disperse heat like steel or brass. —Tsvi Bisk, “Unlimiting Energy’s Growth,” May-June 2012, p. 31

Forecasts for bioenergy in the United States may be overly optimistic. As a potential alternative source of energy to help the United States reduce its dependence on foreign oil, biofuels have not met proponents’ high expectations, says the American Chemical Society. One problem is land availability: To meet the goals of the 2007 Energy Independence & Security Act, 80% of current agricultural land would have to be directed toward biofuels. Another barrier is the uncertainty about oil prices, which inhibits biofuel investors. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 9-10

Alternative energies won’t be enough to solve the world’s energy woes. Alternatives to alternatives are needed. Heavy investment into solar energy, wind energy, and other renewable systems may actually set us back, since these strategies draw resources away from others that might work better, warns University of California–Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner. A more practical approach may be to design communities that enable people to live well while using less. —Books in Brief [review of Green Illusions by Ozzie Zehner], July-Aug 2012, p. 53

ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES

The next great wave of species extinctions may be in the oceans. By 2050, the scale of extinctions of ocean-dwelling plants and animals may equal the five great global extinctions of the past 600 million years, warns the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. Reasons: a “deadly triad” of pollution, overfishing, and climate change impacting the world’s ocean habitats. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 36

“Peak water” may become as big a problem as peak oil. As water tables around the world become depleted, and as growing populations demand more water for personal as well as agricultural use, supplies of sustainably managed water will continue to fall. The consequences could be dire for human health, as water-related diseases proliferate. —Jerome C. Glenn, “Updating the Global Scorecard: The 2011 State of the Future,” Nov-Dec 2011, p. 27

Gadget-happy societies may become more environmentally friendly. The consumer-electronics industries in the United States are building more drop-off sites for customers to recycle outdated devices. Recycling increased by 53% from 2010 to 2011, netting 400 million pounds of gadgets. The Consumer Electronics Association’s goal is to recover 1 billion pounds of electronics by 2016. —Future Scope, July-Aug 2012, p. 4

Extinctions are outpacing scientists’ ability to discover new species. New tools enable both professional and amateur taxonomists to identify new species and share discoveries around the world. About 2 million species of plants, animals, fungi, and other life forms have been identified, and there could be another 10 million awaiting discovery. But human encroachment is increasing in species-rich locales such as the tropics, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea, threatening to kill off species before they can be discovered, warns botanist Peter H. Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden. He estimates that 30% of Earth’s species will be extinct by the end of the century, due to climate change and habitat loss. —World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 8

Water pollution from pesticide runoff will likely increase. As climate change alters the activity and spread of pests, more farmers in Europe will turn to pesticides to keep their croplands productive. The result may be a doubling of pesticide use by 2090 over the 1990 average, and streams in as much as 40% of Europe’s land mass will suffer increased insecticide pollution, warns the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, p. 13

By 2100, humans will have become managers of the natural environment. As climate change and population growth claim the planet’s remaining “wild places,” mankind will learn to manage the natural world as a global garden. Species and even microscopic habitats will be monitored and protected via tiny sensors, and managed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. —Brenda Cooper, “Where the Wild Things Are Not,” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 37

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

An aquaponic recycling system in every kitchen? Future “farmers” may consist of householders recycling their food waste in their own aquariums. An aquaponic system being developed by SUNY ecological engineers would use leftover foods to feed a tank of tilapia or other fish, and then the fish waste would be used for growing vegetables. The goal is to reduce food waste and lower the cost of raising fish. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 2

Genetic modification could yield healthier, more flavorful, and longer-lasting food, thus reducing waste and hunger. Vitamin A–fortified golden rice could help prevent blindness among children in developing countries, but it has not yet been approved. Such “Frankenfood” must first overcome opposition from fearful consumers (and from anti-GMO opponents like the $20-billion organic food industry). —Josh Schonwald, “Engineering the Future of Food,” May-June 2012, p. 27

Genetically engineered animals will become a major part of agriculture, but not soon. In the future, creating livestock that grows faster, consumes less feed, produces less waste, and yields leaner, healthier meat may seem a less “extreme” approach to meeting humanity’s food requirements than it does today. Meat production may even bypass animals, if public opinion shifts to favor lab-grown food as a more ethical approach. —Jeffrey Scott Coker, “Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 26

Demands to decrease pesticides and other chemicals on farms could exacerbate food shortages. However, lower crop yields could be compensated for by wasting less food, says environmental researcher Matthias Liess. About a third of all the food the world produces each year is either thrown out or lost in storage, transit, processing, or packing, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, p. 14

China’s growing appetite for meat will strain global grain supplies. China now consumes 71 million tons of meat a year, about twice as much as the United States and more than a fourth of all the meat produced worldwide, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Increased meat production also increases demand for corn and soybeans used for livestock feed. Supplies of these grains are already seeing strain as energy and other sectors compete with food producers. —Future Scope, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 4

HABITATS

By 2025, there will be 27 megacities around the world, each with populations exceeding 10 million. The “real population bomb” isn’t the sheer number of world population, but the relentless urbanization in places unprepared for this growth. Megacities in northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Indonesia, where poverty is already severe, will face more environmental pollution and become havens for terrorism and crime, warn defense experts P. H. Liotta and James F. Miskel. —Books in Brief [review of The Real Population Bomb by P. H. Liotta and James F. Miskel], July-Aug 2012, p. 55

By 2100, 70% of the world’s 10 billion inhabitants will live in cities. As rural residents move to far-more-complex urban habitats, many will struggle to cope with new institutions and new rules and attitudes. Slums will serve as catalysts for facilitating this psychosocial transition, enabling newcomers to adapt successfully. Instead of “solving” the slum problem, nongovernmental organizations will work to facilitate life with wireless service, educational programs, and “off-grid” power, water, health care, and sanitation services. —Eric Meade, “Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication,” Sep-Oct 2012, pp. 43-44.

Knowmads may drive growth in micro-urban areas. As telecommuting enables more knowledge workers to work and live anywhere they choose, places with big-city amenities and a small-town feel could have growing appeal. Look for micro-urban booms in places like Fargo, Syracuse, Iowa City, and Roanoke. —Future Scope, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 4

A “green” housing boom is under way. U.S. home buyers are increasingly demanding energy efficiency and the use of sustainable materials both in new homes and in remodeling projects. “Green homes” will grow from 17% of the residential construction market in 2011 to 38% by 2016, with a fivefold increase in revenues, according to the National Association of Home Builders. —Future Scope, May-June 2012, p. 4

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Drug-delivering nanorobots built from DNA could be approved for use in humans within 20 years. Medical nanorobots that carry molecule-sized payloads and can detect and attack cancer are being developed by Shawn Douglas and researchers at Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The bots are like complex pieces of fabric, with hundreds of DNA pieces wrapped around a scaffold. When the bot encounters a protein indicating cancer, the nanostructure unlocks itself to release a cancer-fighting antigen. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, pp. 15-16

Robots may become gentler caregivers. Lifting and transferring frail patients may be easier for robots than for human caregivers, but their strong arms typically lack sensitivity. Japanese researchers are improving the functionality of the RIBA II (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance), lining its arms and chest with sensors so it lift its patients more gently. —Tomorrow in Brief, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 2

Humans could one day reach longevity “escape velocity.” Continuous rejuvenation therapy that focuses on repairing cell damage before it accumulates, causing pathologies, may one day allow people to live for a thousand years. As these technologies continue to improve, each new round of rejuvenation therapy will improve upon the previous treatments, and we will stay young indefinitely. —Aubrey de Grey, “A Thousand Years Young,” May-June 2012, pp. 21-23

Full-body firewalls will be necessary to prevent hackers from tampering with your implants. Wireless medical devices designed to manage and monitor drug-delivery systems and other implants are vulnerable to interference. Researchers at Purdue and Princeton universities are developing a medical monitor (MedMon) designed to identify potentially malicious activity. —Tomorrow in Brief, July-Aug 2012, p. 2

Cancer survivorship may strain future health-care systems. More people are beating cancer and surviving longer and healthier—that’s the good news. The bad news is that elderly cancer survivors will still need more medical services. In the United States, the aging population is growing while the number of oncologists and geriatric specialists is declining. —Future Scope, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 4

Smart helmets will rapidly detect brain injuries. Contact sports will become smarter and less dangerous, thanks to helmets that detect concussions. By 2015, high-school football players could be wearing smart helmets that rapidly detect abnormalities in users’ brain-wave activity. The EEG-reading helmets, under development by Villanova University engineering professor Hashem Ashrafiuon and others, would alert medics on the sidelines if there are signs of concussion. —World Trends & Forecasts, July-Aug 2012, pp. 12-13

Better health, but fewer doctors. A projected shortage of more than 90,000 doctors by 2020 will drive technological innovations such as low-cost, point-of-care diagnostics—i.e., Lab-on-a-Chip technologies. A cell-phone-sized device could analyze your blood or sputum while you talk to a health provider from the comfort of your home. —Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, “The Abundance Builders,” July-Aug 2012, p. 17

Boys will enter their at-risk years earlier than ever. The age of male sexual maturity has been slowly decreasing since the mid-1700s (2.5 months per decade), thanks to changes in nutrition and environmental factors. A similar trend has already been observed among girls. While the “high-risk” adolescent years have been stretched for boys, the dangers may be offset by parents who tend to supervise children more closely when they’re younger. —Future Scope, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 4

New approaches to treating alcohol addiction could let alcoholics drink moderately. Abstinence is not always feasible or necessary in treating substance abuse, say researchers at UCLA’s Scripps Research Institute. A chemical treatment approach targeting peptides in the part of the brain that regulates moods and emotions could reduce alcoholics’ anxiety and the urge to drink. —World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2012, pp. 6-8

Disease detection may soon be but a breath away. A Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer under development at Stony Brook University would use sensor chips coated with nanowires to detect chemical compounds that may indicate the presence of diseases or infectious microbes. In the future, a handheld device could let you detect a range of risks, from lung cancer to anthrax exposure. —Tomorrow in Brief, Sep-Oct 2012, p. 2

INFORMATION SOCIETY

The future Internet could connect the world at the neural level. Advances in neurotechnology will make it possible for us to link our minds, share our emotional experiences, and even feel changes in the collective state of mind. This “telempathy” would, for instance, enable leaders to gauge public anxiety during a catastrophe. —Michael Chorost, “A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy,” Mar-Apr 2012, p. 22

Legal-expert systems will make laws easier for laypersons to understand. “Conversational law” will incorporate statutes, interpretations, precedents, and other elements of the law; the system will query users about their particular situation and provide clear answers on how the law applies. Lawyers may reduce their billable hours but earn income developing specialized legal-expert systems. —David R. Johnson, “Serving Justice with Conversational Law,” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 21

Minority languages will disappear with minority populations. Of the 6,900 languages spoken today, more than half face extinction in the next 100 years. Reason: 95% of the world’s population speak one of just 400 languages, and the remaining 5% of languages are scattered among fewer and fewer speakers. —Lawrence Baines, “A World of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language,” Mar-Apr 2012, p. 43

Mobile phones may contribute to political reform in Africa. Web-accessible mobile devices have proliferated in Africa, where text messaging and social networking are giving low-income residents more opportunities to watch their governments. Increased transparency and accountability, such as improving public access to spending on expensive infrastructure projects, could help reduce corruption and poverty, says Matthias Mordi, executive director of Accender Africa. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 6

The last newspaper and book will have been printed in 2020. Information formerly contained by print products will be rented by users rather than owned, and will be accessed from the cloud via 3-D mobile media. —Marcel Bullinga, “Welcome to the Future Cloud: Five Bets for 2025,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 64

Tablet PCs, netbooks, and laptops will be extinct by 2022. Instead of relying on hardware, workplaces will become ubiquitous computing environments, where everything around you (door knob, coffee pot, window) has connectivity and computing capabilities. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 30

Communication will become increasingly image-driven. Thanks both to the proliferation of video and to smaller screens for computing and communication devices, graphics and images will be more heavily relied on for ordinary communication. This will foster faster comprehension and possibly stimulate new ways of thinking, but at the cost of eloquence and precision. —Lawrence Baines, “A World of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 46

By 2020, data will have a life of its own. Algorithms will talk to other algorithms, things will connect with millions of other things, and sensors will gather even more data, processed by more computers, all scarcely discernible to humans. But data may be becoming too big, and we need to learn how to channel the power of data into making the lives of everyone on the planet better. —Brian David Johnson, “The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020,” July-Aug 2012, pp. 21-23

The “cloud” will become more intelligent, not just a place to store data. Cloud intelligence will evolve into becoming an active resource in our daily lives, providing analysis and contextual advice. Virtual agents could, for example, design your family’s weekly menu based on everyone’s health profiles, fitness goals, and taste preferences. —Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth, “From Smart House to Networked Home,” July-Aug 2012, p. 30

Online pornography will become more graphic and more pervasive. As with any stimulant, pornographic imagery must become more intensive as users become less sensitive to its effects. One result will be the creation of an entire generation of young men so desensitized by pornography that they are unexcited by normal sexual encounters. —Roger Howard, “Anticipating an ‘Anything Goes’ World of Online Porn,” May-June 2012, p. 42

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Neuroscientists may soon be able to predict what you’ll do before you do it. The intention to do something, such as grasp a cup, produces blood flow to specific areas of the brain, so studying blood-flow patterns through neuroimaging could give researchers a better idea of what people have in mind. One potential application is improved prosthetic devices that respond to signals from the brain more like actual limbs do. —World Trends & Forecasts, Jan-Feb 2012, p. 10

The next space age will launch after 2020, driven by competition and “adventure capitalists.” While the U.S. space shuttle program is put to rest, entrepreneurs are planning commercial launches to access low-Earth orbit and to ferry passengers to transcontinental destinations within hours. Challenges include perfecting new technologies, developing global operations, building new infrastructure, and gaining regulatory approval. —Joseph N. Pelton, “The New Age of Space Business,” Sep-Oct 2012, p. 17

Algae could provide the molecular machinery to create ultra-low-cost fuels. Pioneering genome sequencer J. Craig Venter aims to create synthetic life derived from algae, which would be run through a DNA sequencing machine and used to design future cheap biofuels. The technology could also create highly productive food crops, high-performing vaccines, and more. —Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, “The Abundance Builders,” July-Aug 2012, p. 15

Electron-level data-storage capacity could be achieved in just over 120 years. One of the eight “grand challenges” proposed by the DaVinci Institute is an electron-based storage system that could be manufactured for less than $1 per 100 terabytes. With Moore’s law on our side, we could reach this goal in the year 2133, according to University of Colorado–Boulder neurobiology professor Mark Dubin. —Thomas Frey, “Eight Grand Challenges for Human Advancement,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 18

Coming soon to sports arenas: the Enhanced Games! Genetically enhanced athletes are nothing new, but rather than leaving the enhancements to luck, future technologies will enable more competitors to choose the alterations that will improve their performance. Officially sanctioned enhanced athletes will thus still compete on a level playing field. —Jeffrey Scott Coker, “Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 27

Genetic engineering could make us superheroes. While we may not become Batman, we may one day find it useful to incorporate specific animals’ traits (such as bats’ sonar-based “vision,” perhaps). —Jeffrey Scott Coker, “Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 27

The dream of “Smell-O-Vision” may soon come true. An odor-release device triggered by heat from an electrical current may one day bring scents into virtual-reality experiences, video games, and other applications. One potential use for such telesmell devices would be for alarm systems, perhaps scaring burglars away with skunk scents, according to engineering professor Sungho Jin of the University of California, San Diego. —World Trends & Forecasts, Nov-Dec 2011, p. 8

Robotic pack mules will lighten the load for human soldiers on the battlefield. Toting 100 pounds or more of gear can be a major impairment for troops. Robotic pack mules under development at DARPA could potentially carry 400 pounds on a 20-mile hike without refueling. —Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2012, p. 2

WORLD AFFAIRS

Soldiers will communicate via telepathic helmets by 2020. Abandoning radio transmissions, microphones, and hand signals, tomorrow’s military will rely on helmets that read and communicate soldiers’ thoughts, according to biomedical scientist Gerwin Schalk. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 30

The global Muslim population could increase from 1.6 billion to 2.2 billion (35%) by 2030. The Muslim population is growing at about twice the rate of the world’s non-Muslim population, reports the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Muslims will make up more than one-fourth (26.4%) of the world’s projected population in 2030. —“The Best Predictions of 2011,” Jan-Feb 2012, p. 32

Both China and India will experience growing pains over the next decade. India’s population, growing at twice the rate of China’s, is creating an “enviably young” workforce, reports the RAND Corporation. China is viewed as having a better educated workforce than India, suggesting that China’s GDP will continue to exceed India’s through 2025, but the aging population bodes ill for China’s longer-term security. —World Trends & Forecasts, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 12

Mandarin Chinese may gain on English’s popularity globally. On the Internet, Mandarin and English have close to the same number of users (510 million and 565 million respectively). However, the number of Mandarin users online increased 1,478% between 2000 and 2011, compared with 301% for English users. The fastest growth was among Arabic users (2,501% increase) and Russian (1,825%). —Lawrence Baines, “A World of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, Mar-Apr 2012, p. 43

Good news and bad news for 2020: The 2011 State of the Future report found reasons to both cheer and fear what global trends portend for the decade ahead.

Where We Are Winning:

• The percentage of people with access to clean water.
• Percentage of people enrolled in secondary school.
• GDP per capita.
• Infant mortality rates.
• HIV prevalence among 15- to 49-year-olds.
• Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries.

Where We Are Losing:

• Carbon-dioxide emissions.
• Global surface temperature anomalies.
• Percentage of people voting in elections.
• Levels of corruption in the 15 largest countries.
• Number of refugees per 100,000 total population.

—Jerome C. Glenn, “Updating the Global Scorecard: The 2011 State of the Future,” Nov-Dec 2011, p. 26

In Search of the Better Angels of Our Future

© Villanova University

Kenneth B. Taylor

By Kenneth B. Taylor

The ideologies that once guided us through political and economic conflicts— such as communism versus capitalism—have little relevance to cultures that face new, technologically driven conflicts over the very meaning of humanity. As we relentlessly pursue paradigm-altering technologies, we will need a new set of guidelines for understanding who we are and where we are heading.

We live at a time when striving for higher social ideals no longer guides most individual or social action. The epic battle against communism has essentially been won, and many in the West now assume that all necessary work has been done, our liberties and rights guaranteed through established rule of law.

Unfortunately, this development has stripped the human condition of transcendent sociopolitical objectives, leaving us floundering in a web of short-term economic liberalism or regressing to more primitive religious, nationalistic, or tribal perspectives. Capitalism (and, with it, materialism) reigns supreme, and as a guiding light leads us nowhere: It can tell us how best to organize our economic affairs, but not where humanity is going or what our meaning is.

We are now on the cusp of two major long-term developments transforming our world. First, during this century, human civilization will move into its climactic stage: The assumptions we make about our daily socioeconomic environment, upon which we orient our lives, will become increasingly untenable. Second, science is discovering means to amplify its mastery over the foundations of life in general and Homo sapiens in particular, signifying that we are gaining control over who we become.

What we are about to face is unprecedented, and we are woefully unprepared for the challenge. To navigate this increasingly turbulent world, we need a new ideology to guide our actions, provide meaning, and protect the achievements of modern civilization.

Approaching the Limits of Enlightenment Ideals?

Elements of a new secular ideology are all around us, yet scattered so widely that they fail to register in our collective awareness. Before outlining the features of this new ideology, it will be worthwhile to briefly investigate where we have come from and why limits are approaching.

As the Enlightenment dawned during the seventeenth century, a powerful, transformative ideology emerged that led to the Western world we now live in. It seized the human imagination, harnessed passions, and directed collective effort. It created a social movement that swept away the vestiges of monarchy embedded in the mercantilist order, giving rise to democracy and capitalism. There were numerous contributors to the associated body of thought we call the liberal tradition, cumulatively giving rise to the first secular ideology. Emphasis shifted within society to the rights of individuals, the social contract, and the common good.

Many of the principles of the liberal tradition are embodied in the ethos of progress, a summative perspective now spreading around the world. In brief, this ethos is built upon the following pillars:

• Rationally generated ideas will lead to triumph over the external world as well as inner human nature.
• All people are created equal and should be provided with equivalent opportunities within an egalitarian meritocracy under the rule of law.
• Social, individual, and material improvement is inevitable and upward.

The collective outcome for a people adhering to this ethos was forecast to be provision of lasting freedom, the greatest good for the greatest number, with justice and peace nourished in this world. Given the clear reward in one’s lifetime, as opposed to the hereafter, this social philosophy had wide appeal. It was quickly embraced, becoming the antithesis to the mercantilist thesis of the day.

Despite subsequent wars, depressions, and revolutions, all went exceptionally well on the socioeconomic front until the early twenty-first century. The Western crisis of 2008 will not mark the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning of Western civilization as we know it.

Recent developments have been germinating since the mid-twentieth century, during which time Western nations gradually backed themselves into an existential corner. It is a predicament without easy retreat for many reasons, including fiscal constraints, vested interests, political intransience, unfavorable demography, and diminishing Earth capacity.

Too many policies related to economic growth and welfare were enacted, institutionalized, and progressively expanded, with payment for current expenditures shifted onto the shoulders of future generations. This can go on only if new entrants exceed the number already involved—that is, if the labor force grows and a youthful demographic pyramid structure continues. Once the demographic pyramid inverts, it is only a matter of time before the scheme becomes unsustainable.

And so the trigger event heralding the end of Western civilization as we know it will not be the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 (and subsequent Great Recession), but rather the inversion of the demographic pyramids in the West, with the inexorable effect of pushing population growth below replacement levels. Before the year 2020, fully half of humankind will live in countries where fertility rates are at or below replacement level.

Even if politicians do find a way to engineer a safe way out of the current financial morass, the slowdown and eventual decline of national populations in the context of high public debt will negate the possibility of maintaining many social programs, or even maintaining existing public infrastructure.

Collectively, these are the reasons why surpassing the previous heights of socioeconomic success is untenable: The socioeconomic tide is turning, producing powerful undercurrents that should not be underestimated.

Riding the Waves of Technological Advancement

As population begins to shrink from this height, so, too, will economic output, with its undesirable negative externalities. The ensuing population decline will have almost as dramatic an effect pushing global GDP down as it had in pushing it up these past 250 years. However, we will never return to the standard of living of 1800 due to the cumulative effects of scientific and technological advancement.

The late business professor Julian Simon once suggested that the Earth‘s carrying capacity is unlimited. While it is mathematically impossible for Earth to accommodate an unlimited number of people, Simon based his statement on faith in human ingenuity, particularly technological progress. He believed in the “technofix” hypothesis: that technology and innovative solutions will be forthcoming, adequate, and timely in addressing major human problems.

I agree with the “forthcoming” part but have reservations about the “adequate and timely” portion of Simon’s presumptions. An important issue is that technology appears to occur in unpredictable waves. In the 1930s, Joseph Schumpeter postulated an economic growth model in which bursts of technological development cyclically set off periods of intense competition between firms for market dominance, leading to a transformation of the economic landscape. Schumpeter saw capitalism moving in long waves occurring approximately every 50 years. When a technological wave commenced, it would cause, as Schumpeter famously put it, “gales of creative destruction,” in which sunset industries would be swept away, to be replaced by sunrise industries.

From Schumpeter’s vantage point in the mid-twentieth century, the waves indeed looked to occur every 50 years or so, but today we understand that technological waves are neither regular nor predictable. We now know that, whenever they occur, each comes with a core of what we may call meta-technologies: general-purpose technologies that affect the economy widely and deeply (e.g., harnessing electricity or the computer chip).

So far, there have been five such meta-technology waves, beginning with the introduction of the steam engine and factory in the late eighteenth century. Since the early 1970s, we have been experiencing the fifth wave, centered on all the technologies and innovations emerging from the computer chip.

Each meta-technology becomes a platform for related developments. Many of these are adjacent possibilities, or innovations emerging logically from the meta-technology (e.g., computer chips make cell phones possible). Others are called “exaptations,” where an invention introduced in one field induces technological change in another field (e.g., Thomas Edison’s phonograph, meant to be an office dictating machine, becomes a medium for recording and listening to music—the record player).

We now live at the tail-end of the fifth wave with diminishing computer-chip based developments. Substantial gains to come will be concentrated in the areas of metadata analysis, material sciences, biocybernetics, and wireless telephony.

A declining pace of invention and innovation—and by association productivity—adds to the headwinds of the Western financial conundrum, making viable solutions elusive and socioeconomic pain protracted. Economist Robert Gordon recently noted that there are clear signs that a productivity slowdown is happening in the United States. Since 2004, productivity has grown at an annual rate of 1.7%, well below the 2.6% rate for the previous decade. During the two years leading into 2012, productivity fell to a 0.9% annual rate.

For the past 250 years, new technological wonders have been the backbone of progress, the cure-all for many problems, and the leavening in a rising standard of living. Might there be a sixth technology wave on the horizon to maintain this pattern? Maybe, but its nature will be uniquely transformative and a major reason a new secular ideology is necessary.

Transformational Technologies Ahead

Whether intentionally or not, humans have irrevocably changed the path of evolution on Earth by altering the planet’s biosphere and habitats by deliberately breeding animals and hybridizing plants to suit our needs and by inadvertently reducing biodiversity. This evolutionary trend will accelerate this century in a new direction through genetic, biocybernetic, neurological, nanotechnological, and pharmacological engineering of the human being.

The panoply of research agendas across these fields is so staggering in scope that their collective implication has not yet risen to social awareness. While science to date has been concerned with transforming things in our external environment, it now is developing potent tools to transform the human being itself.

A cursory introduction to what is happening in a couple of these fields will help set the stage for understanding how their effects will enter into mainstream consciousness and eventually demand a new way of thinking.

Controlling and eliminating genetic diseases by somatic gene therapy, and augmenting physically handicapped humans through biocybernetics, are capabilities that are rapidly coming on the scene, for these are relatively uncontroversial technologies. Cybernetic science has a long history and is essentially an interdisciplinary area of science concerned with the structure and function of regulatory systems.

Biocybernetics is the field where cybernetic theory is applied within biological systems; it has several subfields, including neurocybernetics, molecular cybernetics, cellular cybernetics, and evolutionary cybernetics. Developments in smart-system technology, information technology, neuroscience, and nanotechnology are converging in biocybernetics, causing acceleration in medical advances from drug delivery to sophisticated and more-varied prostheses.

Genetic testing has received more media attention than biocybernetics in recent years. Medical professionals now have more than 1,300 gene tests at their disposal to check for such diseases as cystic fibrosis and hemophilia. Along the way, scientists are discovering and exploring new dimensions of the human genome related to human physical and mental attributes.

As with somatic gene therapies and testing, early applications of biocybernetics have stirred little controversy. For instance, who objects if biocybernetics produces a “smart” prosthesis to permit a disabled veteran to walk with a strong, normal gait or to have a more agile arm with dexterous fingers with which to hold his child? The lack of major controversy with cybernetic enhancements or somatic gene therapies is due to the fact that neither alters the human germline.

Continuing developments in these fields will provide additional opportunities for personal enhancement and, in time, will pass ethical boundaries into stormy controversy. The most provocative scientific trend that is well under way is germline gene therapy. This vein of research seeks to transform the genetic structure of sperm and egg cells toward some goal—such as eliminating genes for disease by inserting new ones for better health or higher intelligence—with the consequence being that the engineered gene sequence will be passed on to future generations.

Germline gene therapies will create new and improved people. Without a doubt, developments in this field will ignite an ethical firestorm that we are unprepared to deal with. (For simplicity, we will refer to all of these scientific fields as bioengineering.)

Science these past three centuries has not only transformed our world, but it has also provided us with the means to improve our individual lives and extend personal power. Whenever you get a flu shot, you become biologically enhanced. Whenever you put on a pair of glasses, you become technologically enhanced.

We enthusiastically embrace enhancements if they protect us from disease or permit us to see so that we can carry on the business of life. We want these treatments or things because they enable us to more freely pursue the range of needs along Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy; they permit us to live more productive, stable, and fulfilled lives. There is little doubt that the majority of people will demand the life-enhancing products and procedures growing out of bioengineering.

Technology, Transformation, Ideals, and Ideology

Democracy is founded upon the inalienable rights of the individual, meaning that people should determine what is best for them, not the state. All who are alive today have grown up with astounding scientific enhancements, are comfortable with new technology, and are legally protected to deploy new treatments and products, within broad limits, that enhance their pursuit of happiness. Liberty—the beating heart of democracy—resonates with human nature and will not be denied.

Since we are about to take dramatic control over our own evolution, it is best to have a relevant, encompassing ideology to guide this emergent transformation. Such an ideology must harmonize with the implications of the demographic and socioeconomic shifts unfolding in the developed world.

Details of this ideology will emerge from a collective learning process; however, I will share some ideas on the structure of this new system of thought.

First, there needs to be a reframing of recent history. Second, from this reframing we need to extract and incorporate successful ideas from our experience. Third, we need to adopt a set of strong ethical principles to guide research, experimentation, and clinical application of biotechnology. Fourth, we need a vision of the new human to be created. And fifth, we need a sustainable community context in which to nurture our becoming while preserving all that humanity cherishes.

Reframing of history is fairly straightforward: The Enlightenment never ended. In fact, we are now moving into the third and final stage, the Era of Transformation. The first era is sometimes called the Age of Reason, for it was a time of social change based on new ideas for organizing social institutions along with economic experimentation through systematic application of the scientific method.

The Era of Experimentation followed and began with the rise of what Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi termed the “Dual Movement” in the mid to late 1800s. This was a period of intense experimentation with alternative social paradigms within democracy and interpretations of the ideal design of civil society (e.g., fascism, communism, democratic socialism).

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the “End of History” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of this second stage. The Era of Transformation began with the complete mapping of the human genome in 2001. The two most distinguishing features of this third stage will be the transition of our species from its colonization stage to a climactic stage of existence on Earth and the creation of a new human being.

Debates over which ideas to incorporate from previous secular ideologies to date will be contentious. The core institutions of democracy based on guaranteed individual freedoms in the context of free-market, meritocratic capitalism will be retained. The principle of the “Common Good” to judge social policy will remain, yet this notion has evolved into a multitude of extended meanings, the significance of which demands intensive analysis and discussion.

Beyond these, the concepts embedded in the ethos of progress—part of the social contract—capture much that resonates with human nature, but requires careful review. Certain elements, such as the sanctity of a rising standard of living, are in need of modification in relation to constraints imposed by physical reality, our numbers, and existing technology.

The scientific community has worked on establishing strong ethical principles to govern biotechnology. In 1979, bioethicists articulated four fundamental bioethical principles:

• The Principle of Autonomy or Informed Consent.
• The Principle of Non-malfeasance, or Due Care.
• The Principle of Beneficence.
• The Principle of Distributive Justice.

These principles have shaped the bioethical debate ever since, forming core standards for guiding research in such fields as gene therapy.

These ethical principles, and others, will be folded into the new ideology. Eugenics was about creating a “better” human based on differences between people. To avoid accusations that this new endeavor is a disguised eugenics movement, bioengineering must be constrained to enhancing attributes that all humans share: health, longevity, intelligence, and attention.

An image of the new human to be created will likely be the most difficult facet of the new ideology to agree upon. What we do not want to create is an inflated version of the Paleolithic human that now populates the world. This would surely lead to extinction. Incorporating some Kantian notion of the perfectibility of humanity is another certain dead end.

I have a strong preference for an open-ended vision and thus will refer to the new human simply as an “angel”—with all the ambiguity this implies. Throughout history, luminaries have referred to “the better angels of our nature,” speaking to the multiple expressions of positive human creativity, behaviors, and endeavors. This is a vision worthy of embracing.

“The Human Foundation” for Building the New Ideology

Our new ideology must have a social locus, including an institution to focus effort, bring minds together to flesh out the ideology, and promote a common agenda. Some will say that today this can be done through a virtual organization, but there is much more to building community than just inspired words on a screen.

I suggest that an organization called The Human Foundation be established with multiple objectives and purposes. For example, this organization will place itself at the vanguard of bioengineering, bringing all the knowledge together in a manner to promote an ethical pathway to the creation of the new human. It will also involve itself in addressing existing world problems—particularly in regard to those associated with demographic, economic, and environmental transition.

One goal will be to spread awareness of the advantages of diminishing population and aggregate GDP, and of embracing a modified ethos of progress. Existing knowledge will be compiled and stored by the Foundation, with strategies instituted for its preservation under extreme circumstances. A “seed bank” would be built within The Human Foundation (as is being done by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) to preserve all that is known for the benefit of humanity’s future, thus serving as an insurance policy that we hope is never needed.

In the end, The Human Foundation would serve to bring together all that is needed to preserve, protect, and advance knowledge while guiding the process of continuing human evolution. It will have one other critical objective: to create a sense of shared purpose within a nourishing community.

The proposed ideology is evolutionary rather than revolutionary: It is built upon a foundation of peace and continuing revelation. Revolutionary ideologies, on the other hand, spawn passions of “us versus them,” with zealotry, fanaticism, and powerful in-group bonds. Both forms share a vision of a better future and sense of purpose, but the revolutionary approach draws heavily—and dangerously—on human emotions.

An ideology based on an evolutionary approach is predominantly rational and therefore lacking the spark to ignite and fuse community bonds. Consequently, there is a need for a studied effort to build community around the proposed ideology. Swiss philosopher Alain De Botton’s recent book, Religion for Atheists (Pantheon, 2012), is a good place in which to begin identifying approaches that The Human Foundation could use to address the issue of community building and cohesion.

No new ideology has emerged in the last half century, not because of lack of human imagination, but because we have been living in a period of complacency, relativism, and materialism. Many of the old ideologies have failed—or are failing—due to a misunderstanding of the underlying constraints imposed by physical reality, little-understood processes unfolding in the world, and overconfidence in our ability to construct institutions and technologies to solve problems.

Immanuel Kant thought that progress could not be measured by the amount of wealth or knowledge possessed and that it would not come automatically or be uninterrupted. Progress was, as he would put it, a difficult passage from barbarism toward cultural and human enlightenment. He believed that a world that was culturally enlightened would be dominated by people who were more uniformly and consistently angelic than in our barbarous past.

Progress ultimately springs from the transformation of people, and Kant called for education as the pivotal tool for doing so. This suggests that he believed nurturing intelligence would dispel ignorance, bringing understanding, peace, and prosperity. But Kant put undue faith in Paleolithic humans’ potential; history since his time has proved him wrong. The human we call Homo sapiens is shortsighted, self-centered, and tribal—with these traits thrown into a cauldron of base emotions with mental and biological flaws.

I believe that Kant was fundamentally correct, yet more and better education alone cannot take us where he envisioned us going: We need a better human to complete the passage. If we succeed in navigating the difficult challenges of the twenty-first century, we may begin to write the final chapter of the Enlightenment. If we do not, then the Enlightenment truly did end with the eighteenth century—and all that has transpired since may be no more than footnotes in the closing pages of the human story.

About the Author

Kenneth B. Taylor is a faculty member of the Department of Economics at Villanova University and currently serves as associate director of the Center for Global Leadership. His most recent edited volume is entitled 21st Century Economics: Perspectives of Socioeconomics for a Changing World (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

Whatever Happened to Western Civilization? The Cultural Crisis, 20 Years Later

Richard Eckersley

By Richard Eckersley

In 1993, THE FUTURIST published author Richard Eckersley’s provocative essay, “The West’s Deepening Cultural Crisis.” Here, he looks back at what has happened since, and forward to what the next 20 years might hold.

For a while, things were looking up.

Twenty years ago, I argued that Western culture was in crisis, marked by increasing pessimism about the future and declining well-being, especially among youth. Other serious problems we faced—the intractable economic difficulties, widening social gulf, and worsening environmental degradation—were also fundamentally problems of culture, of beliefs and moral priorities.

Readers responded strongly, and mostly positively, to the essay. In a poll run by THE FUTURIST, 84% agreed that Western culture was failing to provide a sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose, and a framework of values; 63% said most people in Western nations were pessimistic about the future; 57% agreed that excessive individualism was a problem in Western cultures.

The 1990s seemed to offer new hope. The dot-com and biotech booms were heralded as the beginning of an era of unlimited and sustainable economic growth and prosperity. Several of the adverse trends in young people’s well-being began to improve in countries like the United States, where the declines had been most pronounced. Climate change made it onto the political agenda, nationally and internationally.

Then things changed again. Events such as 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, the West’s waging of protracted and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of the East, notably China, to challenge the West’s economic and political supremacy all contributed. Then the global financial crisis struck in 2008. “Declinology” has now become a new theme in public debate and discussion about Western civilization.

Beneath the economic and political ebb and flow over the past two decades, the West’s cultural crisis never really went away. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, surveys continued to reveal public disquiet about “the frenzied, excessive quality of life today” (as a 1995 American survey put it). And this crisis had an increasingly tangible outcome as new research revealed more about the extent and seriousness of youth health problems.

“Culture” isn’t simply about groups having distinctive costumes, songs, dances, or prayers. Culture brings order and meaning to our lives. Of all species, we alone require a culture to give us reasons to live, to address the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Where have I come from? Why am I here? There are many cultural paths we can follow; this is the source of our extraordinary diversity and versatility. But it is also a danger: We can lose our way.

Deepening Pessimism

In 1993, I said of the United States that reports and surveys revealed a nation that was confused, divided, and scared, suffering its worst crisis of confidence in 30 years. The same was true of other Western countries, including my own, Australia. Today, the situation is arguably worse. In 2011, Time magazine reported a poll showing that the United States is going through “one of its longest sustained periods of unhappiness and pessimism ever,” adding that it is “hard to overstate what a fundamental change this represents.”

Two-thirds of Americans (68%) believed that the past decade was one of decline, not progress, for the United States and that the greatest threat to its long-term stability came from within, not from outside, the country (66%). About half said that the past decade was one of the worst in the past 100 years (47%) and that American children today would be worse off when they grew up (52%)than people were now. In a 2006 European survey, 60% said that, for most people in their country, life was getting worse.

Australia ranks at or near the top of many international comparisons of quality of life and development. Unlike the United States and Europe, it escaped the global financial crisis relatively unscathed: There was no recession, unemployment didn’t rise, and national debt is manageable. A refrain in public debate is that Australians have nothing to whine about. Yet, the public mood in Australia is sour; dissatisfaction with government is high. In a 2009 survey, only 24% of people said quality of life in Australia was getting better. In another 2009 survey, Australians generally saw themselves as being richer, but unhappier (or no happier), than they were in the previous few decades. While 77% said Australians’ material standard of living was higher than 20 years ago, 58% felt that emotional well-being was lower. As one market researcher put it, people see the world as a glass half empty, although they are determined to see their personal lives as a glass half full.

In contrast to people’s high levels of personal happiness and life satisfaction, many studies over the past few decades have revealed their anger and anxiety about the changes in Western societies. The concerns include excessive greed and selfishness, consumerism, too much competition and too little compassion, the loss of community, growing pressures on families, and drugs, crime, and violence. There is a common perception that, with individual freedom and material abundance, people don’t seem to know “where to stop,” or now have “too much of a good thing.”

So the pessimistic mood goes far deeper than politics and the performance of governments, although people may not fully grasp the reasons for their disquiet. The disenchantment is systemic, reflecting the reality that the social trajectory of our health and well-being—of our quality of life—is now downwards (setting aside the offsetting benefits of medical advances and other specific interventions).

Declining Youth Well-Being

In the 1993 article, I looked especially at the health of young people, who reflect best the tenor and tempo of the times because they are growing up in them. Furthermore, their attitudes, lifestyle choices, and illnesses will affect their health in later years, so shaping the health of the entire population.

I pointed to the rising rates among youth in many Western nations of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and other mental health problems, and crime. The next decade showed improvements in at least some measures, including suicide and crime; an American composite index of child and youth well-being, which had been falling since its starting point in 1975, began to rise from 1995. Public commentary about Gen Y (aka, the millennials) has been generally more positive than it was about their predecessors, Gen X.

However, experts believe that the war against drugs is still being lost. The United States is experiencing an epidemic of prescription-drug abuse, which is now driving a sustained rise in drug-related deaths. Heavy drinking remains a concern, and alcohol- and drug-related public violence is a serious problem in many Western countries. More importantly, we now have a much better understanding of the extent of the decline in young people’s health and well-being over several generations, and of its causes.

Rising rates of diabetes and other health risks associated with increasing obesity have led to predictions that, barring new medical treatments, the life expectancy of today’s youth will fall. More disturbing are the trends in mental health, which accounts for by far the biggest share of the “burden of disease” in young people (measured as disability-adjusted life years, or lost years of healthy life). Although the trends remain contested among researchers, the weight of evidence suggests a marked decline in psychological well-being.

One American study, comparing the results of a widely used psychological test going back to the 1930s, found a steady decline in the mental health of college students between 1938 and 2007: Five times as many college students now score high enough on the test to indicate psychological problems, compared with 1938. And a large survey of American college freshmen found that their emotional health had fallen in 2010 to the lowest level since the survey began in 1985.

A British study found that adolescents experienced considerably higher rates of emotional problems in 2006 than they did in 1986. The greatest changes were for worry, irritability, fatigue, sleep disturbance, panic, and feeling worn out or under strain; the more severe the reported symptoms, the larger the increase over the two decades.

Recent results of national surveys conducted by the American College Health Association show that large proportions of students report strong negative emotions. In the 2011 survey, more than 80% had, in the previous 12 months, felt exhausted and overwhelmed by all they had to do; 30%–60% had felt very lonely, very sad, overwhelming anxiety or anger, that things were hopeless, or so depressed that it was difficult to function. From 10% to more than 50% had experienced these emotions in the previous two weeks.

Exactly what the findings mean for young people’s health and well-being is not clear. They are certainly not the whole story. Had they been asked, 80%–90% of the students would have said they were happy and satisfied with their lives; most would be leading seemingly normal lives, attending lectures, completing assignments, working, partying, and dating. At the same time, these findings reveal something about being young today, and about the pressures young people face.

At the societal level, changes in the family, work, education, the mass and social media, religion, governance, and environmental pollution all play a role in this decline in health and well-being. At a more personal level, there are the changes in diet, outdoor play, the experience of nature, physical activity, sleep, peer relations, drug and alcohol use, and sexual activity. A particular concern today is the sexualization and commodification of childhood, as children are pressured at an ever younger age to be popular, look good, do well, and follow the latest consumer fashions and fads.

Linked to these trends are more intangible changes associated with increasing materialism and individualism. Both are defining characteristics of modern Western culture; both have conferred benefits to people, including to their health and well-being. However, both are now exacting rising costs to well-being.

These costs include a heightened sense of risk, uncertainty, and insecurity; a lack of clear frames of reference; a rise in personal expectations, coupled with a perception that the onus of success lies with the individual, despite the continuing importance of social position; an excess of freedom and choice, which is experienced as a threat or tyranny; the construal of the self as independent and separate from others; and a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic values and goals.

These cultural shifts toward excessive materialism and individualism are not just a matter of greater vanity, selfishness, and greed (although many people express concerns about these traits), or simply the manufactured desire to “have more stuff.” They lead to an unrelenting pressure to focus on what we make of our lives, to fashion identity and meaning increasingly from personal attributes, achievements, possessions, and lifestyles, and less from shared cultural traditions and beliefs.

This emphasis is a recipe for disappointment, depression, and anxiety. It distracts people from what is most important to well-being: the quality of their relationships with each other and the world, which, ideally, contribute to a deep and enduring sense of intrinsic worth and existential security. Asked what he had learned from a long-running study of the lives of a group of over 260 Harvard students in the 1930s, psychiatrist George Vaillant replied, “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that social ills have their source in today’s “individualized society of consumers,” with consuming more being the “sole road to inclusion,” and “existential uncertainty” now a universal human condition. A new study of Finnish students’ fears for the future gives intriguing insight into these more abstract aspects of well-being, including the role of the fear of death (see box below).

Health and well-being are more than just a consequence of changing social conditions. They are an important, and underestimated, dynamic in society, affecting our resilience and how we respond to social changes and challenges.

The Mismeasure of Progress

The past decade or so has seen a remarkable surge in interest in measuring the progress of societies (“Is Life Really Getting Better?” THE FUTURIST, January 1999). The debate has focused on adequacy of economic indicators, notably per capita income or GDP, as measures of a nation’s performance, relative to the past and to other countries. Measures of subjective well-being, especially happiness and life satisfaction, are attracting particular attention. Other widely used indicators in comparing nations include health (measured as life expectancy), education, human rights, governance (including political freedom and corruption), and equality.

These indicators place Western liberal democracies at the leading edge of progress, and present them as models for less-developed nations. For example, Western nations occupied the top 10 positions, and 17 of the top 20, in the 2011 UN Human Development Index, which is based on life expectancy, literacy and educational enrollment, and per capita income.

According to the first UN World Happiness Report, the happiest countries in the world are Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands. The story is much the same with most other indices, with the New World countries of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also doing well. Only when environmental indicators, such as the ecological footprint, are included does this order change significantly.

But even the new and expanded measures are still missing a critical dimension of human well-being: the more intangible, cultural, moral, and existential aspects of life that reflect and reveal the depths of the human psyche and the complexities of human affairs. Replacing or supplementing money with happiness or life satisfaction as a measure won’t do the trick. Although well-being research has revealed the importance of things other than money, there remains a substantial gap in the new progress measures, even those incorporating subjective well-being.

Orthodox approaches underestimate the degree to which “progress” as we measure it is contributing to an existential deficit that is affecting the health and well-being of all of us, rich and poor alike. This additional “psychosocial dynamics” perspective is largely absent from the political, and even scientific, debate about progress.

To a significant extent, conventional indicators and models of progress are measuring Westernization or modernization, rather than optimal social progress or development. While the concepts may overlap, they are not the same thing. At best, the qualities being measured may be desirable, even necessary, but are not sufficient. At worst, the benefits of Western culture are being counted, but not its costs, which are formidable and growing (note Finland’s position as one of the happiest countries, while fears about death, health, failure, and loneliness rise among its youth—see box on page 19).

The tension or contradiction is seen clearly with both materialism and individualism. International comparisons suggest that rising material wealth is a national positive (even if it has diminishing benefits); yet, it requires and reinforces a cultural and moral context that promotes materialistic values that are harmful to well-being. Similarly, individual freedom is seen as a major component of progress and development, but freedom, too, comes at a cost when it is pushed too far, and becomes a form of social abandonment or isolation.

The Case for “Pessimistic Hope”

Twenty years ago, I could still see a positive future for humanity, despite the deepening crisis I described. Today I am more pessimistic. Like an increasing number of scientists, futurists, and others, I now believe it is too late to avoid widespread calamities arising from climate change, resource depletion, and other global developments (see “Global MegaCrisis” by William E. Halal and Michael Marien, THE FUTURIST, May-June 2011). I realized about five years ago, with the evidence of accelerating global warming, that we’d left it too late; and we are continuing to leave it too late. As well as being a real threat, climate change is also a symbol of humanity’s wider predicament.

I linked the cultural crisis to several effects of science, but also saw science as helping us through it. Only science, I suggested, was powerful enough to persuade us to redirect its power, to convince us of the seriousness of our situation, to strengthen our resolve to do something about it, and to guide what we do. Yet, the past few years have seen a remarkable rise in public and political questioning, even rejection, of climate-change science.

I saw hope in a growing compatibility, a reconciliation, between scientific and spiritual views of the world. Instead, we’ve seen a backlash by scientists and others against the rise of religious fundamentalism, some of it as “fundamentalist” as the religion they denounce. It is “a dialogue of the deaf,” says Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton.

Still, I could be wrong. I remember the dire predictions in the 1970s of what lay in store for humanity in the decades that have now passed—without their being fulfilled (although the science behind the predictions was much less developed then). We can only face the future with hope; but for there to be hope, we have to confront reality unflinchingly. Let’s call it “pessimistic hope.”

Ever since the 1960s, we have declared the next decade to be the decade of reckoning, the time when we must deal with global environmental problems such as climate change, land and water degradation, food security, peak oil, population growth, and biodiversity loss. And as each decade passed without the necessary action being taken, we postponed the deadline another 10 years. With the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change, the 2010s are now the critical decade for action. By the decade’s end, the environmental “emergency” will have lasted half a century and spanned two generations. Will we have acted decisively by then?

Indeed, one of the most striking things when we look back over the last 20 years is the resilience of the status quo, the persistence in Western democracies of a politics that, explicitly and implicitly, sees no need to move beyond a worldview of unending material progress, despite the disenchantment of their citizens and the evident failure of material progress to deliver on its promise to keep making life better.

It is not that nothing worthwhile has been achieved; it is that not enough has been achieved with “politics as usual” approaches. This deep current of systemic and sustained political failure remains largely ignored, while politicians, commentators, and analysts focus on the swirling surface eddies of political theater and policy detail. If the deeper perspective were more widely recognized and part of public and political debate, there would be more incentive for governments to respond to it.

Fixing this situation goes beyond politics; it requires leadership at all levels of society. But politics has a role to play. Both politicians and the electorates they serve must have the courage to enact sweeping policy changes that shift the course of the deep current, not just stir up the surface eddies.

Making these changes would mean recognizing that economic growth measures progress very imperfectly, that the content of growth is more important than its rate, and that we need to direct economic activity away from private consumption for short-term personal gratification toward long-term public investment in the social transformation necessary to address all the challenges of our century and to ensure our future.

Radical reforms could include, for example:

• Limiting or banning political donations by corporations and other vested interests.
• Putting a sufficiently high price on carbon and other sources of environmental degradation (some countries have introduced a carbon price).
• Abolishing tax deductibility for advertising to ease the pressures on us to spend and spend.
• Creating jobs where they are socially needed and useful, not where confected demand dictates.

Beyond the policy specifics, however, I believe that we need to change Western culture: the stories, symbols, and metaphors by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals—and so our politics.

The magnitude of this transformation will be akin to that from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the medieval mind to the modern mind. Just as it was impossible for the medieval mind to anticipate the modern, or the modern to imagine itself back into the medieval, so it is impossible for us today to anticipate what might follow the modern mind.

However, the seeds of the Enlightenment were sown in the Middle Ages, including the turmoil of the fourteenth century and the devastation of the Black Death; and so, too, are the seeds of a new consciousness being sown in the chaos of modern times. While the earlier revolution spanned centuries, the advances in education and communication could allow a new cultural revolution to happen in decades.

In A Distant Mirror (Knopf, 1978), historian Barbara Tuchman states that Christianity provided “the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory.” Its insistent principle was that “the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth.… The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.”

This transition produced the great social and political movements of the nineteenth century that shattered many assumptions of what was “normal” at that time: epidemics of infectious disease, child labor, the buying and selling of human life, the oppressed status of women, the appalling working conditions in “dark, Satanic mills.” We now face another rupture or discontinuity in our view of ourselves, in what it is to be human, that will change profoundly how we live (see box, “Redefining the Self”).

There are signs this process has begun, although its direction is not yet established, and it remains largely invisible in politics and public affairs (see “A New World View Struggles to Emerge,” THE FUTURIST, September-October 2004, and “Nihilism, Fundamentalism, or Activism: Three Responses to Fears of the Apocalypse,” THE FUTURIST, January-February 2008).

The emergence and growth of a new culture and consciousness will not—now—spare us from troubled and turbulent times. Rather, events will powerfully influence the course that the transformation takes, the shape of things to come after the turmoil. They could help or hinder: provide the moral force for urgent action, or preoccupy us with crisis management.

Writers like Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters, Viking, 2009) and Junot Díaz (“Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal,” Boston Review, May-June 2011) have described the revelatory, and potentially revolutionary, nature of disasters. Not only can they bring out the best in us, and connect and empower us, but they also lay bare the social conditions and choices that often cause or contribute to disasters, delivering a societal shock that makes change possible.

Díaz uses the 2010 earthquake to argue that Haiti is not only the most visible victim of our civilization but also a sign of what is to come. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was reeling, and it needed only the slightest shove to send it into catastrophe. In the process of causing things to fall apart, he says, apocalyptic catastrophes also give us “a chance to see aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denial.” Apocalypses are also opportunities: “chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change.”

Creating a new human story, a new awareness of ourselves, represents a “no regrets” strategy. It might yet allow us to avoid global mayhem (as I said, I could be wrong). In the event that calamities strike, it would mitigate their effects by enhancing our personal and social resilience and preparedness. But even in the absence of the threat of catastrophe, it would improve our quality of life. Even if we did not confront social, environmental, and economic limits and breakdowns, optimizing our health and happiness requires transformational change.

The next 20 years will settle this issue (if it isn’t settled already). We will know by then the extent to which we are locked into global crises, and if so, what we can do to minimize their impacts and to shape the world that lies on the far side. We may no longer be able to get out of the mess we’re creating for ourselves, but we can get through it. There is still plenty to dream of, and to strive for.

About the Author

Richard Eckersley is an independent researcher and writer (www.richardeckersley.com.au), and a founding director of Australia21, a nonprofit research company (www.australia21.org.au).

Who Will Be Free? The Battles for Human Rights to 2050

Josh Calder

By Josh Calder

As geopolitical power around the world shifts, so will the global consensus on human rights. There are challenges ahead, but the expansion of affluence, education, and digital technology may lead to a freer and more humane world in the long run.

The future of human rights looks promising. That may seem surprising, in light of the oppressive regimes that continue to brutally suppress dissident uprisings and rig elections, but several powerful, positive trends are at work, centered around changes in values and new technology. These trends will drive three contests that will define the evolution of human rights over the next few decades:

• Freedom-enhancing technology versus repressive technology.
• The rise of new powers versus the influence of the legacy great powers.
• Clashes within societies over values.

The definition of human rights has evolved and will continue to do so, but for purposes of this article they encompass traditional political rights—democracy and self-determination and their components, such as the freedoms of conscience, association, and information—along with the absence of punishment for exercising those political rights. This definition also includes basic physical protections for the person—freedom from extrajudicial killing and torture.

The Technological Arms Race

The potential contribution of technology to human rights has become increasingly clear, especially after the prominent role attributed to social media in the 2011 Arab Spring unrest. Several trends are at work here.

The Internet and mobile networks are spreading, giving people more open access to information and the ability to generate it themselves. With 70% of the world’s population carrying mobile phones, individuals increasingly have the technological means to document and publicize rights abuses.

Such crowdsourced information gathering is finding new forms. Efforts such as Syria Tracker gather reports of human rights abuses in real time from the field and map them for the world.

Some governments and organizations are backing technologies intended to aid dissidents in sharing information. These include technologies to support clandestine use of the Internet and mobile phones, and software to document human rights abuses. For instance, the U.S. State Department is reportedly helping create an “Internet in a suitcase” to provide dissidents mobile Internet access that can elude government censors.

Human-rights groups are using satellite images and other large-scale, centralized technology, as well, to detect and document human rights abuses. One monitoring effort in Sudan is even partly funded by actor George Clooney.

And new technologies continue to come online: Activists have called for the deployment of unmanned drones to monitor human rights crises.

Overall, transparency is rising in the world, making it harder for governments to hide human rights violations from their own people or global observers. However, technology is also being deployed in ways that harm human rights, or have the potential to do so. Surveillance technologies of all kinds are proliferating and tracking people’s shopping habits, locations, political preferences, and myriad other factors.

The private sector collects much of this information, compiling it into hundreds of millions of dossiers that go beyond what the most totalitarian government of the past could have dreamed of. Such techniques and the information itself could be put to political purposes in the future. For example, Facebook is granting researchers access to anonymized data on the political preferences of all of its members based on their private postings. A similar company might do the same for a government someday.

Surveillance could also go much farther. Technology could track where most people are most of the time and provide clues to their activities and concerns multiple times a day, with the data fed to centralized information repositories. The U.S. intelligence community has already noted the potential utility of the “Internet of things,” with any component of the smart environment potentially feeding data about targets of interest. As one article put it, “We’ll Spy on You through Your Dishwasher.”

All this data could be automatically and continuously mined for patterns that indicate that a person is of concern. People could even be monitored indirectly: Studies have found that much can be discovered about members of social networks even if they keep all their own information private. The characteristics of their associates still reveal facts as intimate as sexual orientation—predictable with 78% accuracy in one study—and this would be the case with political and social views.

Technology could also intersect with human rights much more directly, as armed robots are deployed in policing and warfare. Robots could violate human rights deliberately or through faulty performance, and they will add a level of deniability for violations, potentially reducing accountability for soldiers and policy makers.

New Powers versus Old

Rising non-Western powers such as China and India hold views of human rights that are distinctly different from those in the West. As new powers gain an ever-growing share of global economic, political, and cultural power, approaches to human rights and freedoms will shift.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Western nations have slowly and often only partially adopted the idea of universal human rights. Rising powers are almost uniformly wary of the concept of promoting human rights across borders. Many have serious human rights problems of their own, and others see human rights as a tool that the West uses to impose its views on others. The latter group includes democratic states such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey.

The right of self-determination may falter. The West has endorsed this right only slowly and reluctantly in many cases—such as East Timor, Eritrea, and South Sudan—and rising powers are even more skeptical. Many, including China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkey, face active internal self-determination issues and will oppose any strengthening of such rights in ways that could be applied within their borders.

The rising influence of emerging powers could shift the role of technology in human rights. Technology companies and the systems they run will increasingly reflect the preferences of the largest economies. Early signs of this have begun to emerge. Twitter has modified its system to censor tweets country by country, so that it can comply with local laws. Activists noted that this could enable compliance with information-control laws such as those of China.

As China grows more powerful, it is likely to pressure global companies and other countries to facilitate its information-control efforts. China and other rising powers may determine the degree to which the Internet remains open. Commercial control—as in diminished “Net neutrality”—may be a backdoor to state control as global corporations become more responsive to emerging powers.

Emerging powers’ stance on human rights is evolving. China and Russia did not block the imposition of a no-fly zone by the United Nations in Libya in 2011, departing from their customary views on intervention in “internal matters,” and the Arab League voted later that year for sanctions against Syria due to its violent crackdown against protesters.

The cost of indifference to human rights may be rising. China and Russia were condemned by demonstrators for protecting the Syrian regime from international pressure during the uprising. If global popular opinion shifts far enough, the policy of more countries might come to resemble that of the United States and Europe: selective promotion of human rights, in cases where their sympathies and their perceived interests align. On the other hand, Louise Arbour of the International Crisis Group counters that the influence of new great powers may matter less than it once would have, as the internal evolution of societies is now the driving force in democratization and human rights.

Struggles over Values

Much will depend on the third struggle over human rights: the evolution of values, especially within rising powers. The trend line is positive: Observance of human rights has improved almost universally over the last 50 years, even in authoritarian countries. Viewed over longer time periods, the upswing is even starker. The most humane governments of a few centuries ago were crueler than almost all governments are today. Even mainstream Christian churches were torturing and executing people for mild intellectual dissent a few hundred years ago.

China provides a clear example. Though it is still rated “not free” by Freedom House, it has retreated from mass killing of political opponents to far more limited and selective repression. The slightest deviation in hairstyles or artworks could bring harsh penalties a few decades ago. Though the country remains authoritarian, what would once have been forbidden dissent is now readily discussable and publishable.

This trend of improving human rights could continue globally, due both to changing global norms and to underlying economic drivers. The world may get much richer—and wealthy countries generally treat their citizens better than poorer countries do.

The observable pattern today is that all countries with per capita purchasing-power incomes over $20,000 have high levels of civil liberties and personal freedom (unless their economies are based on natural resource extraction; Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are cases in point). University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, offers an explanation for why attitudes toward human rights tend to vary with level of development. Put most simply, people raised amid material security tend to have “postmaterialist” values, including tolerance for self-expression, absence of xenophobia, and reduced deference to authority. All of these are conducive to freer, more humane societies.

So, too, are rising educational levels, which are a byproduct of rising prosperity (the natural resource exception is likely due to resource-based economies’ rapid expansion with no need for an extended process of socioeconomic development or broad distribution of wealth).

This pattern matters because many forecasts suggest that very large numbers of people will become much wealthier over the next 40 years. For instance, middle-class and wealthy people could number 2 billion in the G20 developing economies by 2050, according to Uri Dadush and William Shaw in their 2011 book, Juggernaut. They estimate that 1.1 billion Chinese and 273 million Indians could be middle class.

The Asian Development Bank forecasts that Asia could achieve an average per capita purchasing power of $41,000 by 2050, similar to Europe’s today, in a strong-growth scenario. And more-cautious estimates still have Chinese income per capita surpassing $17,000 (in constant 2000 dollars) by 2050.

Overall, it seems fairly likely that ongoing values changes around human rights will continue, helped along by rising levels of wealth and education. Still, several caveats apply. The recent spread of human rights and democracy may have been a historical accident. Culture and values may have driven those forces in Europe and its offshoots, and other countries (such as those in East Asia) may have gone democratic because they happened to become rich during the period of Western dominance.

In his book No One’s World, international affairs expert Charles Kupchan argues that democracy might spread in the future, but that new powers will transform the global system before they are likely to democratize.

Even if rising powers greatly improve their own human rights records, internal evolution is no guarantee of external behavior. Western countries engaged in or supported serious human rights violations through the 1980s with few qualms; in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, the United States and Western European countries backed some of the cruelest governments on the planet. Deterioration of human rights is always possible, especially if Inglehart is correct that a prosperous and secure environment profoundly shapes attitudes. Populations that are fearful of losing ground economically might put a lower priority on human rights. Note, for instance, the American slippage on waterboarding, which was punished as torture in the past but was accepted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

And a final caveat: A wealthier world may not come. Development of emerging markets could stagnate at lower levels than discussed above, or prosperity could even decrease globally, if the theorists of economic or ecological collapse are correct.

Even with substantial convergence of values, there are still likely to be deep-rooted collisions across cultures over human rights issues. If nations such as China turned to promoting a humane vision, the rights they emphasized would be different, reflecting profound differences in views of the individual, society, and future generations. Biotechnology could trigger human rights disputes based on fundamental ideas of what constitutes human nature and human dignity.

Key Trends to Watch for Human Rights

Through 2050, human rights will be shaped by technology, changes in geopolitical power, and sociopolitical evolution in the non-Western world. These are some key indicators and variables:

• The relative balance between top-down surveillance and information control versus bottom-up technologies that enhance freedom.
• The degree to which the Internet remains an unfettered information conduit, especially in its core structures.
• Whether emerging middle classes grow, and whether they push for more rights (even if not full democracy).
• Whether governments engaged in human rights violations leverage the strength of rising powers to evade pressures over their policies.
• How India, China, Turkey, and other rising powers adjust their own self-determination policies.
• How these rising powers approach protecting human rights beyond their borders.

Over the next few decades, advocates for human rights will have to push technology toward doing more good than harm, and adjust their strategies for a world in which the West is no longer at the center. It is likely to be a challenging but ultimately hopeful environment for human rights.

About the Author

Josh Calder is a partner at the futures consulting firm Foresight Alliance (www.foresightalliance.com), where he monitors global trends, discontinuities, and international issues. The views expressed in this article are his own.

The Global Talent Chase: China, India, and U.S. Vie for Skilled Workers

Edward E. Gordon

By Edward E. Gordon

Too many tech jobs and not enough tech professionals to fill them—China, India, and the United States all face this dilemma. Here is what each economic powerhouse is—and should be—doing to ease its workforce gap, and a look at a successful strategy known as Regional Talent Innovation Networks, or RETAINS.

Around the world, the talent hunters are on the prowl. China, India, and the United States, the three largest workforces, are the prime contenders in the battle over jobs and skills. Technology’s increasing impact across all job sectors has continuously raised employers’ demands for more intelligent, well-educated, career-ready workers. Replacement needs in high-skill occupations are due to soar. In 2010, a generational retirement shift began that will remove massive numbers of talented baby boomers from the labor pool.

Joining the developed economies of Europe, Asia, and North America, billions of Chinese and Indian workers and potential consumers have flooded into the world marketplace. This has created many new economic opportunities. It also triggered a talent tsunami in labor markets whose warning signs were largely ignored by most Americans.

Long-term forecasters tell us India and China may soon become economic superpowers. Their arguments for touting these two rapidly growing markets are at first glance overwhelming: China and India start from a lower economic base. Their huge populations are waiting to consume. Their colleges and universities produce an inexhaustible supply of skilled scientists and technicians. Ongoing economic liberalization has given them significant economic power. Some see the rise of India and China as a major economic game changer.

However, the growing talent shortage in both China and India is a key issue that is further complicated by a host of socioeconomic problems. India wants the respect conferred by its rising IT power, but a rickety infrastructure and widespread corruption challenge its credibility. China’s state-controlled capitalism is forging into uncharted territory, run by a fascist-type police state that fears political liberalization. Something must change.

These and other major limitations cloud the future of China and India. A major war for talent is now under way as Chinese tech manufacturers and Indian IT firms hunt for skilled workers. This has serious implications for a U.S. business community historically overdependent on importing skilled people from abroad.

Assessing the Global Talent Hunters

China and India have evolved culturally, economically, and socially over the past 30 years. The questions now are where they are heading and whether their growth means they’ll continue supplying the United States and other industrial economies with talent. China and India may expand their own talent pool, eclipsing the U.S. economy and attaining global economic dominance.

One impact of the growing talent shortages is the serious threat of inflation. Wages for migrant workers in China rose 21% in 2011. Indian inflation averaged 9.4% in 2010-2011, with a 13% increase in wages in 2011.

China: Growing Pains. China’s young economy arose in 1978 from the ashes of the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the Mao era. It has benefited from a huge population of consumers and cheap labor. Now comes the hard part. As the economy matures, institutional changes in social/political structures are required along with massive investments in human capital development.

China now faces a major employment crisis. The 30-year low-cost/low-wage manufacturing era that fueled its economic miracle is now over. China’s 200-million migrant-worker army is growing increasingly restless over low wages and a lack of employment benefits.

Other cracks are also appearing in China’s boom. Credit Suisse, citing “alarming levels” of credit expansion in 2011, warned of slower growth for the overall economy. Local government and state-owned or backed enterprise debt totals amount to well over 150% of China’s 2010 GDP, according to Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University. (By comparison, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is 73%.)

More Chinese economists are now predicting sharply lower annual GDP growth. This could undermine middle-class support of the Communist Party that has been based on the so-called “Beijing consensus,” the contention that people don’t think a lot about freedom of action, free markets, and democracy, as long as capable bureaucrats deliver major economic growth.

It is clear that China’s greatest challenge is institutional change. After 90 years of existence, the Chinese Communist Party finds itself in crisis. China’s rising middle class views it as an entrenched elite.

“The fact is that many people today foster hatred for government officials and hatred for the rich,” says Yang Jisheng, a former government journalist and author.

India: Dysfunctional Structures. India’s spectacular growth of recent years is beset by many political and social issues. Economists and business leaders now believe that India’s high inflation rate (9.1% as of May 2011) is the byproduct of broad economic structural failure driven by severe talent shortages, a dysfunctional transportation and power infrastructure, and the unrealistic expectations of many of its citizens.

Unless serious efforts are made to redress a growing human capital deficit, India’s economy may stall as it attempts to move up the value chain into more sophisticated IT services and manufacturing. Someday, India may challenge the supremacy of the United States in pathbreaking scientific research, but not in the foreseeable future. It lacks the large-scale, high-quality university graduate programs needed for an abundance of such breakthroughs.

India has many advantages that China lacks. India has a democratic political system and an Anglo-Saxon legal code. Also, India’s younger age cohort is slated to continue growing, with the nation’s total population passing China’s by 2030. There is much talk about India’s demographic dividend (i.e., its relative youth), but this will only be an illusion unless the quality of India’s entire national talent development system is significantly upgraded.

U.S.: Myths and Realities for Talent Hunters. There is a growing mismatch in India and China between the available talent pool and economic demands for more skilled human capital. Other serious socioeconomic issues complicate their efforts to increase the number of high-skill workers. U.S. business leaders still believe that America remains the best location for the world’s top scientists and engineers.

A World Economic Forum study reported that the majority of U.S. patent filings by many American companies are now being made by foreign nationals living in the United States (General Electric, 64%; Merck, 65%; Cisco, 60%). This motivates many in the U.S. business community to lobby Congress to raise the annual H-1B foreign visa quota from 65,000 to over 100,000.

But the talent tide is turning, as talent hunters from many nations woo their nationals to return home to become participants in their burgeoning economies. Also, the United States has tightened immigration policies and raised visa application fees to screen out potential terrorists. It can now take up to a decade to obtain permanent U.S. residency. Finally, many other nations are tapping the same STEM talent pool by offering attractive employment opportunities and permanent citizenship to foreign nationals.

In 2011, the World Economic Forum found that more Indian immigrants were moving back to India than were moving to the United States. A separate Kauffman Foundation study, Losing the World’s Best and Brightest (2009), surveyed more than 1,200 foreign nationals attending U.S. colleges and universities and found that 60% of Indian students and 90% of Chinese students believed that stronger economic opportunities awaited them in their home countries rather than in the United States.

“You have the cream of the crop coming over here getting educated, getting experience over here, and suddenly they become much more marketable and can do (just) as well anywhere else,” concludes Vivek Wadhwa, the study’s lead author.

Over the last 20 years, an estimated 150,000 highly skilled immigrants have returned to India and China, says Wadhwa. About 135,000 Chinese students left the United States in 2010 and returned home, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education—a 25% increase from 2009.

Structural Changes Alter Needed Skills

All of the world’s talent hunters face the same challenge: the ready availability of skilled people, which is often the primary driver for companies’ site selection. But rather than hunting for foreign talent, businesses over the next decade will need to create their own skilled talent pools. And their success will largely determine the future success or failure of their national economies—and, by extension, the world’s.

Until recently, U.S. businesses have bridged this skills deficit by either importing educated workers or exporting high-pay/high-skills jobs to skilled talent pools overseas, wherever they could be found. Both of these talent strategies are beginning to fail.

The demand for talent and the supply of workers with the desired skills are out of balance all over the world. The populations of Japan, South Korea, and many European nations are in decline. India and China are moving into more-sophisticated high-tech manufacturing or IT services, but both are now encountering severe shortages of engineers, scientists, and technicians. In both countries, domestic labor pools lack the requisite educational preparation due to deficient public-education systems and the inadequate standards of institutions of higher learning.

A major structural change is also occurring in the U.S. labor market. Though the GDP has risen, unemployment has not fallen in a way consistent with the number of job openings. Why? U.S. productivity is increasing. In manufacturing and most other business sectors, it’s not just advanced machines. It’s increasingly evident that many new advanced technologies are digitizing the whole economy. These surges in productivity will create tomorrow’s jobs and raise living standards. New jobs will come from rising efficiencies in production and innovative technologies spawning new products and services throughout the entire economy.

The flip side to these breakthroughs is that today’s and tomorrow’s jobs require advanced technical skills. A workplace may need fewer people, but they must be better educated and able to work with advanced computer systems. This has become the new normal for employment, whether it is in an office, production facility, hospital, law firm, or service business.

These digitized jobs present a new problem. The consensus among employers is that people need to be reskilled for the new workplace. The urgent need to create more skilled workers is now a central political and economic concern in communities across America.

The availability of better-educated talent with up-to-date career skills now largely determines where businesses will locate. Communities that break down the structural barriers among businesses, education, and community groups and collaborate to renew their talent creation and economic systems will attract new businesses and retain current ones. Those that don’t will wither and die.

The Great Recession has accelerated an ongoing labor-market shift that was masked by the many low- or semi-skilled jobs created during the housing/financial bubble. In today’s labor market, employment for low-skilled or semi-skilled workers has fallen dramatically. Even middle-skilled professionals have seen a steady decline in jobs because of automation. In general, the job opportunities are brighter for high-skilled people who have kept their knowledge and applicable certifications up-to-date and who can relocate where jobs exist.

Some critics blame popular culture, and not just deficient education systems, for the lack of desired skills among workers. In testimony before the U.S. Senate, Charles Butt, chief executive of a Texas-based H-E-B supermarket chain, said that finding qualified young workers is an increasing problem: “Many schools inherit an over-entertained, distracted student body.”

The spread of “new media zombies,” who lack basic academic competencies, interpersonal skills, and critical thinking abilities, is reaching alarming proportions. It should not be surprising that the number of young people entering science, technology, engineering, and math-related (STEM) occupations is shrinking.

The major business issue today is not talent management. It has become talent creation. One-third of U.S. business executives report that they face a crippling loss of essential skills as the baby boomers retire en masse.

Current U.S. education-to-employment systems are broken at the local/state/regional levels. They have outlived the labor economy for which they were created 100 years ago. Over the past 30 years, the incremental adjustments—the “education reforms”—have done little to patch the broken talent pipeline connecting people to jobs.

What steps can U.S. businesses take to remedy these massive deficits in the skilled talent needed today and over the next decade? “Technology is easy to develop,” states Dean Kamen, best known as the inventor of the Segway scooter. “Developing a new attitude, moving the culture is the difficult part.”

The RETAIN Strategy

Over the past decade, my research, consulting, and travels have given me the opportunity to learn about regional public–private partnership networks emerging across the Americas, Europe, and Asia that are investing in new talent-creation systems. The goal of these networks is to create more talented people at higher skill levels who will be able to better support a developed nation’s competitive businesses and be high-wage earners.

I call these organizations Regional Talent Innovation Networks (RETAINs). They are local, broad-based community initiatives that include large and small businesses, community organizations (such as chambers of commerce or Rotary chapters), regional economic development or workforce development boards, county/city/state agencies, unions, public and private elementary and secondary schools, postsecondary educational institutions, foundations, parent groups, and nonprofit organizations in health care, literacy development, and other groups that serve challenged workers who need employment.

RETAINs are regional in composition. They focus on talent development through a wide array of innovative programs. They are financed by private and public funds, including business investments, foundation grants, and local, state, and federal funding initiatives.

Already, more than 1,000 RETAINs have been organized across the United States. RETAINs are now building functional collaborative networks of partners from all segments of the community to create new, more open education-to-employment systems. These nonprofit organizations are leveraging business–education partnerships into new linkages to meet long-term local talent needs. RETAINs help their communities keep local businesses, stop population decline, and attract new industries and service businesses by expanding the local pool of talented people.

RETAINs are built upon the value of civic activism. Businesses collaborating with a broad array of community organizations, government agencies, and nonprofit groups are working together to form these new pipelines that connect people with jobs through both short-term and long-term initiatives. In the short term, they are moving to fill current vacant jobs. Through RETAIN networks, businesses offer entry-level job-training programs for those currently unemployed who have some of the required job skills and a willingness to learn the rest. Unlike previous public job-training programs, RETAINs do not offer generic job training in the hope that this will assist an unemployed person in finding future employment.

Many of these public–private networks are now linking individuals who have some of the required job skills to specific vacant jobs. For up to six months, an intensive training and education effort puts these trainees both in the classroom and on the job to get the required knowledge. They receive a training wage from the business and their unemployment compensation. In other words, they earn while they learn. The majority of these trainees “graduate” from their education programs and are hired to fill vacant positions.

Two excellent examples of this approach are HIRED in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Chicago Career Tech in Illinois. Established in 1968, HIRED specifically matches an unemployed worker who has some, but not all of the required skills for a vacant job in a local business. HIRED then provides the worker with classroom education that addresses skill or educational deficiencies, while the business provides a trainee position with on-site job-specific training. HIRED has established a growing network of companies using this proactive approach to fill their vacant positions.

Chicago Career Tech was initiated in 2010 to retrain unemployed mid-level tech workers for new jobs. A rigorous educational program that was developed in collaboration with Chicago-area technology firms provides these workers with the specific educational updates required to fill vacant positions. Of the 165 people in Chicago Career Tech’s first class, 149 received final program certification and were placed in jobs. A second class of 300 began in 2011.

For the long term, RETAINs are also developing career information and education programs from elementary school through college. High-school career academies, as well as higher education career and technical programs, are increasing the number of local well-educated students and connecting them to a regional career pipeline for employment. Such regional overhauls of education-to-employment systems are beginning to help sustain and grow local economies. If the RETAIN talent model is brought up to scale across the United States, more Americans will find “good” jobs and increasing numbers of U.S. businesses will become more competitive in the world marketplace.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building.” America needs to build on these past strengths now. The McKinsey Global Institute agrees: “To create the jobs that America needs to continue growing and to remain competitive, leaders in government, business, and education will have to be creative—and willing to consider solutions they have not tried before.”

If the United States fails to address the current talent red alert, the price will be high. The survival of many U.S. businesses is at stake. Large corporations continue to poach many workers from small and medium-sized companies. In fact, Manpower has predicted that, between 2010 and 2020, 10% to 20% of U.S. businesses will close their doors due to the inability to fill key vacant jobs.

Civic activism has long been a hallmark of American culture. Business persons, educators, union leaders, government officials, and community groups and organizations can work together to form these Regional Talent Innovation Networks. The United States can move beyond the current job crisis into a decade of increased opportunity for those who are willing to form partnerships focused on developing the skills and education required for employment in a twenty-first-century global economy. We must act now before it is too late.

Improving Prospects for Global Prosperity

The success of the United States, China, and India, as economic powerhouses, matters to the world. As Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel put it, “It’s clear that future prosperity depends on the U.S.—its government, business, people, universities—coalescing behind a strategy for growth and creating incentives so talent and capital flow to promising sectors where the U.S. still has an edge in an increasingly competitive global economy.”

But in the midst of a major unemployment crisis, executives at all levels are reporting increasing difficulties in recruiting skilled talent and filling scientific and technology positions. Among the world’s three largest workforces—the United States, China, and India—technology is outpacing current job training and preparation programs. China and India are moving from low-skill/low-wage manufacturing into high-skill/high-wage industries, but the needed talent is sorely lacking.

U.S. businesses can no longer rely on engineers and scientists from India and China to fill their skills gaps, as these sought-after workers are increasingly being attracted by opportunities in their native countries. But Regional Talent Innovation Networks (RETAINs) are gaining momentum across the United States. More than 1,000 of these public–private partnerships are helping current workers upgrade their skills and are sponsoring regional career information and education programs.

As this century’s economic powerhouses build upon their own strengths, prospects for the global economy as a whole will improve. No single business—or country—can win this jobs battle alone.

About the Author

Edward E. Gordon is president of Imperial Consulting in Chicago. His most recent book is Winning the Global Talent Showdown (Berrett-Koehler, 2009). He may be reached at Imperial Consulting Corporation, www.imperialcorp.com.

This article draws from his recent white paper, “The Talent Hunters: The United States, China and India in the Battle over Skills and Jobs” (Imperial Consulting Corporation, 2012).

Dream, Design, Develop, Deliver: From Great Ideas to Better Outcomes

Rick Docksai

KAZ OKADA FOR WFS

Lee Rainie

KAZ OKADA FOR WFS

Brian David Johnson

By Rick Docksai

A better future doesn’t happen on its own. We create it with our ideas, plans, and actions. In July, hundreds of futurists from around the world took the opportunity to “dream, design, develop, and deliver” the future together at WorldFuture 2012.

The world’s problems, and their solutions, may be too complex for any one group to solve. The more than 600 futurists meeting in Toronto for the World Future Society’s annual conference in July came together in large groups and small for lively discussions about how the world community might set in motion the best future possible.

People have always sought out membership in groups, but the last few years of the Internet’s evolution have fueled an unprecedented movement worldwide toward networked behavior, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, told the attendees at WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver.

Rainie shared the findings of a consensus of more than a thousand researchers about this phenomenon of “networked individualism” and its potential to create sweeping changes in how the world processes information and conducts business. These changes might even bring about the end of currency, university systems, and other time-honored institutions as we know them.

“Individuals have a lot more power and a lot more pressure, but they manage it better by operating within networks,” he said. What’s critical is that the world must be aware of these and other changes coming up and plan for them now. An optimal future is attainable, but only if we act in the present to create it.

“If you drive conversations about these kinds of things, you might change the future. You might have smart people thinking about the drivers and the downsides, and might help to make this world a better place,” said Rainie.

Joining Rainie were dozens of internationally recognized futurists and innovators, such as Intel futurist Brian David Johnson, speaking about the myriad innovations and societal developments that are irrevocably changing health care, energy, robotics, and many other fields of human endeavor.

As a futurist who works for an engineering company, Johnson said he is held to rigid accountability for his predictions: “Forecasts become technical specs.” But rather than predicting the future, he promoted the idea of developing visions of the future that are actionable—visions that we can build.

Perils of Blindsiding

Futuring is also about being prepared for the future that others are building. Confectionary giant Mars Inc. suddenly lost huge amounts of revenue about four years ago. Why? Was it other candy companies stepping up competition? No: It was due to the proliferation of SMS messaging, and young people preferring to spend more money on mobile texting services than on chocolate bars. Management consultant Jim Harris, author of Blindsided!, cited Mars’ dilemma as a prime example of the unanticipated changes in environment that can catch any business off guard.

“When these trends begin to shift, companies best get in early on the change, rather than wait until it rolls over on them,” he said.

No business or organization can predict what new challenges will emerge in years ahead, he pointed out, but they can make sure that they will be as responsive and adaptable as possible. The key, he said, is innovation.

“Innovation is the flipside of blindsiding. Innovation is the solution, is the antidote to avoid being blindsided,” he said. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

[Editor’s note: For more of Harris’s examples of blindsiding, see “Innovate or Else” .]

Reports from Singularity University

Some of the conference’s boldest forecasts belonged to José Luis Cordeiro, director of The Millennium Project’s Venezuela Node. He co-hosted the session on “The Singularity University: Team Projects to Change the World” with Anna Trunina and Nikola Danaylov, both recent graduates of the Singularity University.

Cordeiro described momentous advancements in humans’ capacity to rewire the brain, the genome, and the body in general. Just as computing power keeps exponentially rising, so might the human life span, Cordeiro suggested. He noted that laboratory researchers have enabled mice to live three times the average for their species; flies, four times the average for theirs; and worms, six times their species’ average life expectancy. Similar catapults forward in human longevity might be feasible before long—possibly in as little as 20 or 30 years.

“We are going to see the death of death,” he said. “You who are students today will be members of the first immortal generation.”

Cordeiro also foresees, within two or three decades, creation of the first artificial brain. Japan’s Riken Brain Institute, he noted, is actively pursuing the creation of a computer that equals the human brain in capacity by 2018.

“We will conquer the final frontier, which is not really space, but the human brain,” he said.

With further developments in biotechnology and genomics, medicine will similarly attain vast new powers over our genes. Cordeiro pointed out the increasing ease with which researchers can copy an individual’s entire genome: Whereas the first genome took 13 years and cost $1 billion, a medical team completed it in 2010 within four weeks and for a mere $10,000. In 2020, it could cost $10 and take one hour. Following this, researchers may master the art of adding, deleting, or modifying a person’s genes as desired.

“We will design our children. We will design our descendants,” Cordeiro asserted. “If you like the eyes of someone, the nose of someone else, the hair color of someone else, you will be able to channel all those genes and create your own designer baby.”

Representing Singularity University alumni, Trunina and Danaylov presented their innovations to conference goers. Trunina gave a presentation on PrimerLife, a Web-based platform that she helped develop. An individual obtains a copy of his or her family’s genetic history and logs onto PrimerLife to consult with other users and with registered physicians on what the genetic indicators all mean.

Trunina explained that personal genotyping is a rapidly growing market, but there are few services out there for consumers to make sense of the data that their genetic charts contain. PrimerLife addresses this. It is a great way for users to understand what their genetic indicators actually mean for their health and how they might develop a long-term health plan accordingly.

“Genome and biological data will become the primary platform for building a strategy of human life,” she said.

Political corruption is the societal problem that Corruptiontracker.org, which Danaylov helped to launch, aims to fix. This site is a crowdsourced software app, available for download now in Apple’s iStore, by which people anywhere can report corruption.

It’s an app that Danaylov hopes could save lives. He pointed out that innocent people needlessly suffer and die because of dishonest or exploitative behaviors by their leaders: 83% of earthquake building collapse deaths in the past 30 years were in countries that were anomalously corrupt, while a lack of oversight in China’s train systems has led to deadly train collisions.

“Corruption has a very serious direct cost in terms of lives lost. It’s not just a problem on paper. It’s a real life-threatening problem,” he said.

By increasing awareness among all the globe’s publics about corruption, however, Danaylov hopes that the app could foster more dialogue about existing problems and how to solve them. People in the affected countries could confront their political systems’ failures, and do so with support and guidance from concerned citizens of other countries.

“Intelligence outside a community is always greater than intelligence inside,” he said.

Singularity University itself received a few words of praise from Andrew Hessel, cellular biologist who founded the open-source research firm Pink Army Cooperative and, in addition, is on Singularity University’s faculty. He spoke of his frustrations with traditional university systems that stratify fields of study into separate departments that interact little with each other, and in which every department generally resists new ideas. Singularity University stands apart because of its integration of all disciplines and its zealous pursuit of new ways of thinking.

“I’ve been with this group since 2009, and I’ve never had to push an idea uphill. In fact, I learn how to push my boundaries out a bit more,” he said. “They have a vision that is a fearlessness about looking into the future, one that is different from what you see in most universities today.” [Editor’s note: a video clip of Andrew Hessel’s impromptu presentation at the Singularity University session is available at the World Future Society’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/WorldFutureSociety.]

More Monitoring, More Health

Medicine will find better ways of matching patients with effective, safe pharmaceutical treatments than today’s standard clinical trials. It has to: Clinical trials use test populations that are too small and too homogenous, so a drug can pass clinical trials but still turn out to be ineffective or even harmful for many patients. Jay Herson, himself a data analyst who worked in clinical trials for more than 30 years, outlined the problem and some solutions in his talk, “The Future of Global Drug Safety.”

Personalized medicine could be a driver. Patients might consult not only with doctors and nurses, but also with software programs—provided by doctor groups and insurance companies—that observe and advise each patient directly. The program could work with biosensors in your home to obtain information about your personality, lifestyle, and even credit-card purchases and emails to discern what drugs and treatments will work for you, and what lifestyle changes you need to make.

“Siri could give advice based on personality,” Herson said. “It could judge, for example, that this patient is not a morning person, so wouldn’t give him or her any new suggestions until the afternoon.”

The doctors, on their end, will get continuous, instantaneous flows of data from those same apparatuses on their patients’ blood, sleep patterns, and other vital signs, and will make fast decisions accordingly. They will know if a patient is taking a prescription and complying with treatment or not—all by virtue of nanoparticles, engrained within the medications, that the electronic sensors will detect. Just as important, they will know if the same prescription or treatment is causing the patient a bad reaction.

“Big data allows for the merger of health-care delivery, clinical trials, and post-market surveillance,” Herson said. “Practicing health providers will have safety like never before.”

That said, adverse effects to drugs will probably still occur, albeit less often. Herson explained that any given drug may affect a given patient differently due to interaction of outside environmental factors with the drug and the patient’s behavior, lifestyle, and diet. Also, no medical innovation can control for individual patients choosing to overdose or to use other people’s prescribed drugs.

“There will always be adverse events, and we will always be learning, even when we know more about personalized medicine,” he said.

At the macro level, pharmaceutical companies and health-provider networks will accumulate and share extensive databases of patient outcomes. They will plug in to patients’ home biosensors and will be notified immediately if someone reacts badly to a drug or treatment.

“What we need is early safety signals, some continuous form of surveillance. We need patient-level data,” he said.

Of course, all of this robotic surveillance of one’s daily living may sound bizarre and frightening to people today. But Herson noted that today’s millennials will be the adults by then, and they may be far more comfortable with all the monitoring.

“People will be digital natives and used to going to computers in everyday life and having surveillance of all their activities,” he said.

The Future of Quantum Computers

Quantum computers are already solving problems too complex for even the most powerful conventional computers. Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One computing system, thinks that quantum computing just might be the key to true machine intelligence. In his keynote presentation, “Using Quantum Computers to Build Artificial Brains,” he discussed the nature of quantum computing and its implications.

One premise of quantum mechanics is that, every time a decision is made, the whole universe forks and generates copies of itself only marginally different from that original decision. In like fashion, a quantum computer sees more than one possibility, generates copies of each, and then uses information from each and combines them to solve a problem.

A conventional computer can calculate far more rapidly than a human but cannot make decisions, per se. It can only follow prewritten instructions. A quantum computer might be able to make decisions, which will open up many new possibilities for robotic action.

“One example is autonomous robots in hostile environments like Mars,” Rose said. “Those robots will be exposed to things that their designers did not know about a priori, and they will need some autonomy to make some decisions on their own.”

Quantum computers are increasing in computing power. Rose presented the historical trajectory from Calypso, a computer chip with four qubits (quantum bits), in 2002 to Vesuvius 3, a computer chip that debuted this year with 512 qubits. He forecasts that in 10 years, someone could design a chip that holds millions of qubits. Then there is no telling just how smart upcoming lines of quantum systems could be.

“Hopefully, in 10 to 15 years, it won’t be me giving this presentation. It will be something that we created,” he said.

Innovative Approaches to Earth Conservation

People striving to reduce their “carbon footprints” by cutting back electricity use, eating less meat, and so on mean well, but their efforts will not in themselves curb climate change and pollution, according to Ramez Naam, senior associate at the Foresight Institute. In his session, “Can Innovation Save the Planet?” he stressed that society will have to combine sustainable behaviors with the rollout of new green technologies.

“It has to be based on innovation,” he said.

Innovations have already dropped the cost of solar power from $20 a watt 30 years ago to around $1 today—roughly on par with coal, oil, and natural gas, Naam said. He also spoke highly of research and development in lithium-ion batteries, which he said could eventually give electric cars the same range as combustible-fuel-powered cars of today.

“Energy storage is a bigger problem than energy capturing, but there is no reason to believe that we will not solve it,” he said.

Naam turned to the related subjects of water and food. Stores of freshwater are running low throughout the world, and projections are that the global community will have to increase food yield 70% by 2050. Both problems are solvable, he argued: The amount of energy required to desalinate water has dropped by a factor of nine since 1970, and improved farming methods are already enabling farmers to grow the same amounts of produce with one-third to one-half less energy and water than they needed in the 1970s.

Furthermore, in industrialized nations, food yield is twice what it is in the world as a whole. Naam is hopeful that more developments, particularly in genetic crop modification, could lead to even bigger farm productivity gains in years to come. On a related note, he reported that the European Union’s science advisor concluded recently that genetically modified crops have no more adverse health effects than average crops.

“Ideas are the ultimate resource. They grow over time, and they are the only one that accumulates over time,” he said. “Ideas find substitutes for resources.”

Naam also argued for taxes on carbon-dioxide emissions. If anti-tax critics contend that it would harm the economy, then a government could even lower the income tax in direct proportion to the carbon tax increase, so that the overall tax implementation is revenue-neutral.

“Tax the bad, not the good,” Naam advised. “Whatever you tax, you will get less of it.”

Bringing a Country Together on Sustainability

For a country to effectively stop environmental degradation and adopt environmentally healthy ways of life, it needs committed action both at the top levels of leadership and at the grassroots, observed Kenneth Hunter, chair of the WFS Board of Directors, and Zhouying Jin, senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in their joint session, “Systemic Solution to Achieving Green Economic Growth and Sustainable Development.”

Hunter and Jin noted that China and the United States both fall short: China has a lot of top-level action, but not grassroots activism, while the United States has grassroots activism but ambivalent top leadership. Also, both countries’ leaders tend to overly focus on the near future, but might move eventually toward action that is more integrated, cohesive, and oriented toward the long term.

“We are dealing with very large and complex systems, and it requires large management systems,” Hunter said. “But local communities and companies are where things have to actually happen. That’s where the integration has to take place.”

Jin presented an ideal model for action called the Long-Term Strategic System Integration Model (LSSIM). Its characteristics include attending to the goals of environmental sustainability, social welfare, and economic growth all at once. Continuing innovation, road maps for progress, and verifications to check results are other key components, along with exercising strategic management at the micro, macro, and meso levels.

Serious problems persist in China, according to Jin, and many of its renewable-energy businesses are struggling. For example, 30% of its photovoltaic companies have cut production in the last few years. Jin stated that a comprehensive strategy and the use of futures studies to formulate strategic goals will be necessary to achieve truly sustainable outcomes.

“China has taken a solid step in developing a green economy, and its future plan is also exciting. However, for really actualizing green development, the challenges are severe,” she said. “The only option is to fundamentally change the development mode.”

The Future Is Ours to Create

“You can’t let the future happen to you. We all have to be active participants in our future. We all have to have a vision for it, and we all have to have an opinion about it. We all have to do something,” said Intel futurist Johnson.

This year’s WorldFuture participants came from many places and professions, and they doubtless had a multitude of differing opinions about the future. But all would have agreed with Johnson’s statement. It’s indeed vital that people and organizations everywhere participate actively in creating the future.

In that spirit, the World Future Society will continue to be a gathering place for future-minded people everywhere, both now and in years to come.

About the Author

Rick Docksai is an associate editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. Email rdocksai@wfs.org.

Innovate or Else

By Rick Docksai

At WorldFuture 2012, consultant Jim Harris warns about being blindsided.

Futuring is not just about building the future, but also about being prepared for the future that others are building.

Confectionary giant Mars Inc. suddenly lost huge amounts of revenue about four years ago. Why? Was it other candy companies stepping up competition? No: It was due to the proliferation of SMS messaging, and young people preferring to spend money on mobile texting services than on chocolate bars.

At “WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver,” management consultant Jim Harris, author of Blindsided, cited Mars’ dilemma as a prime example of the unanticipated changes in environment that can “blindside” a business and catch any business off guard.

“When these trends begin to shift, companies best get in early on the change, rather than wait until it rolls over on them,” he said.

No business or organization can predict what new challenges will emerge in years ahead, he pointed out, but they can make sure that they will be as responsive and adaptable as possible. The key, he said, is innovation.

“Innovation is the flipside of blindsiding. Innovation is the solution, is the antidote to avoid being blindsided,” he said. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

More game-changers for business might be all around us, he went on to say. And whether you’re in the confectionary industry or not, you’ll want to keep on the lookout for them. He suggested a few of them.

In Kenya, for instance, only a quarter of the population has a bank account. Enter the new app MPesa, account on your mobile phone and you can text funds to family members or other contacts. The size of the transactions are tiny, and the mobile company (Safari) takes a cut that is miniscule compared to what mobile phone companies would take as part of the transaction. Given how MPesa raises its impoverished users’ standards of living by helping them conduct commerce, it’s not far-fetched to think that it might eventually make its way to communities in the industrialized world.

“Think this could roll over the world of western banking as we know it?” Harris asked.

Medical care is ripe for blindsiding by medical tourism, he added. Many heart patients might decline a $100,000 triple-bypass operation in the United States and go instead to an accredited hospital in India, where they could obtain the same procedure for $10,000.

India is also the scene of a new sub-compact, fuel-efficient car, the Nano. A buyer can get one new for $2,500. Harris noted that in the first two weeks following its debut, the company sold two-thirds of a year’s worth of production—could this take the whole automotive world by surprise?

Open-source software is yet another game changer. Harris cited Malaysia, which instituted a Microsoft-Word-like Open Office program. Its code would have cost $10 billion for software professionals to assemble, but Malaysia did it for free, with all coding contributed by volunteers.

Harris reserved particular plaudits for open-source knowledge sharing, which he said businesses everywhere need to find ways to utilize. It can only help, he argued, to be able to draw more information and perspective from more people, but too many businesses are sticking to vertical leadership modes that utilize only the know-how of the few executives at the top.

“The democratization of information, of knowledge, is a powerful trend,” he said. “We have a nineteenth-century management model in a twenty-first-century reality. Corporations need to work in new ways to unleash that hidden talent and potential.”

Nor is it a coincidence that every one of the potentially radical innovations that Harris described has emerged in developing countries, places that most established industry professionals would be inclined to ignore. The nature of blindsiding changes, according to Harris, is that they can arise from where one might least expect them.

As a corollary, he told his audience, any established industry must continue to stay on top of newly emerging trends, or else it will surely be taken by surprise. At the very least, it will short-change its customers. He offered Ford as a case in point: Ford’s turn-of-the-century Model T got 25 miles per gallon, and a Ford SUV today gets an even paltrier 17 miles per gallon. Hence, U.S. car buyers’ dependence on fossil fuels only continues to grow, despite the advent of hybrid technologies that could mitigate it.

“If every car in North America got the same efficiency as my Prius, there would be no need to import oil into North America,” he said. “We have all the resources we need to solve the problems facing our world. It’s merely a matter of priorities.”

For more information, contact: Jim Harris, Strategic Advantage, www.strategicadvantage.com.

Tomorrow in Brief

Threats to Biodiversity in Protected Forests

COURTESY OF VIRGINIA TECH

Conservation researcher Sarah
Karpanty in Madagascar’s
Ranomafana National Park.

Many of the world’s tropical forest preserves are experiencing declines in biodiversity, reports a team of conservation researchers in the journal Nature.

Tropical forests are rich in terms of numbers of species, but protected areas are struggling to sustain their diversity—mirroring threats to the surrounding areas, such as lack of protection and encroachment from illegal colonists, hunters, and loggers.

The study found that most preserves do help protect the surrounding forests, but about half were losing old-growth trees and wildlife, such as many primates, stream-dwelling fish, and amphibians.

“We need to be as aggressive in eliminating threats outside of park boundaries as we are in establishing new parks or maintaining existing ones,” concludes Sarah Karpanty, associate professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech.

Source: Virginia Tech, www.vt.edu.

Sapphire Optics

JOHN BALLATO / CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

Sapphire fiber developed
by Clemson University materials
engineers.

Sapphire may soon supplant silica as an effective and affordable medium for fiber optics.

Silica-based optical fiber has nearly reached its physical limits for transmitting information, observes John Ballato, director of the Center for Optical Materials Science and Engineering Technologies at Clemson University. As demand for high-speed data transmission accelerates, the need for more durable materials is becoming critical.

Sapphire is widely available, low cost, and has proved valuable in high-energy lasers. Ballato and his team have developed new techniques for creating fibers that overcome the challenges associated with sapphire’s crystalline structure. This will make sapphire fibers more useful for high-energy applications than typical commercial fibers.

Source: Clemson University, www.clemson.edu.

Acoustic Tweezers

XIAOYUN DING, STEPHEN J. BENKOVIC, AND TONY JUN HUANG / PENN STATE

Acoustic tweezers use ultrasound waves to manipulate
cells into patterns without touching them.

Ultrasound used in medical imaging may soon be deployed as a new, noninvasive tool for biomedical research and other applications. The “acoustic tweezers,” under development at Penn State University, can move and manipulate tiny objects like blood cells and even small organisms without touching them.

The acoustic tweezers are based on a piezoelectric material that produces mechanical motion when an electrical current is applied. Ultrasound offers a more affordable alternative to optical tweezers or lasers to produce this effect, because it requires less power density, according to Tony Jun Huang, associate professor of bioengineering. It is also far smaller and produces less heat than lasers, thus making the device less likely to damage cells.

Among the potential applications of the device are point- of-care cancer cell sorting and diagnostics, says Huang.

Source: Materials Research Institute, Penn State University, www.mri.psu.edu.

Amish Boom

© CARLOS GUTIERREZ / ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

Horse-drawn buggies may
become a more common
sight on U.S. rural roads, as
Amish population increases.

The fastest-growing religious group in the United States is the Amish, whose numbers will reach 1 million shortly after 2050, according to Joseph Donnermeyer, professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University.

While most other religions experience growth due to conversions, Amish communities are growing on sheer family size and numbers of baptisms. A new Amish settlement is founded every three and a half weeks, and more than 60% of Amish settlements in the United States have been founded just since 1990.

Among the impacts of this boom in a traditionally technology-averse population will be more demand for farmland and farm jobs, which may not be able to keep pace with growth. As Amish men then turn to nonfarm jobs such as woodworking, local economies could see a boost from new business startups, Donnermeyer predicts.

Source: Ohio State University, www.osu.edu.

A Curriculum for Foresight

What futurists can learn from middle-school educators, and vice versa.

By John C. Lundt

Education reformers often invoke the possibility of abandoning the middle-school concept and returning to the K-8 elementary school format. But what might schools, adolescents, and indeed futurists lose?

There are striking similarities between the middle-school model and what futurists have outlined as characteristics necessary for an education that prepares young people for the future. Futurists and middle-school educators share similar worldviews, goals, and ideals, with high regard for the following qualities and values.

• Humanism. A humanistic approach is common to both middle-school educators and futurists. Futurists have a deep-seated positive regard for the nature and potential of humanity. A central premise of the futures movement is the belief that people have the capacity to shape the future.

In a similar fashion, middle-school educators strive to maximize the development of the human potential. Middle-school educators recognize that their student population is emerging and developing in an ever-changing world. The result is a very dynamic, future-looking curriculum model.

Middle-school educators strive to understand the nature, characteristics, and needs of their students. They take the time to get to know their students as individuals as well as clients and demonstrate concern for students’ general well-being by actively encouraging them to develop healthy lifestyles that will have life-long benefits.

• Pragmatism. Middle-school educators and futurists both tend to be forward-looking, dynamic, and pragmatic. All futurists have a serious interest in what will happen in years to come. They view education as a continual, lifelong process.

Middle-school educators also recognize the dynamic nature of society and strive to meet the needs of their ever-changing student population. Middle-school teachers see themselves as facilitators and encourage their students to actively participate in the learning process. The best middle schools have students who are active learners employing higher-order thinking skills to resolve long-term issues.

Futurists and middle-school teachers generally have a pragmatic rather than ideological approach to life. Futurists want to know what will work in terms of improving the human condition over the long term. Middle-school teachers view curriculum development as a dynamic rather than static process. Both futurists and middle-school educators put their faith in strategies that work.

• Comfort with change. Middle-school educators and futurists are also similar in their approach to the change process. As a group, futurists are more willing than most to change their minds and adopt new positions. They are hospitable to social experiments and innovations. Middle-school educators are also comfortable with change.

Middle schools focus on developing a curriculum that meets the needs of the emerging adolescent population, which means recognizing the dynamic nature of society and of adolescence. As futurists know, an essential part of dealing with change is the ability to operate in the realm of the unknown.

• Interest in exploring the unknown. Futurists have long accepted the idea that absolute answers are not available for every question. Success requires a proactive approach, an interest in long-term issues, and the ability to work on problems for which no definitive answers are available.

In similar fashion, the best middle-school programs include a healthy dose of problem solving. Interdisciplinary team activities often include large and small group problem-solving exercises that feature questions for which there are no final or “correct” answers.

• Affinity for interdisciplinary thinking and work. Futurists have long employed a cross-disciplinary model. Middle-school educators have also long recognized the interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum. The most effective middle schools acknowledge the relationships between and among the subject areas and favor an interdisciplinary approach to learning.

• Ability to thrive in collaboration. Collaborative interaction in the form of team teaching, team learning, or cooperative learning is very much a part both the middle school and futurist paradigms. As a part of their cross-disciplinary approach, futurists have always operated from a global or universal, rather than local or nationalistic, perspective.

For many of the same reasons, middle-school educators have favored a collaborative approach to problem solving, and they generally work well with others in group situations. Like futurists, middle-school educators favor a holistic approach to the broad-ranging array of issues that face them.

Future Curricular Needs

The futurist movement and the middle-school model clearly share numerous similarities in purpose and strategies, and in many ways the middle-school model fills the needs for education that are most often identified by futurists, including:

• Clear thinking, evaluation, and analysis. These skills are not only concerned with the student’s ability to learn cognitive material, but also with the ability to analyze and evaluate information. Middle-school curriculums focus on clear thinking skills that lead to creative solutions to complex problems.

• Understanding the environment. Many excellent interdisciplinary middle-school team projects are centered on science programs that emphasize future ecological needs. Students are actively involved in projects that protect the environment, conserve energy, and recycle resources.

• Accessing information and solving for the unknown. Information access and problem solving have long been a part of the middle-school interdisciplinary curriculum. Through team teaching and cooperative learning activities, middle-school teams have been leaders in the area of creative problem solving. Often these team activities are centered on open-ended questions that do not lend themselves to a single correct answer, but rather have several correct possibilities.

• Personal competence through lifelong learning. Middle schools are unique among educational institutions in that they were created for a specific philosophical purpose, which is to meet the developmental needs of their student population.

A central part of this philosophy is the recognition of the dynamic nature of the educational mission. Not only are middle-school students involved in the developmental transition from childhood to adulthood, but they now are also doing so at a time when the world around them is undergoing the most rapid rate of change in human history. Better than any other current educational model, the middle-school curriculum addresses this essential need.

• Social diversity and global citizenship. The last skill identified by those writing about the curricular needs of the future is the need for understanding the role of the individual and society, the importance of social diversity, and the responsibilities associated with global citizenship.

Here also, the middle-school curriculum strives to address these issues. Students who work closely with each other and with their teachers in team teaching and cooperative learning activities have an opportunity to interact on a level that can greatly enhance their understanding of both social diversity and the relationship between the individual and society. Middle-school activities such as the advisory program provide excellent opportunities for students to discuss and explore diversity and global citizenship issues and determine their related responsibilities in the world of the future.

It is fair to say that the middle school not only goes a long way toward meeting the educational needs outlined by futurists, but also has the potential to continue to meet developing future needs. While futurists may be correct in their concern for the overall educational picture, they should be careful not to overlook the ability of the middle school to address important needs.

Both futurists and middle-school educators are striving to face the challenges of the future in very similar ways. It would be tragic to abandon an educational model that has the greatest chance of succeeding.

John Lundt, EdD, worked for 35 years in the middle-school area as a teacher, principal, and university professor. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Montana. E-mail johninmt@centric.net.

Ecoful Town: A Neighborhood Tour of Green Innovation

COURTESY OF TOYOTA-ECOFULTOWN.COM

Toyota City's Ecoful Town layout showcases sustainable
living at the neighborhood level.

A city best known for auto making builds a life-sized model of sustainable living.

Toyota City, Japan, is already famous for being the home of international automobile maker Toyota. But as of May 2012, the city has been earning renown for something else: ecological sustainability. That month marked the debut of Ecoful Town, a neighborhood-sized walking tour of innovations that the town is pursuing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, according to a Japanese government press release.

The roads coursing through the Ecoful Town are coated with water-retaining and thermal-insulation substances to minimize heat emission. Complementing the roads is a “demand-responsive” transportation system that can call up a bus to a location any time, as needed.

The buildings in Ecoful Town include a model “smart home” outfitted with solar panels, storage batteries, and an energy-management system, along with a Pavilion that draws energy from solar panels while regulating indoor temperatures passively via a moss covering on its walls. The Pavilion also houses interactive quizzes and videos that educate viewers about Toyota City’s pursuit of low-carbon living.

“Ecoful Town allows us to show visitors from home and abroad how Toyota City is striving to create a low-carbon society,” says Mayor Toshihiko Ota, in a statement to the press. “We hope we can help popularize this enjoyable, pressure- and waste-free way of life, one that harnesses the latest environmental technologies, in countries around the world.”

Ecoful Town is the product of a consortium of companies, some of them based in the city and some from other locales, who first gathered to form a Toyota City Low-Carbon Society Verification Promotion Council with Toyota City’s municipal leadership. Together, the group has been researching and designing new clean-energy, energy management, and smart-growth systems that communities such as Toyota City could put to use. Ecoful Town displays many of these innovations.

“The companies … are cooperating to conduct verification projects for constructing next-generation, low-carbon energy and society systems. There are some companies, both from inside and outside of the city, participating by supplying our facility their own technology or products which they want to promote,” says says Makoto Shioya, a spokesperson for Ecoful Town.

The city’s residents are paying attention: Home buyers have purchased 67 smart houses in the city. Ecoful is also attracting crowds of visitors from across the country, as well as the heads of foreign governments, international businesses, and universities.

Shioya reports a lot of positive feedback from the visitors, including some who say that they see products on display that they might purchase, and others who say that the facility gives them ideas on how to renovate their own homes and communities.

That’s what the designers had been hoping for, Shioya adds. They wanted Ecoful to be a persuasive test case for home and building construction that is low on energy use and waste, and which keeps its carbon footprint small to nil.

“By presenting a low-carbon city and home life with developed environmental technologies, we are suggesting ways to change our lifestyle to a more comfortable and affordable eco-life with no waste,” says Shioya.

—Rick Docksai

Source: Makoto Shioya (interview), Toyota City, http://www.city.toyota .aichi.jp.

Market for Bioplastics

RICK DOCKSAI

Cases of Dasani water delivered
in “plant bottles”—containers made
with 30% bio-based plastic.

Businesses are developing green alternatives to fossil-fuel-based plastics.

Many consumers don’t know it, but “peak oil” would mean “peak plastic,” since the main ingredients of plastics include oil and natural gas. However, growing numbers of manufacturers are seeking a renewable alternative in bioplastics, whose ingredients derive from biomass sources such as algae, sugarcane, or soybeans.

A 2012 study by the market research firm Freedonia Group forecasts that demand in the United States for bioplastics will grow by 20% a year through 2016, up from 18.5% a year over the five years prior. Bioplastics constitute less than 1% of plastics today. However, Kent Furst, a Freedonia Group senior analyst, thinks that they could slowly supplant conventional plastics in the decades ahead.

Many companies are already investing increasing sums into bioplastics research and development, Furst notes. He points out that most analysts expect oil prices to keep rising over time. Meanwhile, bioplastics manufacturing could gradually become cheaper as the technologies and methods improve.

“Where bioplastics may have an advantage is in access to raw materials. Many producers see plant-based raw materials as more stable in terms of price and supply than petrochemical feedstocks,” Furst says.

Coca-Cola is one of those producers, according to Melissa Hockstad, vice president of science, technology, and regulatory affairs for the Plastics Industry Trade Association. She says that, in May 2009, Coca-Cola began packaging some of its sodas into “plant bottles” that were 30% bio-based polyethylene—a bioplastic that producers can synthesize from sugarcane. Although not all Coca-Cola bottles are plant bottles, a growing share are.

“As the months go by I see more and more plant bottles on the store shelves, so it’s definitely growing,” Hockstad says. Pepsi is going a step further, she adds. In 2013, it plans to debut bottles that are 100% bioplastic.

Food supplies are some of the most common uses for bioplastics, Hockstad notes, along with cleaning supplies and agriculture. Even car companies are exploring bioplastics’ potential. Hockstad cites Ford, which began installing headrests made of soybean-based foam into its cars this year.

Hockstad attributes some of businesses’ interest in bioplastics to a growing focus on sustainability. Business leaders increasingly see value in using materials that do minimal harm to the environment’s health—materials such as bioplastics.

“Some of the questions they’re starting to ask is ‘where are the materials coming from?’ and ‘What are the uses?’” she says. “We’re starting to see more brand owners interested in sustainability, and this is where we’re starting to see a lot of excitement for bioplastics.”

Conventional plastics are still cheaper. Furst emphasizes that bioplastics and their bio-based sources are new, so they will need time to improve and become more economical.

“The plastics industry has had the better part of a century to perfect the chemistry and manufacturing processes to create better and better materials. Bioplastics such as PLA [polyactic acid] are always going to be playing catch-up in this area,” he says.

PLA is the bioplastic that the Freedonia Group report forecasts will be the most extensively used. This compound has some downsides, though: It doesn’t decompose, and, since it closely resembles other plastics, recycling centers’ automated systems have difficulty sorting it out from them—a problem because different products require different plastics.

“Because PLA is such a new material, most automatic systems are not equipped to handle it. This is a substantial detriment to the environmental attractiveness of PLA,” Furst says.

Innovation may help, however. Several new recycling companies that specialize in PLA recycling have already debuted, and as PLA becomes more widely used, other recyclers may eventually install new systems that can identify PLA, according to Furst.

Bio-based polyethylene (PE) is another bioplastic that corporations heavily favor, according to the report. Furst credits the relatively easy extraction process: PE derives from plant-based ethanol, which is already a well-established fuel source in many countries, and it is “identical” to synthetic PE, so companies that have been manufacturing PE for years can easily switch over.

“This technology is already well-established,” he says.

That PE and other bioplastics need biofuel crops raises concern among critics who object to setting aside more farmland for biofuels. Larry Koester, vice president of communication for the Society of Plastics Engineers’ Environmental Division, argues that the world more urgently needs that farmland for food.

“I grew up on a farm, and I know how hard it is to grow corn. I don’t want to see it converted into a gasoline or a plastic,” says Koester.

He’s more amenable, though, to the use of sugarcane. Bioplastics made from sugarcane use the leftover plant stocks of already-harvested crops, so the farmers do not need to allocate any land for them.

“That chemistry works. I don’t know about the economics of it, but there’s no question about the chemistry,” says Koester.

Furst, like Koester, also sees hope in developing bioplastics from “waste” plant stock as a means to obtain plastics without sacrificing farmland. Switchgrass and rice hulls are two examples, in addition to sugarcane, that he considers promising.

“If this is commercialized, it would significantly reduce the carbon footprint and make bioplastics a true boon for the environment,” he says. —Rick Docksai

Sources: Kent Furst, The Freedonia Group.The report Bioplastics (published 06/2012, 240 pages) is available for $4,900 from The Freedonia Group Inc., www.freedoniagroup.com.

Melissa Hockstad, Plastics Industry Trade Association, www.plastics industry.org.

Larry Koester, Society of Plastics Engineers, www.sperecycling.org.

The Rise of mChurches: From Mega to Mobile

Communicating with congregations in the social-media era challenges church leaders.

If you’re looking for an institutional role model for communicating with customers, turn your eyes upward to churches. After all, publishing’s first bestseller was—and is—the Bible.

Christian churches in the United States have often been early (or at least rapid) adopters of new technologies to spread messages of faith to the masses. For example, the televangelism trend of the 1970s turned megachurches into media empires. In the 1980s and 1990s, many churches adopted the technologically sophisticated theatrical lighting and sound designs pioneered for Broadway.

So the next big things in missionary outreach should not be very surprising: social networking and mobile apps that connect even more individuals to communities of faith.

In addition to live-streaming a weekly sermon, for instance, a church’s mobile strategy could include allowing congregations to connect and share more with each other directly, says Matt McKee, CEO of ROAR, a social media company that works with churches and other nonprofits. This may be especially important to minority ministries, he believes.

“We feel like we’re empowering urban communities to use technology because of the reasonable costs for development and the expertise we bring to the table,” McKee says. “We have a new partnership with T. D. Jakes Ministries and we’re working with churches like Church Without Walls in Houston, and these experiences are helping us reach out to more groups like them.” —Cynthia G. Wagner

Source: ROAR, http://ROAR.pro.

An Economy Of, By, and For the People

Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution

By Rick Docksai

In Owning Our Future, business ethicist Marjorie Kelly envisions commerce that makes human well-being, not wealth, its goal.

Although economic stagflation may be everywhere we look, seeds of a new, healthy, ecologically sustainable economy that serves the many appear to be sprouting. Marjorie Kelly, director of ownership strategy at Cutting Edge Capital, calls this new mode the generative economy. It encompasses many different business models, but they have a common trait: private ownership for the common good.

Generative design creates stability by avoiding excess, Kelly explains. These schemes generate wealth for their owners, but not to the extreme degree of today’s institutions. They are set up expressly so that too much wealth does not end up concentrated in a select few hands. More importantly, these businesses operate under clearly stated ethical frameworks and societal missions. Their founders direct them to serve community needs, not to maximize profit.

“They know it’s possible to have plenty and recognize that enough is enough,” Kelly writes. “There are other things they value more highly, like being happy, living authentically, feeling alive. Living well in community. Leaving the world a better place.”

Examples are emerging everywhere. The “solidarity economy”—cooperatives and nonprofits—is catching on in Latin America and Canada. Quebec has formally recognized it as an economic sector and now regularly funds it.

Other examples:

• The United Kingdom’s building societies are member-owned banking organizations. Because the customers are the owners, the banks exist to serve their needs, not to enrich shareholders. They have far lower-than-average rates of foreclosures and loan defaults to show for it, since borrowers obtain loans under fair terms and can work out reasonable payment arrangements.
• A British supermarket company, John Lewis Partnership, states its mission as commitment to the happiness of its employees. Each employee has partial ownership in the company, and between 40% and 60% of every year’s after-tax profits go directly to the employees as bonuses and salary increases. And on one occasion, when one of its warehouses had to shut down, the management helped the displaced employees to write résumés and find new jobs elsewhere.
• Minnesota’s energy cooperative Minwind operates the first farmer-owned wind-power turbines in the United States. All shareholders live in Minnesota, and 85% of the investors come from rural communities. The company is a sharp departure from the traditional business model under which farmers build wind turbines on their land but lease away the rights to absentee developers; the farmers themselves get to claim the wealth.

Society today wrongly believes that wealth creation is a virtually limitless process, according to Kelly. She argues that growth always has limits, and every economy eventually reaches them. She sharply distinguishes the real economy versus the financial economy, which consists of claims on the actual money of the real economy.

The financial economy is now four times as big as the real economy, which means that the world’s financial system rests upon a multitude of claims to money that no one has the money to actually pay! Its outcome is already obvious: financial crashes, like the one that swept the world in 2008.

Kelly places hope in such generative design models as the building societies, John Lewis, and Minwind. With their commitments to their communities and to their rank-and-file employees, they are examples of the responsible and sustainable business practices that the global economy so critically needs.

“As we make the painful turn into a new era—characterized by climate change, water shortages, species extinction, vast unemployment, stagnant wages, staggering differentials in health, and bloated debt loads—the industrial-age model of ownership is beginning to make less sense,” she writes. “It’s time to move beyond growth, to recognize that the economy as we once knew it will never return. Nor should it.”

The twentieth century saw a worldwide clash of capitalism and communism, and communism’s collapse left commentators proclaiming that capitalism is the only game in town. Marjorie Kelly’s ground-level reporting proves that it is not: Forward-thinking entrepreneurs are renouncing the worst aspects of both ideologies and constructing new ways of owning property and creating profits that affirm the individual while also benefiting the collective. Readers who long for a more just economic order will find an abundance of provocative ideas in Owning Our Future.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is associate editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. Email rdocksai@wfs.org.