| [from THE FUTURIST, November-December 2002]
WorldView 2002: Futures
Unlimited!
The world won't work unless the world works together,
concluded several speakers at the World Future Society's annual meeting in Philadelphia.
By Cynthia G. Wagner
The crisis of confidence in the future aroused by terrorist threats and
business scandals created a highly charged atmosphere at the World Future Society's annual
meeting WorldView 2002: Futures Unlimited! Chaired by Arthur B. Shostak,
professor of sociology at Drexel University, the meeting attracted some 800 participants
from around the world to Philadelphia July 20-22.
Sessions on the impacts of September 11 and potential terrorist actions were well
attended, but so were sessions devoted to finding solutions to immediate threats and
renewing faith in the institutions intended to make the long-term future work.
Marvin Cetron of Forecasting International Ltd. warned of many indicators
pointing to continued threats from al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, who is seen as
a religious leader in the Islamic world. One indicator, Cetron noted, is that the name
"Osama" has become the second-most-popular name for new baby boys (after
"Muhammad").
Economic systems are an important potential target of terrorists,
according to Cetron, who shortly after September 11 led a study of more than a dozen
futurists on "what is going to give us grief in the future that we're not looking at
now." One thing the participants agreed on was the fragility of the West's
credit-card-supported consumerism: An electromagnetic pulse could wipe out these
transactions and bring the economy to a halt, the study pointed out. The study is now
being used by the intelligence community, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency,
and others.
There were also warning signs about the current business scandals. One warning, for
instance, was the response among business school students seven years ago to a survey on
whether they would commit an unethical act if it had a high payoff, Cetron noted.
"They said if they only had to go to jail for two years and still ended up with $12
million, they'd do it. And that's what we have now." (The Dow Jones Industrial
Average had plummeted to a four-year low the day before the conference began, and the
sagging economy has been widely blamed on accounting scandals and insider trading
involving major U.S. corporations such as Enron, ImClone, and WorldCom.)
Clearly, this shift in youth values in the United States has been a
trend long in the making, suggested Rushworth M. Kidder, president and founder of
the Institute for Global Ethics. He cited a longitudinal study of college freshmen that
asks, first, how important the individual feels it is to be very well off financially and,
second, how important it is to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. While meaning was
more important in the 1960s, students now rate financial success as more important, Kidder
reported.
The devaluation of ethics might in time reverse itself, but in the meantime the
consequences of unethical behavior are becoming ever more dangerous, said Kidder. For
example, the Chernobyl disaster was a result of workers doing an unauthorized experiment;
their unethical impulse was more dangerous because of the technologies involved.
Similarly, moral collapse in business affects far more individuals than ever before.
"Enron will be a footnote in history," he noted. "The big story was
Andersen. Before the shredding, they did nothing illegal. They collapsed over an ethical
question, and business dried up because they lost the public's trust."
Businesses are not the only institutions that have lost public trust; there has also
been a general "collapse of trust in expertise," Kidder argued. "We don't
trust WorldCom, the regulators, food, medicine, charities, the Church, or air traffic
controllers. Ethics must be reinserted into the core of all these activities. How are we
going to survive the twenty-first century with the ethics of the twentieth?"
Terrorism Makes Everything "Thinkable"
Preparing for the next terrorist threat "should be our top priority, but we are
totally unprepared to fight a war against an elusive enemy," said William B.
Davis, retired U.S. senior foreign service officer and chairman of Wisdom Inc.
Bioterrorism poses a particularly insidious threat, he noted. "A bioterrorist attack
would be impossible to prevent without specific intelligence in advance."
Davis outlined a frightening scenario of a potential attack on forests, a natural
resource vital to the economy. "Without forests, what would happen to the paper and
building industries, jobs, and species diversity?" he said, noting that such a
scenario was once unthinkable. "Since September 11, everything is 'thinkable.'"
Another "thinkable" target is food and agriculture, which represent one-sixth of
the total national domestic product in the United States, according to Davis. At present,
the retail food industry does not have a procedure for protecting food from a bioterrorist
attack, but lessons might be drawn from Britain's experience with mad cow disease and
Taiwan's experience with a recent foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.
Such efforts may come to naught without cooperation from the media, Davis argued.
"The media have learned much about our vulnerabilities," such as the inadequate
inspection of incoming cargo containers at ports, he charged. "We're giving away
more information than terrorists can afford to buy! We read vital information in the press
as though the enemies are illiterate."
Economic Threats
The threats of terrorism are compounded by the insecurities caused by problems in the
economy, such as the monetary crisis in Argentina and the business scandals in the United
States. As Marvin Cetron pointed out, "The economy recovered nicely after September
11, then corporate greed kicked in. Send 'em to jail."
But there is a good-news side to the bad-news economic situation, said futurist Hazel
Henderson, author of Building a Win-Win World. "Why is change so
difficult? Why is there so much fear? Because the old institutions have to break down
before there's a breakthrough," she explained. "We're seeing that now in all our
major institutions. This is a huge opportunity. We will have to work hard redesigning our
economies."
Henderson pointed out that economists traditionally ignore the nonmonetized aspects of
the economy, such as the services of caregivers and the costs of pollution. Now,
economists are starting to recognize the inadequacy of traditional economic measures such
as GDP. Similarly, money-based economics ignores the effects of bartering and mutual aid
in the developing world. Living on one or two dollars a day, some 2 billion people are
considered extremely poor. "They're not poor," Henderson argued.
"They're actually incredibly resourceful in managing their ecosystems." The
crisis in Argentina was the result of a "maldesigned economy," she said, and the
people have "gone back to bartering and cooperating, even making their own paper
money because they trust it."
The Coming "Great Depreciation"
A future crisis in developed-world economies looms as a result of aging populations,
according to Paul Hewitt, director of the global aging initiative for the Center
for Strategic and International Studies.
"Global aging could overwhelm the economy," said Hewitt. "In every
developed country, fertility is below the replacement level." By 2022, the economy
will be slowing and governments will start raising taxes. Look for an "Aging
Recession," accompanied by a "Great Depreciation" as baby boomers begin to
pull their retirement savings out of equity markets, he warned.
Another challenge to the developed world will be a shift in political dominance.
"If demography is destiny, global leadership may pass from developed countries to
developing ones," Hewitt noted. Global relations will be pressured as younger
societies need to expand and as older societies are beset by soaring retirement costs,
shrinking workforces, and stagnating economic growth.
To meet these challenges, developed societies should make some attitude adjustments,
Hewitt argued. "'Active aging' must replace 'rocking-chair retirement,'" he
said. "Scale back pay-as-you-go benefits and encourage working-age immigration and
cross-border investment and cooperation. We must treat aging as a global problem."
Futurists at Work
The annual meetings of the World
Future Society have become a valuable resource for professional futurists to exchange
ideas on improving their techniques and advancing their business. The Society also offers
special sessions and activities for chapters and new members as well as free
career-counseling consultations at every conference.
At the Chapter Meeting, Society
secretary-treasurer Ken Harris outlined five keys to a successful chapter: A core
of committed volunteers, varied and exciting programs, effective public relations,
appropriate meeting locations, and financial viability. Planning is especially important
to successful programs, noted participant Bob Chernow, a financial advisor with
Dain Rauscher, who recommended planning programs a year in advance. And exciting programs
need not undermine financial viability: Utilize "free" speakers such as authors
on publicity tours for new books.
Joined by Stephen Steele of Anne Arundel
Community College, Harris also led a brainstorming session on the Society's new project,
the World Future Network. Harris and Steele gave a preview of the Network's key
element, the World FutureGuide, a Web-based collection of trends and resources on
the future. Volunteers were solicited to work on committees to identify trends in the six
sectors of the macroenvironment (demography, economics, environment, government, society,
and technology), to help draft sample trend essays, and to work on administrative aspects
of the project, such as fund raising.
At a session on working as a futurist in a business
organization, Andy Hines of the Dow Chemical Company reminded participants that
they need to understand the organization's guiding futures orientation. Pop futures
focus on trends only and are "basically useless" to a business, Hines said.
Somewhat more useful are problem-oriented futures—practical, but still focused
on the near term. Critical futures studies attempt to discern deeper processes at
work that will affect an organization's future, and epistemological futures studies
force the organization to ask why it even exists.
Joseph Tankersley, senior show writer for Walt
Disney Imagineering, offered futurists several techniques for developing their
storytelling techniques in order to convey vivid and actionable images of the future to
their clients. "One of the first stories to put in your briefcase of tools should be why
you're a futurist," he said. "Come up with a dramatic story about it. The
greatest obstacle is the belief that you can't create the future. You've got to
break that barrier down and use that passion."
|
Global Cooperation and Interdependence
The need to strengthen institutions of international cooperation was much on the minds of
participants at WorldView 2002. Several sessions were devoted to outlining various efforts
to reinvent the United Nations or develop new mechanisms of cooperation.
There will still be nation-states, but there will also be other levels
of governance, said consulting futurist Joseph F. Coates. "Governance exists
to deal with problems at different levels," he pointed out. "As new problems
arise, new levels of governance emerge to handle them, including global governance. We
need to get over the foolishness of protecting 'our sovereignty.' Global governance will
be necessary."
Currently the leading institutional mechanism for global governance is the United
Nations, which is now more than 50 years old. "The UN charter was written more for
the world of the 1930s" than for the postwar future, said Tad Daley, a
visiting scholar at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. "The goal was
to prevent another Hitler. It was backward looking." What we need, he argued, is a
next-generation United Nations that is more forward looking. For instance, issues such as
genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will dramatically transform society in the
future, and we need to "design a political organization for dealing with them."
One big issue for a next-generation United Nations would be to find ways to make it a
more democratic institution, Daley suggested. "We need to get beyond the five
permanent members of the Security Council. The winners of a war fought in the first half
of the last century all have veto power and can stop all action," he pointed out. In
addition to a reconstitution of the Security Council there could be a People's Assembly
that is directly elected and stands beside the General Assembly.
Aside from the United Nations, a variety of other proposals have emerged
to enhance cooperation on global issues. "We have to put more emphasis on organizing
these efforts," said David Eldredge, president of the UN Association of
U.S.A.'s Greater Philadelphia Chapter. Noting that an assortment of "declarations of
interdependence" have emerged among various groups supporting various causes,
Eldredge said that "we need to go further than one particular emphasis, such as the
environment or the economy."
And in the United States, especially, the leadership still seeks to dominate the world
while the public supports international cooperation and a stronger United Nations.
"Our task is to convince policy makers that the public wants the United States to
engage in constructive dialogue and cooperation with the rest of the world," Eldredge
concluded.
Resolving international conflict through dialogue is difficult when negotiators can
only deal with one group at a time, noted former Ambassador John W. McDonald,
chairman of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy. His organization has worked with all
three major groups in Israel—Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians—but he said it is
hard to obtain funding for dialogue activities involving all three groups. "My
long-term solution is to get all groups involved," he said, noting that
nongovernmental organizations may be more effective at such efforts than governments.
"We can do it without political leaders."
But can a more effective political leader be reinvented for the future? "Politics
is broken," said John Vasconcellos, California state senator for Silicon
Valley. "It's destructive. It's all about who gets the most money. But we can fix
it."
What we need, Vasconcellos argued, is a politics that inspires us to be a part of the
change process and that does not exist to solve our problems for us. This will create a
politics that is more trustworthy and authentic. "If we believe we are all inclined
toward good, all trustworthy, then we can trust 'us'; we can share our lives and the
planet. We can share our goodness.
"We have to change politics," Vasconcellos concluded, "or we won't have
'Futures Unlimited' at all."
A WorldView Sampler |
