As such, the next forty years are likely to be among the most tumultuous the world has ever seen, even as they will undoubtedly be among the most peaceful. Many experts naturally reach for late-nineteenth-century imperial histories to imagine what lies ahead (e.g., empires and colonial wars), but I think more value is found in examining late-nineteenth-century American domestic history, in which a vast collection of regional economies was rapidly and radically stitched together into a far more unified, integrated, efficient whole. In that process of network and production integration, which by no means was approximated in Europe’s relatively crude colonial global economic order, huge inefficiencies were wrung out of the system. Likewise, all that networking exposed the population as a whole to new levels of communicable danger: disease, poor sanitation, bad food handling, environmental damage, and criminality of all sorts. As a result, vast domains of economic, social, and political life needed to be cleaned up, or essentially elevated to new minimum standards so as to avoid the transmission of destabilizing elements (e.g., epidemics, labor unrest, environmental catastrophes, radical ideologies). So rather than look for who’s playing the Kaiser’s Germany this time versus Victorian-era Britain, we instead need to be looking out for rising non-state actors, including leaders of state, who will aspire to the same roles once played within the American System by Booker T. Washington, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Roosevelt, and others. Indeed, the past decade’s list of Nobel Peace Prize winners suggests we’re just hitting our stride in this regard: cleaning up land mines (1997), medical work in remote areas (1999), the rights of women and children (2003), environmentalism in Africa (2004), nuclear energy (2005), micro-lending (2006), and global climate change (2007). In short, we’re heading into an era of great individual leaders, great organizations, and great change—but not great-power war.
The following is my best list of the many shifts I see the world enduring over the next couple of decades, all of which will figure as global tipping points in shaping an international progressive agenda focused on cleaning up globalization’s many dark corners.
The Consumption Shift
Right now the advanced Old Core West consumes resources and produces waste at a level approximately 32 times higher than the rest of the world. As that rest of the world catches up dramatically on income over this century, there’s simply no way our consumption pattern can be emulated. Indeed, the only way that rising middle-class demand can be accommodated is for the West to reduce its resource footprint, which many Americans might assume requires we live according to a lower standard of living, when—in truth—it does not. As Jared Diamond points out, “living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates.” Mobility is a good example: The global middle class will want increased mobility over time, but that doesn’t mean we need to extend America’s current rather wasteful gas-combustion vehicle pattern to the rest of the planet, nor that shifting off that model in America will make us any less mobile. But here’s where the consumption shift is twofold: Not only do the New Core and the Gap need to rapidly abandon the Malthusian “virtues” of their near-past, the Old Core has to abandon its Industrial Era disregard for organic limits to growth as well. Both shifts require a lot of political will, which simply hasn’t kept pace, on a global basis, with globalization’s rapid expansion. So, as Jeffrey Sachs argues, “the paradox of a unified global economy and divided global political society poses the single greatest threat to the planet because it makes impossible the cooperation needed to address the remaining challenges,” a condition he dubs “globalization without trust.” Thus the first item we can add to our progressive agenda is to clean up the impression that sustainable development is just a concept for the New Core and the Gap, when it will apply in equal measure to the Old Core West in coming years.
The Food and Water Shift
In the global oil industry, there is Saudi Arabia and everybody else. But when it comes to agriculture, it turns out that North America is the OPEC of global grain. So if the world’s got us over a barrel on energy, then we’ve got the world over a breadbasket. Moreover, while global climate change will progressively diminish OPEC’s importance as we’re forced to improve transportation technologies, it will only strengthen NAFTA’s role as the world’s preeminent food exporter.
Here’s the lay of the land when it comes to the global grain trade. There are four net exporting regions: North America exports 105 million metric tons, followed by the former Soviet Union at 21, South America at 18, and Australia/New Zealand at 9. So when it comes to spare capacity, North America accounts for a whopping 68 percent of the world’s movable feast, dominating global grain markets as we once dominated the cotton trade. The net importing regions are as follows: North Africa and the Middle East import 58 million metric tons, followed by Asia at 47 million tons, sub-Saharan Africa at 17, and Europe at 12. You want to talk “addicted” to foreign food? The Middle East imports just over three-quarters of its total food supply! Compare this with a North America that imports half that percentage.
Now add in the impact of global climate change and what do we foresee? Basically, the tech-rich regions that are net food exporters today will do as well as they do now or better, while the regions that are currently forced into importing will do decidedly worse—save Europe. On average, the farther you are from the equator, the less negative—and potentially more positive—will be the agricultural impact of global warming. This is why farmers in the Dakotas are presently tilling fields that have lain fallow for decades. It’s also why land speculators are having a field day in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, where roughly an entire Idaho-sized chunk of arable land awaits exploitation, and where current yields are less than half of America’s far more advanced agricultural system. It is also why the Chinese government (with Saudi Arabia right on its heels) has launched a not-very-secret plan to buy up arable land around the world, believing—rather naïvely—that in some future global food crunch, it will somehow siphon off precious grains from foreign lands with nobody noticing. Good luck with that transparent strategy, because during the 2008 price shock, many of the world’s major producing nations suddenly slapped restrictions on crop exports—including China! Why such extreme measures? In industrialized nations, food eats up only about one-tenth to one-fifth of a household’s spending, but in developing countries, that share can rise to as high as four-fifths. So if you think it’s tough to be poor in fragile states today, global warming and continued population growth will make it a lot harder—absent globalization’s successful expansion into these poorly developed and weakly connected markets.
A lot of things account for recently skyrocketing food prices: bad harvests, immoral Western trade barriers, the rising price of energy, the diversion of croplands to biofuel production, and increasing demand from rising economic pillars like India and China. None of these factors can be easily curtailed. Indeed, several of them increasingly feed on one another.
But here’s where it gets interesting for global food networks: Today, only a small fraction of worldwide grain production is traded globally—for example, only 7 percent of rice and 12 percent of corn. Looking ahead a couple of decades, we’re likely to see those percentages rise dramatically, making the global food trade network as important as—arguably far more important than—today’s global energy trade network, which it will come to resemble in that much of its major supply sources will be located distant from its rising sources of demand.
The Transportation Shift
As Iain Carson and Vijay Vaitheeswaran argue in Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, “Oil is the problem; cars are the solution.” Neither Big Auto nor Big Oil has been interested in seeing America pay an honest price for gasoline these past few decades, so our sense of entitlement has ballooned while our apparent—but not real—threshold of economic pain has lowered. The result? We’re suffused right now with all sorts of “Calgon, take me away!” proposals to leapfrog the U.S. car fleet into a post-oil future. The problem is
, even with our rising fears about global warming and an unstable Middle East, our vehicle-heavy lifestyle makes it hard for us to muster the political will necessary to force a rapid shift. So where will this shift come first? Asia, partly from its desire to dominate global manufacturing in this industry, but more so in response to its declining air quality as the region’s vehicle fleet skyrockets. Because China will soon become both a global demand center and a global production center for cars and trucks, we’re already seeing the world’s major auto manufacturers scramble to make Asia their future global center of R&D. This might seem like a huge loss to American industry, but you have to remember that automobiles began in Old Core Europe in the nineteenth century, came of age in twentieth-century America, and so logically are transformed by twenty-first-century Asia’s rise—an evolution mirroring globalization’s expansion. In the end, the progressive agenda that drives the transformation of transportation in this century will center on cleaning up Asia’s air quality.
The Energy Shift
Despite the current focus on global climate change and the push to reduce CO2 emissions, in my mind the big “going-green” shift of the next couple of decades will be more about reducing energy costs than about pollution per se. Because of the overall rising global energy demand, we’re unlikely to lower carbon emissions worldwide for quite some time. But because the Old Core West has already exported much of its dirtiest and most energy-intensive industries to the New Core East, the main route for lower energy usage in the West will be through cost-savings efforts designed to improve our economic competitiveness. In the East, fears of energy dependence and lost profit margins will do more to generate greater efficiencies than local pollution, although that will be a close race. In general, the two big shifts in energy will concern the movement to a far more distributed model of power generation, and the shift from coal and natural gas generation of electricity to nuclear generation. If there is a place for heightened East-West cooperation across the Core, this is it, because both of these shifts can easily be held up by fears of proliferating nuclear technologies. So one of the key items on a global progressive agenda must be a Core-wide rule set for creating and operating a closed nuclear fuel enrichment cycle that allows the rapid spread of nuclear power generation of electricity across the planet.
The Security Shift
With global logistical networks coming to define globalization’s essential functioning more and more, our planet’s definition of crisis will continue shifting from a past focus on kinetics leading to human deaths (classic violence and war) to a future focus on nonkinetics leading to business discontinuities, which is just a fancy way of saying, Stuff isn’t moving and so business can’t be conducted. Right now, we tend to view the movement of energy (i.e., oil) as the most important logistical network, but faster than you can anticipate, the movement of food and water will come to be seen as more strategic and therefore requiring more scrutiny (i.e., sensor-based transparency to ensure purity). So another item for our global progressive agenda would be to create a Food and Drug Administration for the planet as a whole (we currently have the UN’s World Health Organization, but that is human-health-oriented versus product-safety-oriented), including a worldwide scanning capacity to ensure that unapproved biological materials are not transported. If the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution brought us chemical weapons (WWI), and the twentieth century’s focus on physics yielded nuclear weapons, then the twenty-first century is logically the age of biological weapons/ terrorism. So a focus on biological security dovetails nicely with the growing hyperdependence on food and water traffic that the planet will experience as a result of rising incomes and climate change, in addition to the rising climate volatility (i.e., higher frequency of natural disasters) caused by the latter.
The Communications Shift
One of the reasons I continue to eschew “strategic communications” as a weapon to win hearts and minds is that the concept is rooted in the broadcast era of communications, when the planet collectively stands on the verge of a huge expansion in peer-to-peer communications that’s likely to radically alter the way we process information in general, communicate with one another, and conduct business and political dialogue—at least judging by my kids! The first billion users of Internet and wireless technologies were already plugged into the global economy as they adapted their lives to these innovations, so a lot of broadcast-era methodologies could simply be imported into these new realms, because the vast bulk of the users would accept their supply-push logic. But as the world elevates rapidly from that first billion to the second and third billions, we’re talking about a vast new sea of players in globalization’s previously underserved New Core and Gap markets. This large bottom of the pyramid is likely to rewrite the rules for business, social, and political (see Obama, Barack) uses of communications networks, shifting to a pronounced demand-pull function. Because the providers best able to meet those demands will probably be local players, the West should expect the East and South to force a lot of market change here, for example forcing us to make free things that we’ve always charged for or charging for things that we’ve always thought should be free. The key goal for America will be adaptability to the rising “nomadism” made possible by all this connectivity, because being connectable everywhere means a lot of people will be able to live and work anywhere. Americans tend to view the Web, for example, as something over which we retain ultimate control, when in coming years and decades, we’re likely to be scrambling—as much as any other nation—to make sure our population is as plugged in as it needs to be. If there’s one area where I see more government discretionary spending in coming years, it’s in ensuring that Americans have the cheapest, fastest, and most reliable communications networks in the world. Referencing the security shift noted above, communications continuity is likely to become the primary definition of a “secure” America.
The Religious Shift
The rise in religiosity worldwide in conjunction with globalization’s advance—and subsequent enablement of the economics of abundance—is going to trigger a global shift toward more social conservatism combined with more social activism. I see an immediate future where a lot of religious and secular transnational groups come together increasingly to “battle the evil of X.” In that regard, the Bush administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives within the White House should survive Bush’s presidency, for it is a harbinger of things to come, meaning more explicit coordination between governments and religious charities. The spread of globalization turbocharges the more general long-term historical trend of risk-shifting from the collective to the individual, and so, just as religious groups were instrumental in rescuing and protecting the weak in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, they’ll likewise be early and powerful entrants into this field on a global basis in coming years, in conjunction with their secular counterparts. In combination, these groups make for a formidable global missionary function. But again, that’s no surprise for an age of rapid and extensive frontier integration.
The Urbanization Shift
The planet as a whole has just reached majority urban status, meaning most of the world’s future social problems—and hence progressive agenda—will be more urban than rural in nature. This affords humanity a lot of opportunity, because if we can link up the world’s major coastal cities in next-generation networks for communications, travel, logistics, sensing, and so on, then we’ve effectively captured roughly half of humanity and the vast majority of the world’s network traffic. Moreover, major coastal cities can serve as laboratories for curing globalization’s many ills, including rising sea levels, air pollution, traffic and people congestion, caring for the elderly, and ethnic tension. This is essentially the historic role New York City has played throughout American history, generating the “first” of too many urban innovations to recount. So a key progressive agenda item would seem to be encouraging growing cooperation and coordination among the world’s bi
ggest cities.
The Feminization Shift
The more globalization spreads industrialization (reducing the brute-strength advantage of men and the agricultural chores of women) and gender-neutral networks in general, the more women are empowered relative to men, meaning the twenty-first century is likely to witness a huge uptick in women’s issues globally. This emerging market trend will dovetail nicely with the feminization of certain key professions, such as law and medicine, in advanced economies. Such trends are crucial and must be encouraged, because if globalization encourages a risk shift by gender, then it’s clearly women who end up shouldering more risk over time (e.g., more divorces, more out-of-wedlock pregnancies, more every-bad-thing-you-can-name).
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