Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change Your World by the Year 2020 - Softcover

Shapiro, Robert J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312352433 ISBN 13: 9780312352431

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2009

Synopsis

What will life be like in America, Europe, Japan, and China in the year 2020?
As the world grows increasingly interconnected and inter-related by globalization, economic crisis and new technologies, the answer to this important question depends largely on the paths taken by the world's major nations. In Futurecast, Robert J. Shapiro, a man world leaders and heads of industry look to for straight talk on the global economic, political and financial affairs, sketches the future with a critical eye to tell us what our world will really be like over the next decade. In this brief time, he foresees monumental changes caused by three historic new forces― globalization, the aging of societies, and America's role as a sole superpower with no near peer― that will determine the paths of nations and the lives of countless millions.
· The U.S. and China will be the world's two indispensable economies, dominating the course of globalization.
· Globalization will continue to shift heavy manufacturing and millions of high-end service jobs from advanced countries like the U.S., to China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania, Turkey and other developing nations.
· Europe's major nations and Japan will face the prospect of serious economic decline and critical problems in their retirement pension systems, pushing them further towards the periphery of global economic and geopolitical power.
· Every major country―the U.S., Europe, Japan, China―will face critical problems maintaining their health care systems, and the entire world will face a slow-motion crisis over energy supplies and the need to confront climate change.
In an unstable world, Robert Shapiro's Futurecast is a necessary road map to the coming years.

About this title

About the Author:

ROBERT J. SHAPIRO is chairman of Sonecon, LLC, an economic advisory firm, and a fellow at numerous academic and research institutions. He served as Under Secretary of Commerce from 1997-2001 and as Bill Clinton's principal economic advisor in the 1992 campaign. He also advised the campaign and transition of Barack Obama. He lives in Washington D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Enormous changes happen to most people over any ten- or fifteen-year period. Your brain and body, wants and desires, circumstances and prospects, all change as you grow from a five-year-old to a young adult of twenty, from a new husband or wife of twenty-five to early middle age, and from a fifty-year-old at the height of your career to a grandparent of sixty-five. Societies usually change less than most individuals over fifteen-year periods. Most societies have much longer lifetimes, too—although occasionally a great event like a war or an exceptional boom can shake up a nation’s conditions and prospects in short order. Broader and more powerful forces, beyond the control of any country or its leaders, can shift the course of development of the entire world. Such developments—some new force changes the way people approach family life, new technologies arise that change fundamental factors in all economies, or a global empire falls—usually happen once in many centuries. We live in a period when three such tectonic developments are all unfolding at the same time.
Three great, global forces are currently reshaping our near future. The first is an extraordinary global demographic shift. Over the last half-century, every advanced society and most developing countries have experienced a baby boom followed by a baby bust. The plague killed one-quarter of Europe’s population in the thirteenth century, and the world wars of the twentieth century decimated the young male population of several countries. But what’s happening today—across most of the world, the greatest aging of national populations ever seen, along with the smallest relative numbers of working-age people on record—is without historical precedent. It will have large effects on both how fast different countries grow and the basic capacity of governments to meet the needs of tens of millions of newly elderly people.
The second great force is globalization, principally, the rapid advance of hugely complex, worldwide networks of money, resources, production, and consumer needs. There have been several previous periods in which world commerce and communications suddenly expanded—especially in the era of exploration in the seventeenth century, and the spread of the telegraph and electricity in the late nineteenth century. The current phase is more far-reaching, with new information technologies affecting more societies more quickly. It’s also more comprehensive, with 151 countries agreeing to the World Trade Organization’s general rules that open each of them to foreign investment and to much greater foreign and domestic competition. Whether most people in Europe, Japan, or America thrive or merely get by will depend on how and whether their governments and societies find a way to prosper under these rules—and to compete with China and India’s unprecedented combinations of advanced technologies and huge numbers of low-wage, skilled workers.
The third great historic development is the fall of the Soviet Union, its European empire, and its political ideology. Empires and ideologies have fallen many times before, but not since the time of Rome has such an event left one global military and economic superpower with no near peer. And the rise of Rome didn’t coincide with a period of world-changing economic globalization. Nor was the fall of past empires accompanied by other seismic geopolitical changes of the sort we see today—namely, the rapid makeover of the world’s biggest country from socialism to a supercharged form of capitalism, and a shift of the center of global politics from the Atlantic nations to the Pacific rim. In place of the cold war and everything it demanded of most countries, the geopolitics of the next fifteen years will be driven by a combination of all of these extraordinary developments.
These developments and their combinations and interactions will have profound effects on the course of every major society and the daily lives of their peoples, and no nation or person can opt out of the consequences.
Strictly speaking, they will not determine anyone’s precise future. Wars and new alliances, booms and recessions, social progress and terrible domestic conflicts will come to pass in the next fifteen years, and each one will arise from countless decisions and events no one can know today. But whatever the near future holds precisely for all of us, it will unfold in a world where these three great forces shape its outset and outcome.
The powerful effects of these forces come from their depth and breadth. The family-planning decisions of billions of people over more than two generations have gradually shifted the demographics of most nations and produced the unprecedented aging of their populations. The roots of modern globalization, and the reason it’s not going away, are similarly elemental. Globalization as we know it today comes out of the responses of tens of thousands of businesses to the new availability of low-cost skilled labor abroad, the growing capacity of developing nations to attract foreign capital and technology, breakthroughs in manufacturing that have enabled producers to break up and distribute the parts of their production process across plants in different countries, and the spread of information technologies to manage and coordinate global networks. And America’s position as the world’s sole superpower has come from not only the epochal collapse of the Soviet Union but also sustained decisions over a half century by America to spend whatever it takes to be stronger than other nations, and by Japan and Europe’s major powers to depend on the United States for security. The deep sources of these developments give them enormous momentum as well as power.
Over time, every nation has little choice but to respond in some way to the pressures created by these historic forces. They can affect the way these forces influence their societies through policies that change the behavior of large numbers of their people or companies. But such changes take time to put in place and more time to affect such deep developments—in our judgment, a good ten to fifteen years. This potential for change limits our foresight to roughly the period between now and 2020.
Over that span, for example, nothing can change the demographic dynamics producing the current aging of all major societies and its impact on a country’s savings and growth rates and the sustainability of pension and health-care systems. Japan or the major countries of Europe could ease restrictions on immigration to expand their baby-bust labor forces and trim their state pension and health-care obligations. If such changes were to come about—and there’s little sign of any of this today—the early economic and social effects might be felt in about a decade. Similarly, France, Germany, or Japan could today undertake the difficult economic reforms necessary to make themselves more successful players in globalization—at least France now talks about it—but it would take at least ten years to see an impact on their growth rates and the incomes and productivity of their people. China’s and America’s strengths in the new global economy also could unravel over time if, for example, China were to confront serious social unrest that slowed its modernization or, even less likely, if America turned inward economically. The key roles the two countries play in globalization, however, are very unlikely to change materially in a decade’s time. In geopolitics, it’s conceivable that China or the European Union could permanently double or triple their military investments, starting today. It’s unlikely because it w

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0312352433
• ISBN 13: 9780312352431
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368