At the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the world is changing in fundamentally new ways. Unfortunately it's not changing in fundamentally good ways.
The economic collapse seems unstoppable. Unemployment threatens ever more people with utter doom - yet not everybody is affected.
The strange truth is that about 15% of the population is doing all the 'useful' work. The most highly trained and skilled individuals are doing extremely well, while 99% of mankind will leave no lasting legacy.
In a time of rising specialization, there is little interest in studying the vast differences between the world's cultures and individuals, at least among politically correct intellectuals, which is most of them.
The creative economy of Iceland almost equals that of Libya. Large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa seem almost prehistoric. There have been no African and very few Arab airplanes, yet tiny Sweden has a world class aviation industry. Even in improving economies like India and China the majority remains shockingly poor, and in India their absolute number is rising.
For some reason, most societies appear to have failed. Could they ever be fixed?
Intentional instability
The easy answer is to say the world is too complicated to understand. Too many factors influence each other. Reality is about as user-friendly as those symbols flickering across the screen at the beginning of the movie 'The Matrix'. Only from a distance does it look stable.
This suggests the world should perhaps be simplified, but instead the opposite is happening.
Worldwide, the required skills for every profession are increasing faster than ever. Employers are getting ridiculously demanding. As unemployment skyrockets, professions evolve ever harder-to-penetrate specialty skills. New methods and rules are developed from old ones before the old ones are perfected.
Software gets more complicated and harder to use. Interfaces and methods are changed for no good reason. If someone tried to make an understandable user manual, it would be obsolete before it was complete.
This also explains why going to school sucks. Teachers try to cram in a random accumulation of skills just to keep up. The big picture is an afterthought, if that.
Thomas Friedman says that the only solution is for everyone to become highly educated in the stellar skill levels demanded by this new economy. They should learn new languages and nuanced dialects and all the latest scientific knowledge like latter-day Renaissance Persons while keeping every certificate up-to-date, and establish cosmopolitan contacts to arbitrage fleeting opportunities across many timezones against swiftening competition. The early bird gets the worm.
Massive subsidies to established universities need to be increased even further. New mandates and bureaucracies are urgently called for.
That's the mainstream solution, endorsed by all respected opinion leaders. Only this article begs to differ.
The problem is the economy itself is becoming obsolete thanks to mass efficiency. As of this writing, no one has dared to think about the implications. It's time for a fundamental change.
Change only happens after great social trauma or a massive shock. New problems are emerging faster than old ones are solved. It has always been this way.
It would be nice if a single method could solve most social problems, even if no one understood how they were related. Previous attempts have included property rights, free trade, religion, communism, and democracy. The real answer is only the vaguest outline.
Humanity does need a kick in the butt, but it has to be in the right direction.
1) The Third World.
One of the most neglected subjects is the study of failure, despite the ample research opportunities.
Pain focuses on itself, making it impossible to see the bigger picture. This explains why state oppression is the most successful industry on earth.
Most societies occupy their version of a local maximum: to get any better, they would first have to get a lot worse.
The main Third World problem (especially in Africa) can be summed up in one word: Nerds (the absence of).
To be a nerd, you have to be able to do the following things at least part of the time:
-stop worrying about material concerns.
-work alone or in small groups.
-get utterly obsessed by a seemingly meaningless problem.
In most of the world, these things are quite impossible. Nerds wouldn't last long there.
The documentary 'Killer's Paradise' shows how hundreds of Guatemalan women are offed annually in a culture of violence. In 2005, no cases were solved.
Until recently North Korea didn't even exist online. The devils in charge couldn't be bothered to put up a single .kp website extolling 'Juche'. There are over a million South Korean .kr sites. Even Tuvalu, which is smaller than all but seventeen DPRK death camps, has 100,000 registered websites.
Anyone born in most of Sudan should just sue their parents.
All these problems are symptoms of the same disease. Our planet is and always has been structurally overpopulated.
It's not 'correct' to point this out. Politicians will promise every benefit under the sun without ever mentioning birth control. They would rather spend money to solve a problem than to prevent it.
For most religions, the idea is off the table entirely.
It may take a combination of brutal droughts, civil wars, epidemics, depressions, and other die-offs to make the notion acceptable to a significant minority of the masses and their decision makers.
The only proven path to economic growth is the combination of free markets and property rights. We know what the result should look like. The unsolvable problem is temptation. Those who will be obsolete in the new order will steal any newly generated wealth before it can be reinvested.
One conceivable solution is a new mindset: to consider the problems as opportunities in disguise.
Eventually, all the global inefficiencies and artificial barriers will lead to a new service industry. Facilitators, both private consultants and large corporations, will help supplicants deal with the various international bureaucracies, corruption/bribery and extortion organizations.
Worldwide trade treaties could reduce the worst excesses. In a fundamentally amoral world, the UN actually has a much bigger role to play. The number of necessary treaties may rise as the square of the number of conflicts.
International meta-laws will cover tourists and tariffs, contracts and debts, and begin to harmonize legal systems.
In the long term, even more radical steps might become possible.
The balance of power could shift quite suddenly from the faceless elite to the nameless crowd.
Countries may eventually be replaced by corporations, voluntary associations and international alliances, which might eventually merge into 'negative countries' defined by negative rights - most importantly the right to be left alone in various ways.
Islam
When Islam is in the news it's rarely a good thing (Sudanese women sentenced to stoning for adultery under Sharia law etc).
Unlike a thousand years ago, Muslims lead the world in few fields or none. There are few indigenous Arab aircraft, cars, medical products, innovative commercial services, or even cartoons or videogames.
At this point, it's not clear that cultures can change. They can only be replaced. Change may not be possible until every dominant member has died of old age or other causes.
The best outcome for Iraq is so reasonable it was never mentioned during its prolonged troubles: a country where the average tourist could backpack the length of the Tigris without being decapitated multiple times. How this remote goal would be reached shouldn't matter as much. This new Iraq would not have to be an American client state; just something else than excessively evil.
Most violent areas are so primitive that even that's too much to ask for. For many of the less pleasant members of our species, not committing violence seems harder than going to Pluto.
America is successful because it started from nothing. There's nothing like occupying a continent to focus creative and destructive energies.
Iraq's feuding ethnic groups have been crowded together in the most fertile regions for millennia, enough time to form many unresolvable grievances.
The civil war would have been less bad with a divide and rule strategy from the start, keeping existing institutions in place, but making them less powerful. The first new Iraqi president could have been chosen by acclamation, provided all ethnic groups could agree on a figurehead.
The country could have had foreign investment, student loan programs, the first modest pension plans, and staff exchange policies - Shiite officers working with Sunni police brigades and the reverse.
The borders between ethnic groups are long and tangled, with enclaves everywhere. First of all, Iraq needed new barriers between towns, neighborhoods, even streets. Good fences make good neighbors, provided they don't have too many mortars.
What remains of Iraq should use its oil wealth (and whatever international aid can be finagled) to start from zero, by developing new cities and towns, or at least neighborhoods.
Some of the towns would be strictly segregated, others would welcome all ethnic groups willing to renounce their violent history. They would still need massive defensive perimeters. The paranoia would probably increase for another decade.
Then something wonderful might begin to happen. People could actually become bored with the past, and start living for themselves instead.
China
The country that makes those pens sold at the Dollar store that don't write, and auto tire pumps sold at Kmart that don't inflate: how will it affect mankind as a whole?
80% of the population still lives in Third World conditions, with famine a distinct possibility. There's been an alarming increase in droughts. Foreign investment seems to be slowing as investors wait for new trends to emerge (social, technological, regime changes in the US).
The government remains resolutely authoritarian, with plans to reform never. In fact they would like to increase control forever.
They have few original ideas, and don't want any. The goal is stability, long term power, and then prosperity.
There are only a few 'world-class' Chinese companies, run by entrepreneurs playing the system at the mercy of semi-corrupt bureaucrats.
Except for two cities, China has no independent media, no national magazines or significant entertainment industry. A strong national culture would threaten the leadership.
Western ideas like democracy couldn't be adopted without strange modifications. China will probably evolve a domestic ideology after the completion of economic reforms, a more flexible version of Confucianism.
This ideology is coming together right now, with notions like cooperative competition, conservation, cellular networks that know their places, the role and responsibility of status, and so on.
At this point few people notice or care, but China's and India's vast populations could eventually start enough new trends to begin to erode the social dominance of the West, but that will take many years.
The Universal Solution: Gradualism
China will attempt to keep the appearance of central control, and the full hierarchy of officials and agencies, but quietly reform the system from within. In this respect, it may accidentally discover new ideas and methods for the rest of mankind.
One of the biggest mistakes made by reformers is to abolish existing institutions. It's much less disruptive to slowly change them, by reducing their power of coercion. They can then claim credit for any reforms they have inadvertently allowed to happen.
All change is painful. The key is to make it seem smooth, without threatening those things the masses hold dear, respecting their worldview, origin stories and myths, and anniversaries of past achievements.
New forms of participation.
In the world's numerous worst countries, the biggest gang-lords get to make all the long-term plans, such as they are. There's no good reason for that. Immediate power is much more valuable than future influence. A dictator would have little to lose by allowing his subjects to decide what happens thirty years from now. He still gets to decide what happens today and tomorrow.
This type of long term planning could become an intermediate step to true democracy. This may be how China will change. It could also reduce our upcoming environmental crisis, by postponing the 'hard sacrifices' (like reduced driving) while still making them likely.
People might be more willing to drive smaller cars and tolerate new nuclear power plants if they didn't have to make immediate lifestyle changes.
A long, gradual transition period can make even a difficult adaptation seem normal.
It could be the next big mass movement.
We live in a time without original ideas, a dull fog quite similar to the start of the twentieth century.
The world needs a certain amount of intellectual conflict to raise its energy levels. It doesn't even have to leave a lasting legacy.
Atheism could spread if existing institutions were to collapse, but it can't change society by itself. Mankind will demand some sort of higher goal: world peace, universal wealth, unlimited spare time, or even a posthuman religion.
3) The decline of the United States
The world's ten most idealistic countries, sometimes willing to do the right thing for the wrong reason, currently are (in order):
USA.
All the runners-up were too busy complaining about the US role as world cop.
But that may become a thing of the past.
The number of Americans living in poverty has reached a thirty-year high. Wages have been steadily and stealthily cut to pay CEO salaries and shareholders. Everyone else may go bankrupt.
When fundamental conditions change, society becomes unstable.
The US is the most complex and regulated entity on the planet, not really a country but an operating system. At the moment, it's also the most efficient society in history, with no competition. China and India may actually be falling behind.
This can't last forever. The moment a better idea comes along, the power balance will shift. It may never happen; history gives no indication that mankind really wants freedom. If it does happen, the changes may happen fast.
The USA is probably the least bad country in human history, but it's far from perfect. It is surprisingly hard to describe to outsiders, both the good and bad features:
You can't buy fine paint brushes here (a true curse). A hundred sales associates won't even understand the question, but at least you can buy the best luxury yachts and executive jets. Back and front yards are designed to provide less privacy than anywhere else in the world. The only form of public transportation is hitch-hiking.
Industry is collapsing throughout the Rust Belt. The consolidation of agriculture has quietly shrunk the prospects of at least a dozen states. Some shouldn't be states at all. Montana and South Dakota may revert to economic territories owned by agribusiness, subsidized by their good friends in Congress.
Actual unemployment is much, much higher than the official figure. Millions of stressed-out consumers are unable to pay off their loans, and may end up bankrupt and homeless.
Despite these problems, millions of illegal immigrants fleeing vastly more horrid homelands are still drawn toward the American Dream.
In fact migration is predicted to explode as the less successful societies go through their upcoming collapses.
What should be done about these illegal immigrants? Opinions are mixed.
On the one hand: expel them all at once!
On the other hand: how would you find them? No one not charged with a crime (or perhaps even then) should be required to identify themselves. It's un-libertarian!
The parity principle
Why should immigration, illegal or otherwise, be treated as separate from the problems that caused it? For some reason, liberal pundits and decision-makers won't discuss the conditions in the migrants homelands. Only the accepting response to the influx can be debated.
Ideally, the number of locals moving to foreign countries would be the same as the number of foreigners arriving there. The ratio could be somewhat adjusted to reflect regional disasters, employment opportunities and economic impact.
Already, a few wealthier Americans are retiring to the least violent parts of Mexico, a trend that should be encouraged. So far, it's only a trickle. If anything could draw the world together it would be to turn the world into one vast suburb.
Many bad people would have to pass away first.
The worst countries often act as incubators of evil, maintaining the maximum possible population under terrible conditions, and expelling or eliminating the surplus through ethnic cleansing.
Other overpopulated countries don't want to admit all the refugees. Instead, they're allowed to die in large numbers, like in Rwanda in 1994. Overpopulation as the driving force of history is another concept that just can't be discussed in polite society.
Perhaps there is no solution other than requiring incoming refugees to be sterilized, which would be immensely more controversial than letting them die, according to the mainstream sensitivities that rule the world.
Clearly the world needs more space, or at least 'virtual' space allowing more people to occupy the same region using less resources. This problem can only be solved by new technology.
The most advanced research has traditionally been carried out in North America, but that may change.
We can't count on the present international order lasting much longer.
If America retreats from the world stage, other countries will try to maximize their advantage. China would increase its influence throughout southeast Asia. Arab states would do the same in sub-Saharan Africa.
The natural state of human affairs is creative failure. No one wants to be the world cop anymore.
Eventually, Europe may try to fill the void to some extent, after selling arms to all the warring sides.
A more tolerable world would require fundamentally new ideas, and much easier methods to achieve wealth. Such solutions would certainly involve powerful computers. It would also have to be a more equal world. The same solutions could apply everywhere, with only local details changed.
Ideally, it would be like a game.
The first step may be to reduce the number of choices, by actually simplifying the world. Things don't need to be made more complex or mysterious. There's already enough ignorance. Far too many barriers are maintained by power groups protecting their interests and domains.
Some people would rather have 'freedom' than to be part of some impersonal system controlling their lives. They want to be left alone to fix their own problems.
The fundamental human problems involve stable connections: trust and reputation, time shifting, credit, short and long-term loans. There may be only a few reliable ways to provide these on a worldwide scale. In that sense the future may have to become much simpler.
Future consumers may have to sign long-term contracts (or select from a limited menu of worldwide products) to afford much cheaper utilities, healthcare, real estate, and groceries.
Ideally, no one would need to travel much further from home than they could walk in ten minutes. They could still visit all known reality through cyberspace.
Unless there is some fantastic technological breakthrough (which still seems unlikely), freedom will have to come from making it easier to be poor.
Probably the best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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