In some ways, the big picture is unaltered. The world’s population continues to rise; it looks as though there will be close to 8 billion people alive in 2020. The developed world continues to age, and politicians have finally started to appreciate the social and financial consequences of this.
Pressures on the environment continue to build. Nuclear power’s retreat has begun, while dependence on fossil fuels has grown. There is no shortage of oil (rather, the reverse), and the eventual squeeze may not occur until well into the next century.
Globalization races on–the world has become ever more closely linked by a liberal trade economy. We’ve weathered the financial collapses of East Asia, Russia and now Brazil without a global banking crisis or a resort to protectionism. But one surprisingly grim economic reality is the plight of Japan. It was easy to see that Japan would have a very tough time in the early years of the next century as its population became the oldest of any of the G-7 nations. But the state of its financial system is much weaker now than it seemed five years ago. The European Union, by contrast, has made faster progress toward monetary union (with more members) than seemed possible. Has government started to shrink? Not yet. We are just catching the first glimmers of a world in which governments are in competition with each other. The idea that EU governments should compete on taxation is, not surprisingly, being resisted by some high-tax countries. Nor has there been much sign of the change in social values predicted in 1994: a gradual shift toward more orderly, self-reliant societies. Though the sharp fall in crime in the United States may signal wider social changes, it is really too early to say.
The technology boom has come as the biggest surprise. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy in 1994. Though it was clear that linked computers would play an enormous role in the information revolution, this has happened far more swiftly and dramatically than was evident then. E-commerce will clearly change the business world utterly by 2020. And we are only beginning to glimpse the other economic and social consequences of the Internet.
Finally, the most serious omission: my book contained virtually no mention of biotechnology. This will clearly be one of the key areas of advance in the 21st century. In fact, it may be the only way in which the world will be able to feed its increased population. The cloning of Dolly the sheep may come to seem as important an achievement as the Wright brothers’ first flight–another event that took the farsighted by surprise.
