The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [123]
Globalization Reversal
Might any of the four global forces of demography, natural resource pressure, globalization, and climate change screech to a halt between now and 2050, thus ruining all of our best projections?
Three of these have tremendous inertia. Demographic trends are a slow-moving ship, taking a generation—fifteen to twenty years—before even major course corrections will be felt. Population momentum ensures that our fastest-growing countries will keep growing for decades, even if their fertility rates fall to 2.1 tomorrow (replacement level), because their age structures are so youthful.511 And with a projected population increase to around 9.2 billion by 2050—especially a modernized, urban, consumptive one—it’s hard to envision how our demand for water, energy, and minerals will decrease from what it is today, even with great strides in conservation and recycling. Greenhouse physics dictates that we are locked in to at least some climate change and higher global sea level no matter what; the big uncertainties are how far we will allow greenhouse loading to go, what the impacts on global rainfall patterns and hurricanes will be, and lurking climate genies.
That leaves globalization. In today’s world of Walmart and iPhones, it’s easy to take our continued economic integration for granted. But as discussed in Chapter 1, the current globalization megatrend did not simply happen by itself. It was set into motion by the United States and Britain very deliberately, with a long string of new policies dating to the Bretton Woods summit in 1944. While the Internet and other information technology have enhanced globalization, they did not create it. Global social and information networks surely seem here to stay, but unlike population momentum or greenhouse gas physics, there is no natural law commanding that current policies favoring our global economic integration must continue.
History tells us of past balloons of economic integration and technological advance followed by puncture. In 221 B.C. the Qin armies first unified northeastern China out of a bedlam of warring fiefdoms. Successive Han, Sui, T’ang, Yuan, and Ming dynasties then expanded the world’s biggest trade empire into central and southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. By the fifteenth century, China had trade outposts in Africa and led the world in medicine, printing, explosives, banking, and centralized government. But then, its rulers lost interest in a global empire. They began a series of fateful political decisions that shut down China’s overseas trade while discouraging scientific advances at home. Its nascent industrialization cut short, China stood frozen in time, and the much smaller European states commenced to take over the world.
Europe wasted little time ramping up the next round of globalization. By the 1600s colonialist governments were working hand in hand with private corporations like the Dutch and British East India companies—the equivalent of today’s multinational corporations—setting up remote trading posts and shipping routes. Merchant capitalism flourished, fueled by furs, timber, gold, spices, and coal imported from overseas. Guided by multinational banks, by the 1870s goods and capital were flowing across national borders as freely as they do today. Steamships, the telegraph, and railroads were opening up the world just as standardized shipping containers, jet aircraft, and the Internet would do again a century later. Many countries decided to peg their paper currencies to a gold standard, creating fluid international currency markets and huge flows of cross-border capital. The British pound became the dominant circulating world currency much as the U.S. dollar is now. Remarkably, by 1913 the