The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [25]
The following point will become particularly important later in this book. In an aging world, those countries best able to attract skilled foreign workers will fare best. The early signs of a migrant planet are already here. In 2008, some two hundred million people—3% of the world population—were living outside their native countries. In most OECD countries the proportion of foreign-born was over 10%, even in countries like Greece and Ireland, where emigrants used to flow out, not in.90 Foreign workers benefit their homelands as well as host economies: The World Bank estimates overseas remittances to poor countries was USD $283 billion in 2008, constituting a huge share of GDP in countries like Tajikistan (46%), Moldova (38%), and Lebanon (24%).
What about in 2050, when the nursing homes in Mexico, China, and Iran are packed full? Who will be running the computers and caring for the residents? Unless the entire world has entered a full-blown robotic age by then, we will still need young people around to do things. Where on Earth will they come from?
This is harder to project demographically, because those young people haven’t been born yet. But based on current population structures, the most youthful countries in 2050 will be the same ones where fertility rates are highest today—in the world’s least modernized places. Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, the West Bank and Gaza, Ethiopia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa will offer our world’s youth in 2050.
It’s a critical but open question whether our poorest countries can convert their forthcoming demographic advantages into the new skilled workforces needed to help care for an elderly world. Just having a bunch of young people running around is not enough. Huge improvements in education, governance, and security are also required. Women will have to start attending school and working in places where this is uncommon today. Terrorism must be sufficiently quelled such that the countries that need young workers will accept immigrants from the countries that have them. I hope that these things can be achieved, and a global skilled-worker program all worked out, by 2050. I’ll be eighty-two years old—and I just can’t imagine anything lonelier than being turned over in my bed by a robot.
CHAPTER 3
Iron, Oil, and Wind
All I wanna do is to thank you
Even though I don’t know who you are
You let me change lanes
While I was driving in my car
—Lyrics from “Whoever You Are” by Geggy Tah (1996)
I nose my compact SUV out of traffic and into the Mobil gas station at Cahuenga Pass, just off the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles. Perched high above me atop the Santa Monica Mountains are the enormous white letters of the Hollywood sign. The nine letters gleam out proudly over a booming young megacity that barely existed a century ago.
I find an open pump and hop out of the car. I swipe a credit card and tap in my ZIP code. I choose a fuel grade, lift the pump handle from its cradle, and jam it into the tank’s orifice. I squeeze the pump’s handgrip and feel its metal grow cold as fuel churns from another tank in the ground beneath me to the one in my car. It is a simple, mindless act I have repeated countless times since I was seventeen years old. I give no more thought to the process than I do to washing my hands or drinking a glass of orange juice. But I really should be more appreciative. In L.A. the elixir of life isn’t Botox: It’s gasoline.
The average man must labor for ten hours a day, for two solid months, to perform as much physical work as one gallon of crude oil. No wonder we’ve abandoned horses and carriages in favor of oil-powered vehicles. This raw material, from which all gasolines, diesels, and jet fuels are refined, is miraculous stuff. It fuels 99% of all motorized vehicles today. And oil is so much more than just a transport fuel—it is an