The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [5]
But before we can intelligently discuss the future, we must first understand the past. In roughly historical order of their rise in significance, here are four global forces that have been busily shaping our 2050 world for tens to hundreds of years.
FOUR GLOBAL FORCES
The first global force is demography, which essentially means the ups, downs, and movements of different population groups within the human race. Demographic measures include things like birth rates, income, age structure, ethnicity, and migration flows. We shall examine all of these in due course but for now, let us start with the most basic yet profound measure of all: the total number of people living on Earth.
Before the invention of agriculture some twelve thousand years ago, there were perhaps one million persons in the world.12 That is roughly the present-day population of San Jose, California. People foraged and hunted the land, living in small mobile clans. It took twelve thousand years (until about 1800 A.D.) for our numbers to grow to one billion. But then, oh boy, liftoff.
Our second billion arrived in 1930, a mere 130 years later. The global Great Depression was under way. Adolf Hitler led his Nazi Party to stunning victory in Germany’s Reichstag elections. My Italian immigrant grandfather, then living in Philadelphia, was thirty-three years old.
Our third billion came just thirty years later in 1960. John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in the U.S. presidential race, the first satellites were orbiting the Earth, and I was a scant seven years from being born.
Our fourth billion took just fifteen more years. It was 1975 and I was eight. The U.S. president Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts (one by Charles Manson’s murderous henchwoman Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme), the Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia, and the movie Godfather II ran away with six Academy Awards, including one to the Italian-American actor Robert De Niro.
Our fifth billion came in 1987, now just twelve years after the fourth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time in history and the Irish rock band U2 released their fifth album, The Joshua Tree. Standing outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, U.S. president Ronald Reagan exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The world’s last dusky seaside sparrow died of old age on a tiny island preserve in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort. A self-absorbed college sophomore at the time, I only noticed The Joshua Tree.
Our sixth billion arrived in 1999. This is now very recent history. The United Nations declared 1999 the International Year of Older Persons. The Dow Jones climbed above 11,000 for the first time in history. Internet hookups ballooned and millions of songs, to the dismay of U2 and the rest of the music industry, were swapped for free on Napster. Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela, and a huge chunk of northern Canada quietly assumed self-rule as the new territory of Nunavut. By then, I was a young professor at UCLA, working toward tenure and starting to notice things. The world vacillated between nervous fretting about Y2K and excitement over the dawn of a new millennium.
11,800 years . . . 130 years . . . 30 years . . . 15 years . . . 12 years. . . . The length of time we need to add another billion has petered down to nearly nothing. One billion is more than triple the 2010 population of the United States, the third most populous country on Earth. Imagine a world in which we added one-plus USA, or two Pakistans, or three Mexicos, every four years. . . . Actually, this requires no imagination at all. It is reality. We will add our seventh billion some time in 2011.
This extraordinary acceleration, foreseen over two centuries ago by Thomas Malthus,13 burst into popular culture