A variety of problems have combined to move the global civilization toward a collapse. The key drivers of collapse, according to Stanford University scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, are overpopulation and overconsumption by the wealthy.

Reforming Democracy and the Future of History / ISN

As history is nowhere near its end, the sustainability of democracy depends on a substantial reform of its current form. This may resemble the “Sustainable History” model that fulfills the fundamental human need for dignity in its holistic sense, and would ensure accountability, equity, authenticity and sustainability."

Reforming Democracy and the Future of History / ISN: "To make them more sustainable requires a stronger focus on, and application of, eight criteria of national good governance:

 participation

 equity and inclusiveness

 the rule of law

 separation of powers

 free, independent and responsible media

 government legitimacy

 accountability and transparency

 the limitation of the distorting effect of money in politics

ATROCITY FORECASTING PROJECT

The project has the overall purpose of enhancing capacity for forecasting mass atrocities and genocide globally and in the Asia-Pacific region. The specific aims are to:

1. develop sophisticated, appropriate, and cutting-edge quantitative forecasting models,
2. improve understanding of the causes of political instability and conflict which greatly increase the probability of mass atrocities or genocide,
3. improve understanding of the crucial causal processes which lead from instability to mass atrocities or genocide, and
4. produce forecasting software and reports which are useful as early warning tools for protection of vulnerable populations.

The aim is to provide tools for analysts and policy makers. The project builds on the current academic literature, and employs econometric and machine-learning based forecasting techniques, which can greatly enhance analytical capacity in combination with standard qualitative and quantitative social science methods. The forecasts are intended to be used in combination with other quantitative and qualitative analysis and expert knowledge.

Funding for this project from AusAID’s Responsibility to Protect Fund, via the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, is gratefully acknowledged. However, the projects’ Chief Investigators, based at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, take full responsibility for the analysis and forecasts presented here and in the project's reports and publications.

If current trends continue, we’ll be dealing with three times as much waste by the end of this century as we are now, warns the World Bank. One solution is to treat waste as a resource. Read more.

• A poll of 67,806 respondents from 65 countries found that the U.S. won by a landslide the dubious distinction of being considered the “greatest threat to peace in the world today”. 

State formation has been the driving force behind civil and interstate war -- a fact woefully missing from much of the popular debate about the violent conflicts of today.

It is not diversity, but political inequality, that breeds conflict.

Building more inclusionary power structures -- not necessarily through electoral democracy -- represents the most viable strategy for new states to prevent armed conflict. 

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140245/andreas-wimmer/states-of-war

Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, frets that as the boundaries blur, biologists are now going to be directing evolution and that we are witnessing “the end of Darwinism.” “Life on Earth,” Joyce has noted, “has demonstrated extraordinary resiliency and inventiveness in adapting to highly disparate niches. Perhaps the most significant invention of life is a genetic system that has an extensible capacity for inventiveness, something that likely will not be achieved soon for synthetic biological systems. However, once informational macromolecules are given the opportunity to inherit profitable variation through self-sustained Darwinian evolution, they just may take on a life of their own.”

This is not hyperbole. All the key barriers to the artificial synthesis of viruses and bacteria have been overcome, at least on a proof-of-principle basis. In 2002, researchers at SUNY Stony Brook made a living polio virus, constructed from its genetic code. Three years later, scientists worried about pandemic influenza decided to re-create the devastating 1918 Spanish flu virus for research purposes, identifying key elements of the viral genes that gave that virus the ability to kill at least 50 million people in less than two years. What all this means is that the dual-use dilemma that first hit chemistry a century ago, and then hit physics a generation later, is now emerging with special force in contemporary biology.

The chances of a U.S.-Chinese crisis in the coming years are low, but they are not negligible, and they are made more troubling by the risk of such a confrontation escalating. The most important steps Beijing and Washington can take are those that might help prevent crises from developing in the first place. Since uncertainty about the scope of each side’s vital interests would be a trigger for such crises, the two countries should deepen political and military exchanges that focus closely on this problem. Even if they cannot achieve full clarity, discussions can help draw attention to what each side believes poses the greatest risks.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139651/avery-goldstein/chinas-real-and-present-danger

Top 10 Disappearing Futures

http://www.wfs.org/futurist/2013-issues-futurist/september-october-2013-vol-47-no-5/top-10-disappearing-futures

The advent of wearable smartphones could accelerate the disappearance of endangered languages, but also lowering of economic barriers and of fundamentalist intolerance.

By 2020, the ubiquity of wearable smartphones and the power of the conversational interface will give youth everywhere “teacherless education”; that is, conversation, both with remote peers and with the Web itself.

For kids in developing nations, the killer app of teacherless education will be learning a more developed nation’s language at the same time they learn their own. Their wearable will “listen in” as they learn their native language and deliver the same words in the foreign language of choice, along with images, learning aids, and games that test proficiency.

Of the roughly 6,000 languages spoken today, perhaps 3,000 endangered languages will no longer be spoken by children in 2030. Most other languages will have lost users as well, as the languages of developed nations with the most open cultures increasingly take their place. We’ll also see many more scientific, technical, business, social, and artistic “languages” (knowledge systems) taught from birth.

Adults will no longer need to visit a doctor’s office for routine checkups.

By 2030, adult visits to a doctor for an annual physical, blood cholesterol screening, exams for prostate or breast cancer, and many other important but nonemergency consultations will be a thing of the past.

Several trends will drive this change:

1. Technology will enable an accurate and personalized diagnosis in your own home. The ubiquity of smartphones and sensors tied to cloud computing will allow screening for chemical indicators for cancer, blood glucose and oxygenation levels, EKG, respiration rate, heart attack and stroke precursors, and more. The information will upload into a personal medical database, and no human will ever see it until your database alerts your doctor that something is amiss.

2. Patients will, after initial privacy concerns abate, begin to understand that regular, consistent monitoring of many health indicators will act in their favor, preserving good health and indicating potential catastrophic conditions.

3. Insurers will price policies and make coverage conditional on the use of this system of monitoring and detection.

4. The efficient economics of this system address the cost implications of socialized medicine and the looming doctor deficit.

The public-health benefits begin to become evident as daily, real-time reporting of conditions like typical flu symptoms will aid in the delivery of medicines and enable people to avoid interactions where they might either become ill or spread their own illnesses.

Users will be alerted to issues via algorithms that scan daily test results. Computers may send simple text questions to obtain more information; if that questioning cannot resolve the issue, the computer will schedule an examination with an appropriate specialist.

• Percentage of U.S. adults who considered homosexual relations morally acceptable in 2002: 38
• Percentage who considered homosexual relations morally acceptable in 2012: 59

• Estimated number of humans who have been born in the last 50,000 years (when modern humans appeared): 107 billion
• Percentage of humans ever born who are alive today: 6.5

40 maps that explain the world

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/12/40-maps-that-explain-the-world/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/07/map-more-than-half-of-humanity-lives-within-this-circle/

Map: More than half of humanity lives within this circle

By Caitlin Dewey, Published: May 7 at 7:30 amE-mail the writer

(Via Imgur)

In yet another illustration of China’s and India’s enormous populations, Reddit recently surfaced the above population map, which claims more than half the world’s people live within a circle superimposed over a section of Asia.

The process is fraught with challenges. At the beginning of the process, what these countries have to sell to their customers is their relative poverty. Their poverty allows them to sell labor cheaply. If the process works and the workers are disciplined, investment pours in to take advantage of the opportunities. Like the investors, local entrepreneurs prosper, but they do so at the expense of the workers, whose lives are hard and brutal.

It's not just their work; it's their way of life. As workers move to factories, the social fabric is torn apart. But that rending of life opens the door for a mobile workforce able to take advantage of new opportunities. Traditional life disappears; in its place stand the efficiencies of capitalism. Yet still the workers come, knowing that as bad as their lot is, it is better than it once was. American immigration was built on this knowledge. The workers bought their willingness to work for long hours and low wages. They knew that life was hard but better than it had been at home, and they harbored hopes for their children and with some luck, for themselves....

As the process matures, low wages rise -- producing simple products for the world market is not as profitable as producing more sophisticated products -- and the rate of growth slows down in favor of more predictable profits from more complex goods and services. All nations undergo this process, and China is no exception. This is always a dangerous time for a country. Japan handled it well. China has more complex challenges.

Since the Industrial Revolution, there have always been countries where comparative advantage in international trade has been rooted in low wages and a large work force. If these countries can capitalize on their advantages, they can transform themselves dramatically. These transformations, in turn, reorganize global power structures
.

The arcs along which nations rise and fall vary in length and slope. China's has been long, as far as these things go, lasting for more than 30 years. The country will continue to exist and perhaps prosper, but this era of Chinese development -- pyramiding on low wages to conquer global markets -- is ending simply because there are now other nations with even lower wages and other advantages. China will have to behave differently from the way it does now, and thus other countries are poised to take its place
.

GLOBAL RELATIONS

 

Who Authorized Preparations for War with China? – (Yale Journal of International Affairs – June 12, 2013)

In this detailed analysis paper, the military-policy expert Amitai Etzioni asks, “Who authorized preparations for war with China?” His answer is stark: Mr. Obama has spoken of a “pivot to Asia,” but there has been no political intent or desire to have such an active military confrontation with China – in fact, the politics and diplomacy have been moving in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, the Pentagon has concluded that the time has come to prepare for war with China, and in a manner well beyond crafting the sort of contingency plans that are expected for wide a range of possible confrontations. It is a momentous conclusion that will shape the United States’ defense systems, force posture, and overall strategy for dealing with the economically and militarily resurgent China. Etzioni writes, “The imagined result of ASB (AirSea Battle plan) is the ability to end a conflict with China in much the same way the United States ended WWII: The U.S. military defeats China and dictates the surrender terms.” “AirSea Battle is demonizing China,” James Cartwright, the former vice-chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned last year. A Marine Corps assessment warned that the concept is “preposterously expensive to build in peace time” and, if used as intended, would “cause incalculable human and economic destruction,” in good part because it makes escalation to nuclear war far more likely. And the Chinese have responded in kind: “If the U.S. military develops AirSea Battle to deal with the [People’s Liberation Army],” Col. Gauyue Fan warned, “the PLA will be forced to develop anti-AirSea Battle.” And that is now taking place. Soon after assuming power last year, Mr. Xi abandoned his predecessor’s commitment to “peaceful rise,” took direct command of the Central Military Commission and commanded the military to focus on “real combat” and “fighting and winning wars.” (Editor’s note: This article is a long, very detailed analysis worth your attention, but if you just want the “bottom line”, see U.S. and China Smile for Cameras, Prepare for War.) 

After the end of World War II, there was an abundance of low-cost labor in Japan, so that’s where manufacturing moved. But as the Japanese economy recovered and the standard of living went up, the cost of making goods also went up. So low-cost manufacturing moved to South Korea. After “the miracle of South Korea,” it moved to Taiwan. When the standard of living went up there, manufacturing moved to the province of Shenzhen in China.

The Limits of the Earth — Part 2: Expanding the Limits

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/04/18/the-limits-of-the-earth-part-2-expanding-the-limits/

Mega trends

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2013/02/20130218_2020.jpg

The economic costs of pollution have been the focus of various government-backed studies in China. A recent study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning found that environmental damage to forests, wetlands, and grasslands shaved 3.5 percent off China’s 2012 GDP. The World Bank puts the total cost of China’s environmental degradation in the late 1990s at between 3.5 and 8 percent of GDP. China’s pollution problem is holding back its economy -- and poisoning its own people and the rest of the world in the process. 

Relativity in the Balance of Power

There is a paradox in all of this. While the United States has committed many errors, the fragmentation of Europe and the weakening of China mean the United States emerges more powerful, since power is relative. It was said that the post-Cold War world was America's time of dominance. I would argue that it was the preface of U.S. dominance. Its two great counterbalances are losing their ability to counter U.S. power because they mistakenly believed that real power was economic power. The United States had combined power -- economic, political and military -- and that allowed it to maintain its overall power when economic power faltered. 

A fragmented Europe has no chance at balancing the United States. And while China is reaching for military power, it will take many years to produce the kind of power that is global, and it can do so only if its economy allows it to. The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of its balanced power. Europe and China defeated themselves because they placed all their chips on economics. And now we enter the new era.

Read more: Beyond the Post-Cold War World | Stratfor 

The Long Peace

“Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Pinker. Forensic archaeology (“CSI Paleolithic”) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state societies and pockets of anarchy show, on average, 524 war deaths per 100,000 people per year.

Germany in the 20th century, wracked by two world wars, had 144 war deaths per 100,000 per year. Russia had 135. Japan had 27. The US in the 20th century had 5.7. In this 21st century the whole world has a war death rate of 0.3 per 100,000 people per year. In primitive societies 15 percent of people died violently; now 0.03 percent do. Violence is 1/500th of what it used to be.

The change came by stages, each with a different dynamic. Pinker identified: 1) The Pacification Process brought about by the rise and expansion of states, which monopolized violence to keep their citizens from killing each other. 2) The Humanizing Process. States consolidated, enforcing “the king’s justice.” With improving infrastructure, commerce grew, and the zero-sum game of plunder was replaced by the positive-sum game of trade. 3) The Humanitarian Revolution. Following ideas of The Enlightenment, the expansion of literacy, and growing cosmopolitanism, reason guided people to reject slavery, reduce capital crimes toward zero, and challenge superstitious demonizing of witches, Jews, etc. Voltaire wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

http://longnow.org/

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

To See Humans’ Progress, Zoom Out

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of "The Better Angels of Our Nature."

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

James Flynn’s eponymous effect — a worldwide rise in IQ scores — shows that in one important sense, people have been getting smarter, not dumber, over time. The increase is not in raw brainpower, nor in crystallized skills like arithmetic or vocabulary, but in abstract reasoning: the ability to ignore appearances and reckon in formal categories. Flynn attributes the effect to the spread of education and the trickling down of scientific and analytical concepts into everyday discourse.

In a culture that seems to be getting dumb and dumber, this claim needs a sanity check. Can we see the fruits of superior reasoning in the world around us? The answer is yes.

We are living in a period of extraordinary intellectual accomplishment.

In recent decades the sciences have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles like smartphones, genome scans and stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies. No historian with a long view could miss the fact that we are living in a period of extraordinary intellectual accomplishment.

Nor is our newfound sophistication confined to science. It’s easy to focus on the idiocies of the present and forget those of the past. But a century ago our greatest writers extolled the beauty and holiness of war. Heroes like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson avowed racist beliefs that today would make people’s flesh crawl. Women were barred from juries in rape trials because supposedly they would be embarrassed by the testimony. Homosexuality was a felony. At various times, contraception, anesthesia, vaccination, life insurance and blood transfusion were considered immoral.

Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason.

Steven Pinker changes the world twice in his new book, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined.

First, he presents exhaustive evidence that the tragic view of history is wrong and always has been. A close examination of the data shows that in every millennium, century, and decade, humans have been drastically reducing violence, cruelty, and injustice---right down to the present year. A trend that consistent is not luck; it has to be structural.

So, second, he boldly founds a discipline that might as well be called “psychohistory.” As a Harvard psychologist and public intellectual (author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate), he sought causes for the phenomenon he’s reporting---why violence has declined. Real ethical progress, he found, came from a sequence of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and mental tricks employed by whole societies to change their collective mind and behavior in a peaceful direction.

Humanity’s great project of civilizing itself is far from complete, but Pinker’s survey of how far we’ve come builds confidence that the task will be completed, and he illuminates how to get there.

 The media love sudden drama, even as the grand trend lines of history are often gradual and economic. The media love wars. The Middle East does not disappoint…. it contains blood, myth and emotion -- the stuff of news. Whereas all Asia can offer is substance. 

-- Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan: 

http://www.nesta.org.uk/newsandfeatures/13for2013/predictionwillbecome_ubiquitous

Predictive tools will move from being of marginal interest to part of mainstream culture.

Prediction is now much more an art than a science. Economic forecasting has been shown to be little more accurate than guesswork. Political forecasting is just as suspect: as the political scientist Philip Tetlock showed, experts are terrible at predicting what will actually happen.[1] Worse, many professional futurists continue to repeat old predictions (like the end of work and long-tenure jobs, university campuses and live theatre) even when they've been proven to be wrong.

But my prediction is that  predictive tools will move from being of marginal interest to become part of mainstream culture and everyday life.  

The main reason is that science is increasingly entering this murky territory.  

Weather forecasting has steadily improved - even if only a few days into the future. In business, companies like Wonga have made money through superior algorithms for predicting risk and credit-worthiness (the ethics of the loans that result are of course another matter). When you walk into a GP's surgery the PARR (patients at risk of re-entering hospital) system may be  assessing your chances of entering hospital. In criminal justice the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) has been  used for a long time, and  shown to be fairly accurate.  Kaggle runs regular competitions for programmers to develop algorithms which can demonstrate better predictions, for example of school results or health.  

In many fields, prediction won't be easy: genetic tests, for example, have been much less useful for predicting disease risks than many expected. But there's no doubting the direction of travel. 

Rigour is also being brought to more intuitive kinds of prediction: for example, observing three minutes of a marital row to predict whether the marriage will survive, or the first few seconds of a job interview, or a short stretch of a tutor teaching a class to predict their overall scores. 

As predictive models become more mainstream it's possible that our thinking about prediction will change. In the film Minority Report it's presented as a modern version of astrology - if you gaze into the scientific crystal ball you can know for certain what will happen. Instead the opposite is likely. People will become much more aware of probabilities, and therefore more immunised against the idea that the future is knowable. We'll all become more Bayesian - able to understand that the world around us is probabilistic rather than deterministic. That will help us to be better decision-makers. If for example you're given a prediction of your risk of entering hospital in the next two years you may decide to radically change your lifestyle.  

Indeed the greatest value from these models lies less in prediction itself but rather in changing our awareness that  we can change how the dice fall. The paradox is that where the science fiction of predictive tools tended to diminish the space for human agency, the science may end up expanding it. 

[1] Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement. He also showed that Norwegian rats can outperform undergraduates on some predictive tasks.

Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130102-tomorrows-world

World Energy Report: the Good, the Bad and the really, truly Ugly

The 2012 World Energy Outlook report provides a grave depiction of our energy future. It mainly focuses on the positive that advances in drilling technology will increase US oil production to make it the largest producer by 2020. However, it is the result of a simultaneous production decline from tradition markets like Saudi Arabia and Russia. Thus, energy security remains a key issue especially since the report predicts growth in demand. Furthermore, future increase in renewable energy will be insignificant thus continuing the dependency on fossil fuels. More importantly, the report alludes to a 3.6°C increase in long term average global temperature even with drastic measures to curb greenhouse gases. Thus, creating resiliency on both energy projections and climate change is the current global dilemma. Focusing efforts on reducing energy demands is ultimately more favorable due to the slow increase in clean energy. (Huffington Post)

110 Prédictions pour les 110 prochaines années – Popular Mechanics
Popular Mechanics pour fêter ses 110 ans propose 110 prédictions pour les 110 prochaines années.

The top risks of 2013

Click HERE for Eurasia Group's complete report
1. Emerging markets -- The era of emerging market abundance is finished. As the United States and Europe slowly regain their economic footing, the political risk focus will return to the emerging market world, where differences among the largest players will become more obvious. Slower growth and rising expectations from larger and more demanding middle classes will create public pressure on governments, meaning that emerging markets -- including the increasingly suspect BRICs -- should no longer be treated as an asset class for outsized growth. Consideration instead should shift toward which developing country governments have enough political capital to remain on track to a more advanced stage of development.
2. China vs. information -- China's new leadership faces many challenges in 2013, most importantly the state's growing inability to control the flow of ideas and information across borders and within the country. Until now Beijing has been largely effective in isolating online discourse to focus on discrete issues without culminating in real challenges to the government's decision-making or policy. But every corruption scandal and example of official malfeasance makes the next event more difficult to navigate, and the risk is that a broad-based social movement for change will gain momentum in China in 2013, distracting the government from its domestic and foreign policy priorities and potentially weakening investor confidence in the stability of the mainland market.
3. Arab Summer -- We are far beyond the Arab Spring, and an Arab Winter, where dictators rebound and consolidate power, has not materialized. Instead we are approaching an Arab Summer, whereby the region will witness radicalized movements -- both sectarian and Islamist -- playing a much more important role. As outside powers look to avoid direct involvement in the region's risks, local powers -- Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others -- will compete for influence and play out their rivalries. At the center of this lies Syria, whose civil war now has implications that extend far beyond the humanitarian. Syria has become a proxy conflict for Shiite and Sunni powers, as well as a magnet for jihadists, increasing the geopolitical risk overall and sparking further insecurity throughout the region, most notably in Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey.
4. United States -- Every silver lining has a dark cloud. While the fiscal cliff was averted, the process by which the deal was reached casts a large shadow over hopes that the election might create a more conducive environment for cooperation, and dysfunctional American politics will weigh on both the U.S. economic recovery and President Obama's legislative agenda. This is not about a politically induced new recession, let alone a major financial crisis. But political uncertainty over corporate taxes and a series of noisy brinkmanship episodes will generate a modest but real drag on growth.
5. JIBs (Japan, Israel, Britain) -- These are the three current global trends that matter most: China is rising, the Middle East is exploding, and Europe is muddling through. Set against a G-zero backdrop, the structural losers of these trends are the JIBs (Japan, Israel and Britain): countries influenced most directly and problematically by changes now underway in the geopolitical order. All three countries are now in a similar position for three reasons: their special relationships with the United States are no longer quite as important; they sit just outside the major geopolitical changes underway, without the means to play a constructive role; and key domestic constraints in all three countries (political, social, historic, and otherwise) make it particularly difficult for them to respond effectively to the challenges posed by a shifting global order.
6. Europe -- There will be no grand implosion, but the muddle-through approach to crisis management carries risks of its own. The eurozone is headed for neither breakup nor resolution, and in 2013 the risks shift from a threat of financial crisis to a loss of momentum in creating the institutional and policy frameworks for a redesigned union. The weak economic outlook and the politics of crisis-fighting will also remain sources of uncertainty. Simultaneously, euro-skepticism is on the rise and resistance to reforms is increasing in the face of protracted austerity and few prospects for an economic turnaround.
7. Asian geopolitics -- In 2013, geopolitical risk will continue growing in East Asia in a new and potentially more dangerous way. Facing increased nationalism in China and Japan, the United States will look to play a larger role, giving oxygen to the hedging strategies of many regional states seeking closer American ties. Territorial disputes over the East China and South China Seas will also create new friction, and at risk overall is East Asia's decades-long distinction as a zone where positive-sum commerce and economics trumps zero-sum geopolitical tension.
8. Iran -- The significant risk in Iran this year is not the one everyone's thinking about. A strike on the country's nuclear program is unlikely, but biting sanctions, other forms of international pressure, and leadership tensions make Iran less predictable and heighten the stakes of an ongoing shadow conflict with Israel and the United States -- one with the potential to rattle markets and put upward pressure on oil prices.
9. India -- India in 2013 will be one of the prime examples of the intrusion of political factors into what had until recently been seen as a long-term economic success story. The country's dysfunctional politics and looming elections feed the risk of an economic shock, and in 2013 the ability of the government to implement robust economic policies will decline even further, perpetuating India's "stalling or falling" outlook.
10. South Africa -- In aggregate growth terms, Africa as a whole looks to be on a trajectory to continue its recent position of positive performance. But in South Africa -- one of the continent's largest and most sophisticated economies -- the outlook is far less rosy. Populism, spearheaded by the ruling ANC party, is on the rise, and it is hard to see any real movement on labor, education, and budgetary reforms. Coming retrenchments in mining will almost certainly spur another bout of labor unrest, which has the potential to spread into other sectors as well. Taken together, all these factors increase the risk of further credit downgrades.
In addition to these, Eurasia Group's red herrings for 2013 include:
The geopolitics of energy -- 2013 isn't the year to get overly concerned about geopolitical risk spiking energy prices. For one thing, most of the Middle East risk in the coming year isn't about energy -- it's about everything else -- and the energy revolution happening in the Western Hemisphere will be a boon for consumers across the globe. 
Global protectionism -- The G-20 can afford to agree on protectionism because there's less of a threat here than meets the eye. The trend in fact is toward hints of competitive trade liberalization, especially within the European Union, which is generating a strong internal consensus on the need for a new major transatlantic economic cooperation package.
Radicalism in the developed world -- Many fear the growing gap between rich and poor will instigate class warfare and cause significant instability across the developed world. We think not. For much the same reason that emerging markets are the top risk this year, it's the underlying stability of advanced industrialized democracies that will come through in 2013.
European separatism -- There is no doubt that there are very real separatist pressures building in Catalonia and in Scotland, and national unity remains fragile in Belgium. However -- as much as we all would love to watch Barca field its own team in the World Cup -- there is almost no chance that any of these issues will grow into an actual crisis leading to separation in 2013.
? - North Korea -- Sometimes, you just can't know what's happening, and with North Korea in 2013 that's really the case. In the face of a sudden leadership transition in the world's most totalitarian state -- now run by an untested 28-year-old -- it's almost impossible to assess whether North Korea is becoming more stable. All signs point to the country remaining a perilous bet, but what causes trouble and when? It's hard not to lose sleep over it, but at the same time working harder to assess what exactly is going bump in the night doesn't feel very purposeful. Sorry.

Global Risks 2013 - Eighth Edition

http://www.weforum.org/reports

The Long-Term Threat

The greatest danger is one that will not be faced for decades but that is lurking out there. The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon. That means that a core assumption is at risk. The problem is that social stability has been built around this assumption -- not on the assumption that everyone is owed a living, but the assumption that on the whole, all benefit from growing productivity and efficiency.

If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated. Other superpowers such as Britain or Rome did not have the idea of a perpetually improving condition of the middle class as a core value. The United States does. If it loses that, it loses one of the pillars of its geopolitical power.

Read more: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power | Stratfor 

The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000. Take-home income is a bit less than $40,000 when Social Security and state and federal taxes are included. That means a monthly income, per household, of about $3,300. It is urgent to bear in mind that half of all American households earn less than this. It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.

Read more: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power | Stratfor 

We might not like the idea of paying taxes, but without it, democracies will struggle to function, and will be unable to provide public services. This affects both rich and poor nations, alike.

Individuals and companies all have to pay taxes. But some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and multinational companies, able to afford ingenious lawyers and accountants, have figured out ways to avoid paying enormous amounts of taxes. While we can get into serious trouble for evading payment of taxes, even facing jail in some countries, some companies seem to be able to get away with it. In addition, if governments need to, they tax the population further to try and make up for the lost revenues from businesses that have evaded the tax man (or woman).

Why would companies do this, especially when some of them portray themselves as champions of the consumer? The reasons are many, as this article will explore. In summary, companies look for ways to maximize shareholder value. Multinational companies are in particular well-placed to exploit tax havens and hide true profits thereby avoiding tax. Poor countries barely have resources to address these — many have smaller budgets than the multinationals they are trying to deal with.

Due to massive public debt governments are recognising that they can no longer afford generous pensions and the European Union Commission has said that the average retirement age across the 27 member countries needs to rise from 60 today to 70 by 2060. Governments are rapidly turning to the 'Cloud' to service the needs of their citizens and today EU citizens can access 82 percent of basic public services online. 

The working population will start to shrink from 2012 and unless a dramatic change in migration policy is forthcoming, companies will have to deal with the consequences of older workers and fewer workers in the labour pool in the EU. The EU is setting policy towards car free cities in Europe by 2050. This could be a boom or bust strategy. On the one-hand it will lead to innovation and the rise of cleantech and on the other it may put off investment and inward migration of companies. We will see.

Middle Class

Of course, these two drivers of change, populations and economies, are having significant impact on us all. There's more economic activity in more countries than ever before, using increasingly scarce resources, creating wealth for the first time for billions of people. Over 70 million people are entering the middle class every year and most of them are from emerging economies. 

Cities

As a consequence 20 of the world largest 50 cities will be in Asia by 2025, up from only 8 in 2007. In 2010 the urbanisation of the world reached 50 percent and it is expected that by 2030, 6 out of 10 people will be city dwellers, which is double the number back in 1950. By 2050 it's forecast that 70 percent, of the then 9 billion people, will live in cities. 

Populations

We are confronted by the evidence of our rapidly changing world every day and are contributing to its change each in our own way. In the past 50 years, we've doubled the number of people alive on our planet, reaching 7 billion people at the end of last year. In the next 40 years we are expecting over 2 billion more people to be alive than today. 

Economies

At the same time, and as a direct consequence of this population growth, we are forecasting that our global economy will triple in size by 2050  and is set to have doubled to over $130 trillion in just twenty years time, in 2030 . Much of this growth is amongst the emerging economies of the world, including China, Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia. As a consequence, by 2019 the E7 emerging seven major economies of Peoples Republic of China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, will be a larger economic bloc than the G7 countries who have, for the past 60 years, led the world economically and to a great extent, politically. By 2050 China will have the largest economy with a GDP of over $24 trillion whilst the United States' economy is expected to reach £22 trillion and India the third largest economy at $8 trillion. 

 

Futures studies work best when they're vague and build upon current trends to their logical (and often extreme) conclusion. Along the way, they usually play into their intended audience's hopes and fears: economic collapse, infinite growth for the middle class, Malthusian predictions of food crashes, and a belief in the fundamental know-ability of what is to come.

At the same time, any specific prediction in these texts will almost invariably be wrong. And that limits how useful they can ever be beyond a limited scope of activity. It is rare to see government officials or even corporate executives making long-term plans based on a vision of the future laid out in these studies. You just won't hear someone saying, "We should do this because of GT2030."

That doesn't mean this sort of study is useless. The GT2030 report is important for how it's changing the process and trying to encourage adaptive thinking about the future. It helps leaders understand not just the current trends (which can change on a moment's notice, in the way the 2008 recession undid all the previous predictions of forever-growth), but also how to be flexible enough to adapt to rapid change.

Leaders should look at reports like GT2030 and think about how they can evolve current institutions to be more adaptable and flexible in the future. It seems odd to think that the decentralized world GT2030 describes is going to be met with institutions that were designed in the 1940s.

In 1997, the U.S. intelligence outfit charged with long-term strategic thinking made some startling predictions: by 2010, North Korea would be transformed into a normal state and tensions on the peninsula would be eliminated; the western world would see unending 2-percent growth in personal income; and precision weapons would make conflicts smaller and less costly.

None of those things happened. North Korea remains mostly unchanged today -- except for its nuclear program, which perhaps poses more of a threat than ever. Not only did the 2008 financial crisis stall most economic growth in the Western world, but personal incomes have largelystagnated as well. Finally, while precision weapons did make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan less costly in some respects, neither war could be considered small. Few would argue those were examples of a new, high-tech way of fighting.

According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be engineered and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this may be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies -- whether communism, fascism or humanism -- matter and matter greatly. 

But there is another truth: The reality of large, impersonal forces like geography and the environment that also help to determine the future of human events. Africa has historically been poor largely because of few good natural harbors and few navigable rivers from the interior to the coast. Russia is paranoid because its land mass is exposed to invasion with few natural barriers. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are fabulously wealthy not because of ideas but because of large energy deposits underground. You get the point. Intellectuals concentrate on what they can change, but we are helpless to change much of what happens.

The National Intelligence Council has issued Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, “intended to stimulate thinking about the rapid and vast geopolitical changes characterizing the world today and possible global trajectories during the next 15-20 years.”

The report sees four megatrends:

Individual empowerment will accelerate substantially during the next 15-20 years owing to poverty reduction and a huge growth of the global middle class, greater educational attainment, better health care, and widespread exploitation of new communications and manufacturing technologies.  Enabled by communications technologies, power will shift toward multifaceted and amorphous networks that will form to influence state and global actions.

Diffusion of power among countries will have a dramatic impact by 2030. Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power, based upon GDP, population size, military spending, and technological investment. China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030.

Demographic Patterns: in the world of 2030—a world in which a growing global population will have reached somewhere close to 8.3 billion people (up from 7.1 billion in 2012)—four key trends will be aging—a shrinking number of youthful societies and states; migration, which will increasingly be a cross-border issue; and growing urbanization, which will spur economic growth but could put new strains on food and water resources.

Growing Food, Water, and Energy Nexus: Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources.

The U.S. energy situation also will improve dramatically under most scenarios, and it can be expected to be able to supply most of its energy needs from Western Hemispheric sources within a few years. A decline in dependence on energy resources drawn from the Eastern Hemisphere reduces the need of the United States to intervene there and particularly reduces the need to concern itself with the Persian Gulf. That will be a sea change in how the global system works.

How the Internet of everything will change the world

November 8, 2012

Internet of Everything (credit: Cisco)

From the Internet of Things (IoT), where we are today, we are just beginning to enter a new realm: the Internet of Everything (IoE), where things will gain context awareness, increased processing power, and greater sensing abilities, says Cisco in their blog.

Add people and information into the mix and you get a network of networks where billions or even trillions of connections create unprecedented opportunities and give things that were silent a voice.

Cisco says their IoE as bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before — turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.