George Rebane

[This is the submitted version of my 12feb 2011 Union column published today in its print and online version here.]

Some of us recall the time of ‘population bombs’, ‘megatrends’, and the coming ice age thawing into ‘hothouse earth’.  The 1970s were a bleak time – a lost war, economy in stagflation, the Soviets’ trigger finger on the ‘now or never’ button, and a Peanut Farmer at the helm.  Somehow we managed to survive that with a new rush of enthusiasm that brought on twenty years of the greatest creative and wealth generating enthusiasm since WW2, and the demise of the USSR in the bargain.  But that was then, this is now.

Today we are back in the age of megatrends big time.  But this time, economically we are in debt beyond our ability to repay, and structurally unemployed with no plan beyond fervent hope that history will somehow repeat itself.  And according to Professor J. A. Goldstone of George Mason University, these aren’t even the real megatrends into the face of which we are on a firm course.

Writing in the current issue of the prestigious Foreign Affairs – ‘The New Population Bomb: Four Megatrends That Will Change the World’ – Goldstone argues compellingly that the new bomb is not about world hunger.  Instead it is about cultural and economic demographics that will sweep all before it.  In the process Goldstone sprinkles loads of data here and there to bolster his assessments.  The main point hinges on the widely accepted projection that world population will max out at about 9 billion people in 2050.  But it is the make-up and motivation of these people that we may ignore only to our great peril.  He writes –

Barring a cataclysmic climate crisis or a complete failure to recover from the current economic malaise, global economic output is expected to increase by two to three percent per year, meaning that global income will increase far more than population over the next four decades.

But twenty-first-century international security will depend less on how many people inhabit the world than on how the global population is composed and distributed: where populations are declining and where they are growing, which countries are relatively older and which are more youthful, and how demographics will influence population movements across regions.

The attentive among us know that the aging and thinning populations are primarily in Europe, America north of Mexico, Japan, and, yes, soon China.  The fuel for the fireworks will be the billions of young in less developed countries who will, one way or another, flood the wealth producing countries with their own growing unemployed.  Goldstone argues that the numbers will be so large that it will not matter whether it is cash money or the Caliphate that compels these young people to seek their fortunes and glory in the first world.

To be sure, during this time the world’s economic balance will shift away from today’s developed regions, but it will not occur fast enough.  And the nature of what looms is made worse in Europe, North America, and Japan by the so-called decapitalization effect that over-controlling governments are implementing.  Basically, this means that through excessive taxation, misguided monetary policies, over-regulation, and the simple bloat of the unproductive sectors, governments continue to remove capital required for growth from the productive sectors in developed countries.

Goldstone points out that all this is happening under the radar of the grassroots who seldom lift their heads from everyday concerns that are molehills compared to what is coming down the pike at us.  And while folks are busy arguing about things such as where to build their new courthouse with other people’s money, and how much more to pay lawyers to defend against the latest local scandal, they do pause to vote for politicians who promise short term rewards that coincide with the election cycle.

In the end, the megatrends will give rise to massive migrations of the young, and these should also give rise to commensurate migrations of the old.  To do all this without the breakdown of large scale order will require new immigration policies and rules governing the movement of monies.  Goldstone’s foreboding conclusion is that “coping with (these megatrends) will require nothing less than a major reconsideration of the world's basic global governance structures.”  In sum, to keep the peace, many new policies having a worldwide scope will be needed to replace the parochial ones now in force.  But before that we should have a reasoned public debate among those so capable.

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist and entrepreneur in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on KVMR, NCTV, and Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).