Image: Illustration by Kagan McLeod
Fast-forward to the year 2100. Computers, writes physicist and futurist Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future (Doubleday, 2011), will have humanlike intelligence, the Internet will be accessible via contact lenses, nanobots will eliminate cancers, space tourism will be cheap and popular, and we’ll be colonizing Mars. We will be a planetary civilization capable of consuming the 1017 watts of solar energy falling on Earth to meet our energy needs, with the Internet as a worldwide telephone system; English and Chinese as the contenders for a planetary language; a unified culture of common foods, fashions and films; and a truly global economy with many more international trading blocs such as we see today in the European Union and NAFTA.
Kaku’s vision of how the exchange of science, technology and ideas among all peoples will create a global civilization with greatly weakened nation-states and almost no war is epic in its scope and heroic in its inspiration. Many have felt similar hope for a united, peaceful future through globalization. Indeed, I evoked a similar image in my book The Mind of the Market (Holt, 2009), and I was inspired in part by Thomas Friedman’s wildly popular The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), in which he argues for “a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language.”
The problem for Kaku, Friedman, me and other globalization proponents (and even opponents) is that such a future may be unattainable because of our evolved tribal natures. In fact, this is all a bunch of “globaloney,” says Pankaj Ghemawat, professor of strategic management and Anselmo Rubiralta Chair of Global Strategy at IESE Business School at the University of Navarra in Barcelona, in his new book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). According to Ghemawat, only 10 to 25 percent of economic activity is international (and most of that is regional rather than global). Consider the following percentages (of the total in each category): international mail: 1; international telephone calling minutes: less than 2; international Internet traffic: 17 to 18; foreign-owned patents: 15; exports as a percentage of GDP: 26; stock-market equity owned by foreign investors: 20; first-generation immigrants: 3. As Ghemawat starkly notes, 90 percent of the world’s people will never leave their birth country. Some flattened globe.
The problem, Ghemawat says, is that globalization theories fail to account for the very real distance factors (geographic and cultural). He crunches these factors into a distance coefficient akin to Newton’s law of gravitation. For example, he computes, “a 1 percent increase in the geographic distance between two locations leads to about a 1 percent decrease in trade between them,” a distance sensitivity of –1. Or, he calculates, “U.S. trade with Chile is only 6 percent of what it would be if Chile were as close to the United States as Canada.” Likewise, “two countries with a common language trade 42 percent more on average than a similar pair of countries that lack that link. Countries sharing membership in a trade bloc (e.g., NAFTA) trade 47 percent more than otherwise similar countries that lack such shared membership. A common currency (like the euro) increases trade by 114 percent.”
That analysis actually sounds encouraging to me if we use Kaku’s projected time frame of 2100. But Ghemawat reminds us of our deeply ingrained tendencies to want to interact with our kin and kind and to retain our local customs and culture, which may forever balkanize any globalized scheme. Even as the E.U. expands, for instance, an average of “Eurobarometer” surveys of residents of 16 E.U. countries between 1970 and 1995 made in 2004 by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 48 percent trust their fellow nationals “a lot,” 22 percent trust citizens of other E.U.-16 countries a lot and only 12 percent trust people in certain other countries a lot.
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Add CommentI think that if you change the time frame from 2011 to 2311 you will probably be able write the same story. Two things have to happen before Dr. Kaku's dream can start to come true: The current trend of income to be more and more concentrated in the hands of a few has to be reversed and the cultural move toward more idealogical conservatism has to be reversed. Sorry, but the idea of "exchange of science, technology and ideas among all people[s]" is probably farther away today than it was in the science fiction of the 1950s.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe world sure seems globalized to me...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy office room holds four people: a Chinese, an Australian, a Canadian of recent Persian ancestry, and myself born in Los Angeles with a Lebanese grandfather. We eat lunch with a Malay, a Swede, a Hispanic from Miami, an Indian, and a Chilean. My boss is Greek. My wife is from Thailand.
Seems to me you're making a couple of assumptions here. First, that you have the best way of handling things, indeed the only way. Second, that people who see the world differently than you must be wrong. That is not my experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs with any other hypothesis assumptions need to be tested and proved or disproved.
Michael hit the nail on the head again.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's a sweet dream to "believe" that we can change human nature so easy. These experiments have been done on grand scales and failed horribly.
Sorry TaylorIII but you should be happy to learn that the actual trend of income is as you desire although different from what you surmise. 150 years ago, wealth was only in a few hands, it is much more wide spread now. There wasn't a middle class and almost everyone was poor. The fact is that capialism, with all its shortcommings, has created the greatest increase in living conditions, prosperity and wealth in human history. The socialism experiments (income equalization)all destroyed wealth and cost the lives of millions upon millions of people. Once the wealthiest and most advanced nation in the world, people in China ended up eating tree bark. As much as we'd like, we can't make everyone finish the 100 yard dash at the same time.
@Michio, please, do something useful. Like helping us to accomplish the stuff you hold being the future. And not just mention it being a possibility! You've become, in my view, too much of a populist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@TaylorIII: I think you missed one important thing that will have to hapen for a truly global society: a confirmed encounter with extraterrestrial (non-human) intelligence. The tribalistic "Us v. Them" mentality is so deeply ingrained that the only way we'll all come together is to find someone who's even more "Them". Colonizing Mars might do it for earth, after a few generations. Once the majority of the Martian population is made up of people who were born there, expect the "They're not as human as we are" bigotry to start up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@cesium62: It sounds like you have the good fortune to be in a very open-minded environment. sadly, the people in most places aren't that evolved yet.
@goldenTrout: I think you're info's a bit out-of-date. In the Western world, the masses may still be better off the 150 years ago, but the tide has definitely been going the other direction for the last 30 years or so. the rich have been getting uber-rich & the middle class has been disintegrating as wages have failed to keep up with inflation. China hasn't been "the most advanced nation" since Europe entered the Industrial Revolution & all their wealth has always been concetrate at the very top rungs of the social ladder - the bulk of the populace has always been dirt-poor.
You may be correct that most of the country's capital is now in the hands of an elite few, but China seems to have educated a large percentage of their populace and certainly is developing an enormous 'middle' class. On whole, China seems to be one of the fastest economically 'advancing' countries in the world. Almost certainly, it also still has an enormous population that remains dirt-poor, but where do you think all the manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. went to over the past several decades? China, India, S. Korea, and Viet Nam!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf a truly global economy does develop in the future, if it still relies on the English language it will likely be an artifact of past economic conditions more than any then current conditions...
@GoldenTrout, I do agree with you, that capitalism has done a lot of good for human kind's standard of living, and it has done so much faster than previous methods. I even agree that income equalization, and forcing business' to produce set amounts of goods and so forth (i.e. the socialism experiments you speak of) has failed horribly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, that being said, @Madscientist72 has a good point, that the rich today tend to be uber rich, and the middle class doesn't hold a penny compared to that wealth (in fact it almost seems as if the middle class has become the new lower class, just with a better standard of living than has ever been seen before, however the lower class still exists and arguably their standard of living is at an all time low).
So, I suggest a new type of "socialism experiment". One in which wealth and industry still exist as a free enterprise system (one similar to the U.S.'s but with little to no restrictions on trade), and the only things "provided" for the people are bare necessities (i.e. food, water, energy and shelter), in fact I would take it a step further than that and go ahead and make the governments sole purpose for existence to be providing the basic necessities which allow that government's citizens to exist
1). without the need to worry about whether or not they will be able to survive or provide for their family [by the creation of ultra sustainable, hydroponic, fully automized, high rise agriculture that is funded by the government (I mean, it was your money before the government took it as a tax, right?) as well as desalination plants, solar/wind fields and free "economy" housing]
2). without the need to worry about another individual or entity, foreign or domestic, taking what is rightfully theirs, intentionally seriously harming them either physically or emotionally, or breaking a contract that had been previously agreed upon
3). without the need to worry about the depreciation of their currency due to the irresponsible actions of their own government
I also suggest starting this experiment out on a semi-small scale seeing as the results could be fairly unpredictable
you are all wrong
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGhemawat's globaloney is baloney. The real economy of goods and services is not fully global but the virtual economy of financial markets is truly global and it dwarfs the real economy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe international trade of US is about $3.3 trillion a year. The global currency market has a turnover of $4 trillion A DAY! One year of imports and exports for the US is less than a day's trading in the global currency market.
Wow! a really nice exchange of ideas.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor me, looking through the history of mankind, which BTW is only 5.5 k years old (written history) it provides prospective. Even back in the times of Mesopotamian civizialtion, weatlh is either growing or shrinking. like the sun, rising or setting. Never sitting still. If you grow wealth, the government will also enjoy higher tax income, if you destroy wealth, you will end up eating tree bark.
Do what grows wealth, and avoid what destroys wealth.
This is the path to increasing living standards for us all. So ask yourself...if the government takes the tax to build the infrastructure, is this growing wealth? The Hover Damm? The lost decade in Japan? The vacant cities in China today?
History has shown us, socalism destroys wealth. Capitalism, with all its bad stuff, increases (grows) wealth.
Which place would you want to live?
The land of equal income? Or the land of capitalism?
North Korea, South Korea.
It is all about the creation or the destruction of wealth. There is no Nivrana.
Where Ghematawat sees the influence of global distance factors, I think we can see an inherent property of communication flow. Just as there is more communication between Canada and the United States than between Chile and the United States, so there is more communication at a cocktail party between people who are close to each other than people who are across the room. The phenomenon appears sort of fractal; we can see it at the scale of a cocktail party as we see it at the scale of a city, and at the scale of a nation, and at the scale of a continent. I think this is an inherent property of communication flow. It will never go away, nor will it change.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt appears Ghemowat's calculations are based on linear events, measurements, and thinking. The exponential power and growth of weapons technology and biological systems, or the runaway factor of something like global climate change or global economic system going over the tipping point -- or an asteroid hit (or alien visitors). These are not factored into his assumptions. I don't think Earth is going to be visited anytime soon, but we can all count on unthinkable and unprecedented changes resulting from the exponential growth of technological change. Perhaps even new technologies that will overcome our stubborn resistance to mental change.
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