2030

In ‘2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything’, Professor Guillén attempts to offer a roadmap to navigate the turbulence of the future. He identifies eight major trends and devotes a chapter to each one of them: population decrease coupled with the African baby boom and the next industrial revolution, tech-savvy seniors postponing retirement and their interactions with the new generations, the new middle classes in Asia and Africa and their battle for attention, women’s growing influence in business and government, global warming and the mundanity of survival, the future of technology, the rise of networks and the sharing economy, and blockchain and the demise of modern banking.

Guillén shows how the global population will shrink by growing half as swiftly as it did during the last four decades of the twentieth century. Birthrates in the advanced nations, not only in North America and Europe but also in East Asia, coupled with a much slower decline in Africa and other parts of Asia, will impact the global balance of economic and geopolitical power shifts. Guillén illustrates how Europe’s population is expected to fall from about 22 percent of the world population in 1950 to 8 percent in 2030, while Africa’s will surge from 10 percent of the world population to 20 percent during the same time frame. The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed that in many areas of life, we make bad decisions because our thinking is clouded by the “loss aversion bias.” After conducting many experiments, they concluded that people tend to prefer avoiding losses rather than locking in equivalent gains. Cognitive bias clouds our views on immigration. While the opportunities embedded in immigration are huge, so are the potential pitfalls if natives perceive that they are losing out. Guillén examines the anxieties and anger over immigration, and goes on to demonstrate how immigrants create jobs, rather than take them away, and why brain drain is more of a myth.

The world will have 400 million people in their 60s in another ten yearsworldwide. By 2030, the sixty-plus-year population will reach 38 percent in Japan, 34 percent in Germany, 28 percent in the United Kingdom, 26 percent in the United States, and 25 percent in China. The healthcare and pension systems in every country will have to be adjusted to cope with the new demographic realities. Today’s older consumer is enjoying a much higher quality of life, is “tech-savvy,” have a significant disposable income to spend and invest, and is gradually extending their retirement years. By 2030, an average sixty-year-old can expect to live another twenty-two years, and companies are better off retaining the “institutional knowledge” that the elderly take with them when they leave the workforce.

The Chapter titled, “Keeping Up with the Singhs and the Wangs,” spotlights the growth of the middle class in Asia and Africa. The author quotes Aristotle, who said that “the most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control.” Even as late as the turn of the millennium, i.e., 2000, twothirds of the world’s middle class resided in the European Union, the United States, or Japan. By 2030, these three entities will account for just 25 percent of this class. China, India, and the rest of Asia will account for half of the global middle class by this time. The conflicting paths of the middle classes in the advanced world and the developing markets will be defining economic and political reality by 2030.

“Second Sex No More?” is the focus of Chapter 4, which harps on the evolving role of women as business professionals, entrepreneurs, and leaders of the new decade. Guillén claims that by 2030, women will own more than half of the world’s wealth. However, he insists that the traditional biases that societies have for women will continue to remain and gender equality will remain a chimera. Nevertheless, women’s hard-won new status in society can potentially lead to a transformation of the power structure, and perhaps fewer scandals, less corruption, and diminished violence, as a growing number of researchers have found. Or it can produce a sharp bifurcation whereby only a segment of women enjoy the benefits while the rest are pushed to the fringes, resulting in more social conflict rather than less.

“Cities Drown First” hones in on the problems of global warming, and how urban areas are most likely to be adversely affected by it. Cities account for 1 percent of the world’s land, and yet currently house 55 percent of the world’s population. What happens in the urban centers of the globe is a microcosm of what’s to come in the future. In 2017, there were just 29 cities with more than a population of 10 million. By 2030, that number will grow to 43, while 14 will be home to more than 20 million people. Approximately 90 percent of the urban areas lie near a coast, and these areas are the most susceptible to rising sea levels due to climate change. The author gives examples of the revival of Bilbao, Spain, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga in the US. Nevertheless, the future of the over 400 cities globally, with over a million people in 2030, is dualistic. While these centers will continue to be home to the creative class and knowledgeintensive workers, will pollution, congestion, and security be formidable challenges yet to be overcome? Will climate change cause a shortage of fresh water, and will vertical agriculture develop fast enough?

In “More Cellphones than Toilets”, true to the eminent Austrian economist and political scientist, Joseph Schumpeter’s predictions about “creative destruction” being as normal as it is ubiquitous, modern technology such as virtual reality, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnologies, show a tremendous promise to address intractable societal problems such as poverty, disease, environmental degradation, climate change, and social isolation. Yet, there are potential perils with joblessness as a single robot shows the promise of doing the work of between five to six workers. Technology is partly to blame for the stagnation of the middle class- it also creates evolving ethical and moral dilemmas in society, particularly with the rise of AI, automation, and big data. However, hopefully, new technologies will accelerate growth and access with the rise of mobile phones and e-books in emerging markets, and e-commerce throughout the world.

“Imagine No Possessions,” highlights the rise of the sharing economy, network effects, and the power of almost 10 billion connections. The number of things that we continue to share- homes, cars, jobs, meals, fashion- will continue to grow. Global surveys indicate that over two-thirds of individuals are willing to share resources to save money. The rise of Uber, Airbnb, etc., in the past decade, points to an increasing tendency to leverage the shared economy to share resources. Yet, it has been shown that most of the suppliers of this service are richer and use them to supplement their incomes, hence increasing the inequalities between the classes. He concludes with a book with a chapter on the possibilities of Blockchains and the rise of alternatives to paper money. The book is curated most stimulatingly with anecdotes in every chapter, as well as insightful graphs and figures to illustrate the outlined trends. Examples from around the world illustrate these vicissitudes, fully exhibiting the author’s command over the subject. However, his examination of technological phenomenon such as Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and biological innovations and their likely impact on our lives by 2030 is sketchy. Strangely, the excellent sources cited at the end of the book are not directly referenced in the text. However, his core argument that, “we will not survive the challenges of 2030 unless we change our traditional mindset, which is too linear and too vertical to help us” is a worthy template for addressing problems of the future.1 A very thought-provoking read.

1 The seven principles to take on the future outlined by the author are lose sight of the shore, diversify with purpose, to be successful start small, anticipate dead ends, approach uncertainty with optimism, don’t be scared of scarcity and take the current