The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz

Author:Peter Schwartz [Schwartz, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307816115
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-07T14:00:00+00:00

Economic Fears and Hopes

In exploring the economic interactions of demographics and culture we can see some of the longer term driving forces. As the coming of age of the American baby boom helped shape the American economy of the seventies and eighties, the global teenager will help shape the world economy in the nineties and beyond. While the presence of 2 billion global teenagers is predetermined, their characteristics are an uncertainty. We do not know how wealthy or literate they will be. There is a temptation, especially among industrial companies, to assume the worst. Many people, no doubt, would find plausible this sentiment from Paul Hawken:

Young people that I have seen in the so-called Third World countries remind me of a juggernaut—hungry and rapacious—thrust into a world of tremendous uncertainty. Their need, demand, for certainty is so great that almost anybody can pander to it in ways that are quite destructive, both to their own culture—their own inherent culture—and to the environment at the same time.

After a decade of Third World debt and inflation, Paul’s concerns are real. Global teenagers will either be uneducated, unemployed, undernourished, and in the end hopeless, street criminals—like the Brazilian teenage hero of Hector Babenco’s film Pixote—or their fear of poverty will fuel ambition that drives out every other consideration. As a scenario-planner, this type of pessimistic image always inspires the question in me, What would have to take place for this image not to come true? The accelerating power of education via the new technology could turn out to be an answer.

As it happens, there are three driving forces in the world which might, together, be enough to catalyze that education. None of the three have anything to do with a formal educational establishment. The first is the ambition, already noted, among teenagers who want to better themselves. The second is the presence of cheap communications links; to play even a simple computer game is to become familiar with the habits and mind-set of programming, and there is every reason for programming education (and education in other subjects) to travel via interactive telecommunications—assuming that the teenagers of the next fifteen years want it. The third factor is a critical uncertainty, derived directly from the driving force of demographics. How will countries around the world handle the overwhelming pressure for immigration?

Half of Mexico’s population, for example, is under the age of twenty. In the next two decades its population will double, from 70 million to 140 million, even more dominated by people in their teens and twenties. Many of these young people will not find jobs in Mexico. But across the border, the United States will face a labor shortage, especially in entry-level positions. So will nearly every country in Europe, Eastern and Western. When Will Baker asked teenagers around the world, “What would you like to be doing ten years from now?” he nearly always got the same answer: travel to the United States. “Not a few,” he wrote, “foresee declining to return.”

In past waves of migration, unskilled labor from developing countries was welcome.

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