The last two mega-trends

In previous posts I looked at two of the four inexorable mega-trends Bernard Lietaer sees currently bearing down on us : 1) the aging of global population, and 2)a revolution in information technology. These two issues leave us with two questions: how are we going to care for the increased needs of aging populations, and how can we sustain ourselves if our labor is no longer needed by the corporations for the making of stuff? 

The final two giant converging trends  are
-3) climate change with loss of biodiversity, and
-4) instability of the global financial system.

3) As I write this, a UN conference on  biodiversity has just created something called the Nagoya Protocol. Representatives from 198 countries decided they would work to cut the current extinction rate by at least half by 2020. The goals include protecting 17 percent of the world’s land areas and 10 percent of its oceans. Scientists predict that the earth is losing animals and plants 100 to 1,000 times the historical average, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Also under the Nagoya Protocol, the U.N. conference delegates decided that rich and poor countries would share the benefits of resources like medicinal plants.

 The assumption that climate change and the mass extinction of species is a large and growing problem is a matter of widespread discussion. Some folk prefer to thing that humanity has nothing to do with causing it, while others grieve the whole thing has already gone so far that we are lost. No one is in favor of climate disaster, whether or not they think it is coming upon us.  Lietaer suggests  a useful "money" question in this area is "How do we resolve the conflict between the need for  long-term planning,  which would be necessary for projects in sustainable development, such as reforestation, and the short-term thinking which dominates our investment universe and forces even the most enlightened managers to focus on the next quarter's earnings?" 

4)The fourth mega-trend bearing down upon us was a shocking novelty to me. I had never given much thought to paying interest on loans (which I avoided) or earning interest (which I tried to do). However, our financial system  itself turns out to be inherently unstable and unsustainable, as well as a fairly recent invention of history. The past 25 years have witnessed a series of ever larger and more geographically extensive financial crises. This book was written before the economic melt-down of 2008.  The hubris of world capitalism was still unassailed- only  Latin Americans,  Russians,  southeast Asians, "others of all sorts" had  until then been affected. However, the events of 2008 engulfed even the U.S. and Europe.

Lietaer points out that the international flow of money has grown beyond the power of even America, the largest and most powerful of  national states,  to control. He asks how we individuals and small communities are ever to protect ourselves from such rampaging financial forces?

I like this book because it is encouraging. It seems to me that listening to the daily news could put one into a permanent hopeless gloom. Next time I will finish his first chapter with thoughts on creating a sustainable future- that is the subtitle of the book: "creating new wealth, work, and a wiser world"!

Chapter One (part two)

 Bernard Lietaer calls the first chapter of this book "Money-the source of all possibility". It sets forth four mega-trends that are converging in our time.
 1) the "age wave"
2) monetary instability
3) the information revolution
4) climate change with extinction of biodiversity.
He asks a money question arising from each of the mega-trends.

 In my last post, I reviewed what he sees as mega-trend #3 " the revolution in information technology".  All the stuff we are able to consume takes ever fewer hands to produce. Our financial system is set up that people need wage money to buy the essentials for life. The question arising from this mega-trend is what are we to do in a system when so many of us are not needed for production, while we still need the wages to get by?  

Now look at the first mega-trend: the inexorable aging of the world's population. For 99% of the history of the human species, our life expectancy was about 18 years. In 1889, Otto von Bismarck introduced a retirement plan for German workers reaching 65 years of age. At the time, life expectancy for the average Prussian was 45 years. In Florida, Italy, and Japan today one in five people is 65 or older. Two thirds of the those who have ever made it to age 65 in all of history are alive today. If indeed money is the source of all possibility, our prevailing financial system isn't designed to do a good job supporting those who are not engaged in it.

Looked at in the context of history, or from the context of traditional community, our system is more than a little strange. Was there ever another place or time when everybody was expected to labor for wages while so much important work remained undone? The money question that arises from this mega-trend is like the last one. Productivity success  puts growing numbers out of work. Successes in education, medicine and public health have allowed an enormous extension of our life span. How do we  provide a decent life for so many aging people?


One way or another, these four converging mega-trends  ensure that the world of 2020 may be hard to recognize. However it turns out, we are creating it with daily choices, largely unconscious of what is happening, how it came to be, and what we can do about it. Although  we are six billion, we think one by one, usually in terms of what one alone can do. Perhaps one alone cannot do much, but for better or worse, we are in this together and the work of the moment may be to learn how to talk to each other respectfully and listen for good ideas in unexpected places. Also, if money really is the source of all possibility, best to understand how it works.

Next time I'll look at the growing instability of the  financial system, which is the fourth of the great mega-trends.

A sustainable future? What jobs?

In the first chapter of this book, Bernard Lietaer asserts that  four gigantic trends are converging in the next few years. Our reactions to them will determine whether we create wise growth and a sustainable future, or not. The four trends are global aging of populations, instability of the world financial system (he wrote this in the nineties!), climate change, and the revolution in information and communications. I'll devote a blog to each of the four.

Since the financial collapse of 2008, there is over 9% unemployment in the US. Depending on how that is calculated, some people say the true figures are closer to 17% Once upon a time, unemployment was a problem for "third world" countries, but it's not only them any more. Arguments rage about "outsourcing" by corporations of "our" jobs to southeast Asia. Companies are able to get the work done abroad more cheaply than it can be done by Americans, Europeans, and the citizens of other comfortably developed countries.We seem to be half asleep to the results of our ongoing revolution in information and communication (computers and the internet). Output of businesses has been multiplied,  jobs have not. In the twenty years before William Greider wrote "One World: Ready or Not" in 1997, he reported that the world's 500 largest enterprises had increased their production 700 times while reducing employment.

In the early twentieth century, many economists predicted that multiplication of productivity by automation would lead to a world of general leisure. A twenty hour work week would be sufficient for the production of all humankind's need for stuff. Medieval serfs worked less than four hours a day. In our time, only the remaining "hunter-gatherer" societies match that level of leisure. Mostly these days we have workaholics and the unemployed. When engines replaced horses for power at the beginning of the twentieth century, the horses became rare. To-day less manpower is needed to make all the stuff we can ever want. There may not be enough jobs, but there's no shortage of work that could be done. Edgar Cahn, founder of Time Banking, says "We've got what we need if we use what we've got".  Bernard Lietaer says that by becoming conscious about money, we can make wiser choices. Sounds like that's worth checking out.