Loserthink, page 15
If someone does something you are happy about and you praise that person, you encourage more good behavior of the same kind. People like praise and recognition. Most of us are starving for it. Personally, I would probably steal a car if I thought someone would applaud me for it. Praise is an effective way to get more of what you want.
The opposite is also true. When someone does something you appreciate, the best way to ruin that momentum is by asking why it didn’t happen sooner. That’s putting a penalty on good behavior. And you should expect anyone who gets treated with that sort of loserthink to be less likely to be helpful in the future.
If someone does something you appreciate, it is loserthink to ask why it didn’t happen sooner.
I’ve never discovered a good way to respond to the “Why didn’t you do it sooner?” criticism. I can’t offer you a solution, but I recommend asking your critics if this is a new standard by which they are also willing to be judged. Do not play defense. Attack the standard for being absurd and unworkable. This approach has zero chance of changing any minds, but you might enjoy asking, “Why didn’t you do it sooner?” every time your critic accomplishes something.
This chapter is not an exhaustive list of the ridiculous things pundits and online trolls shamelessly say, but I think it serves as a good reminder that those people are advocates—not logicians, not historians—and they are not always true to the facts. If you choose to imitate their arguments, don’t expect others to take you seriously.
CHAPTER 12
The Golden Age Filter
If you pay attention to the news, you are assaulted with one dire warning after another about how the world is barreling mindlessly toward doom. It is easy to lose sight of the big picture: the world is doing well by historical standards, and the rate of improvement is increasing.
In this chapter, I’ll give you a quick tour of what is already going right and what is likely to continue going right. I do this to help you recognize how often you can be in a mental prison of negativity while things are actually going quite well.
I’m an optimist by nature, and I confess to putting that bias on this chapter. But you don’t need to buy into all my optimism to see the larger point that you have been sold a negative view of the future because of the business model of the press. If the press has a choice of scaring you or telling you everything is fine, one of those paths is more profitable. Fear sells. I hope this chapter helps you to keep the fear stories in context.
POVERTY AND OVERPOPULATION
In 1966, half of the world lived in extreme poverty. By 2017, the number had fallen to 9 percent.1 Once you get people out of extreme poverty, they tend to have smaller families, which means you get population control for free.
The middle class has not done so well lately because the cost of living is rising faster than incomes. When an imbalance of this sort happens in an innovative, capitalist system, you can expect new companies to spring up in response. There is always a time lag, of course, so you won’t see all of this right away. I’ll give you a brief tour of the innovations you can expect in the near future to lower the cost of living.
Inexpensive Homes
We are in the early stages of seeing entirely new home-building systems, but you can already see where things are heading. We’re seeing small but successful tests of 3-D-printed homes, factory-built homes, kits for assembling your own home, and nonstandard living arrangements, such as college students being roommates with senior citizens for mutual benefit. It is too early to know which of these approaches will dramatically lower the cost of a good home, but with this much attention on the problem, the smart money says we will soon have low-cost housing options of the type no one can yet fully imagine.
Education
Traditional education involves one instructor teaching a class of students who are in the same room. That’s an expensive model, and a bad one if you live in a place with poorly funded schools and no other options. Online learning is rapidly growing and is already cost-effective, but it is fairly primitive compared to where it is likely to evolve in a few years. Most online learning is limited to one teacher droning about a topic while the video camera is running. But eventually, and inevitably, you will see more of a Hollywood film model for online education, meaning teams of qualified people will get together to add their contributions to the product. The “teacher” might simply be a good presenter, similar to an actor. The course content might be the product of graphic artists, CGI artists, gifted writers and directors working together. Now add the tech industry’s ability to measure what gets the most clicks and who gets the highest test grades, and you have a way to continuously evolve to better and more effective forms of online teaching.
At the moment, online learning is inferior to a physical classroom experience for most subjects. But that gap will shrink rapidly, and eventually the online experience will be far superior, more widely available, and much less expensive than college. Someday we might see public schools replaced by online courses and augmented by social get-togethers for the students.
I recently bought a virtual reality (VR) system for entertainment and also to learn what is ahead for VR technology. In its current form, the content for VR is limited, and wearing the VR headset for several minutes can give users headaches and motion sickness. But as primitive as the technology is, it is already completely obvious that virtual experiences will eventually rival in-person experiences, and surpass them in many ways. This is especially important for online learning. If you can put yourself into the scene—let’s say, attending an historical event as a spectator, or assembling a virtual machine from virtual parts—your learning experience will be extraordinary compared to anything a classroom can provide.
One VR title I used at home involved taking a tour inside the Hindenburg airship that was famously destroyed by a fire in 1937. I could walk through the control room, the crew’s quarters, the public spaces, and all the interior engineering spaces at my own pace. This was full-body learning, and I remember the inside of the Hindenburg as vividly as if I had been there in person.
Probably the biggest obstacle to nontraditional learning is the value of the degree or certification one gets when done. If you have a degree from a top college, employers know approximately what they are getting. But if you learned a variety of useful skills online, and there is no degree program involved, how would anyone know your value? I expect this to change over time as credible business leaders and companies start endorsing certain collections of online classes as being degree-equivalent.
END OF UNSOLVED CRIME
Have you noticed that nearly 100 percent of high-profile crimes seem to get solved? That’s not an accident. In the United States and other developed countries, we have the technology to solve nearly any crime that merits enough resources. You are probably familiar with most of the crime-solving tools available to law enforcement. But when you see them listed together, it creates a powerful picture in which the rate of unsolved crime will approach zero.
Video Everywhere
Most businesses, and an increasing number of private homes, have video security cameras inside and out. If you are running from a crime you’ve just committed, all law enforcement needs to know is where the crime happened and approximately when, and they can usually find video of you leaving the scene.
I assume most self-driving cars of the future will have video capabilities both inside and out, meaning anything within sight of an automobile is likely to be recorded. And self-driving cars will reduce drunk driving, speeding, road rage, and most other types of vehicle-related crimes.
With the ubiquity of smartphones, you can almost guarantee that any crime in a public space will be recorded. And if the perpetrator makes the mistake of talking anywhere near a smartphone or home speaker, law enforcement might be able to find that audio file.
Digital Trail
If you own a smartphone—and nearly all criminals do—law enforcement can know where you have been, what you have been saying, with whom you have been communicating, and where you purchased what kind of goods. Unless you live off the digital grid, which is rare, you’re likely to leave a clear trail.
DNA
We have long been able to match DNA with evidence found at crime scenes. But this capability is taking a huge leap forward as more people voluntarily submit DNA samples for personal testing and for tracing their family trees on genealogical websites.2 What’s new is that a perpetrator’s DNA can now be used to locate a cousin or other relative. And once you have a family member, you can usually find the perp. Just ask cousin Bob if he has any relatives living in the town where a crime has happened. That’s often enough information to find the criminal, and this exact process has already been successfully used. As more people voluntarily submit their DNA for various personal reasons, any DNA from a crime scene is likely to lead to identification of the criminal via family connections. And once you have a suspect, that person’s digital trail will give them away.
Humans will always be tempted to commit crimes, but it usually only happens when people feel they can get away with it. The days of getting away with crime are almost over. Expect crime rates to continue falling.
WORLD PEACE
Experts disagree on whether we are experiencing a trend of declining war in recent decades.3 Like most things, it depends how you measure it. And comparisons of war dead over time are complicated by improvements in treating the wounded. But in my opinion, a number of forces are aligning to make wars far less likely in the future.
Mutually assured destruction keeps working.
Conquest is no longer economical.
Guerrilla resisters have access to better weaponry.
Economic war is a better substitute for physical war.
In olden times, it often made sense to conquer a neighboring country to plunder their resources. It could be a good investment. Today, there is little opportunity for making money from war because the conquered country would inevitably produce a well-armed guerrilla resistance to destroy pipelines, roads, and other economic assets of the conquerors. And we know the aggressor country will suffer staggering economic pressure from the rest of the developed world. In our increasingly connected global economy, making war is bad for business, and the aggressor can know with certainty they will not come out ahead.
If countries will no longer start wars for economic gain, you still have the kinds of wars in which an irrational leader brainwashes his own citizens to fight for irrational reasons. But even the most irrational leaders need to believe they have a chance of winning before they commit to battle. Hitler was crazy, but he invaded other countries only when he thought he had a good chance of winning, both militarily and economically. And in those days, when resistance forces were armed mostly with rifles, you had a good chance of occupying and holding conquered territory. None of that is true in today’s world. Conquering your neighbor in this day and age is economic suicide.
If you look at the two alleged “craziest” leaders in today’s world who also have substantial militaries—Iran’s Ali Khamenei and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un—we observe both of them responding rationally to economic pressure and military threats. Keep in mind that the press routinely describes our international adversaries as unhinged, which is almost always an exaggeration. When dictators do evil things to their critics and adversaries, it is generally in a rational, albeit immoral, pursuit of self-interest. In other words, even “crazy” dictators are not full-on crazy.
Given human nature, a dictator who crosses the line into full-on irrationality would soon be removed by his own inner circle and military. While the odds of dictators being labeled crazy by adversaries are 100 percent, the odds of a completely irrational leader staying in power long enough to wage war seems vanishingly small in this day and age.
I’ll round out my optimism about the direction of war by looking at some of the main types of military conflicts.
Nuclear Powers
We have never seen two nuclear powers go to war against each other, and in my opinion we never will. The threat of mutually assured destruction is clearly effective. The minimum requirement for starting a war is that the aggressor has to think there is a legitimate chance of winning, and no one believes a country can win a nuclear war in any sense that “winning” means something. So that’s good news.
Nuclear Powers Attacking Nonnuclear Powers
The lesson of the past few decades is that large military powers can easily crush countries with smaller militaries. But the victor can’t easily occupy and hold the defeated country for the long run because of the high cost of containing the inevitable guerrilla resistance. So we will probably see fewer wars of conquest simply because they don’t work out for the conquering power.
Proxy Wars
Big countries like to take sides in wars fought by small countries, including revolutions, whenever it suits the larger country’s national interest. We call those proxy wars. For the larger countries supporting fighters in smaller countries, the benefits of having your side prevail can outweigh the risks. Or at least that has been the case in the past. But here too we see a trend toward economic punishment of the larger countries backing a warring faction. For example, at this writing, both Iran and Saudi Arabia are experiencing economic pressure to end their proxy war in Yemen.4
Special-Case Wars
We will still see smaller wars for years to come in which there is some kind of special case involved. For example, if a conquered country’s citizens are neutral or positive about the conquering country’s intentions, and they dislike their own leaders, that situation might be economical for the conquerors. But over time, we should expect the number of special cases to shrink toward zero as those few situations are exploited.
Radical Islamic Wars
I see no end in sight for radical Islamic terror attacks because the normal cost-benefit analysis of life on earth doesn’t apply to people who believe their payoff comes after martyrdom. But the brief tenure of the so-called ISIS caliphate in Syria shows us what happens when overachieving terrorists try to hold territory: it turns them into easier targets. The advantages of being a secret terror society evaporate when you try to hold territory.
We also observe that the psychological situation in the Middle East is evolving in a positive way. The old thinking was that Israel was the common enemy of its Muslim neighbors and susceptible to some kind of eventual conquest. The newer thinking is that Israel is too strong to conquer in any rational military sense, and Iran is emerging as the common enemy of both Israel and other Muslim countries in the region. Israel has made tremendous progress in improving relations with its neighbors and has made a public campaign of friendship directly to the Iranian people, offering to help them with water purification, for example.
Put all of this together and the Middle East might be only one ayatollah away from something that looks like peace. And that ayatollah, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei, is in his eighties, with a crumbling economy thanks to sanctions and military spending, and a relatively pro-Western population. For perhaps the first time ever, conditions are ripe for major progress in eliminating war in the Middle East.
Miscellaneous Wars
Afghanistan will probably be at war with itself, with the help of various outside entities, for another hundred years. But most of that will stay within its borders. And it is reasonable to assume plenty of underdeveloped countries will have civil wars and wars with neighbors, complete with genocides and atrocities. But as countries in that category develop their economies and become tied into the global economic system, their odds of war will plummet.
For the developed world, as well as their less-developed allies, the risk of war is declining every year because economic sanctions are the better weapons of choice.
I won’t argue with anyone who tells me I am too optimistic about the future of major wars. But I am certain that the historical reasons for war have nearly evaporated, at least in terms of the largest military powers. Today, economic war makes far more sense, and I don’t see that changing.
CLIMATE CHANGE
In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a “dire” prediction that climate change could depress GDP by 10 percent in eighty years. That might be the best news you have heard on the topic, albeit disguised as terrible news. In eighty years, the world is likely to be five to ten times wealthier, assuming normal trends, and we wouldn’t even notice we were 10 percent worse off than we might have been without climate change.
But let’s say you don’t believe global warming is economically trivial. You still have reason for optimism because of the technologies that are already in the pipeline. And one can hardly imagine what we will see over the next eighty years. Here are some interesting developments in that space.
Fusion Power
Fusion power has been the “flying car” of energy conversations for many years. Futurists have consistently predicted it is coming soonish, only to leave us disappointed as the future comes and goes without it.
The dream is that fusion will be the nuclear technology that overcomes a number of limitations with older fission technology. The potential of fusion power, should it ever be solved to a commercial level, is immense. Fusion would provide clean, uninterrupted power at a cost that would annihilate all competing sources. If scientists and engineers can commercialize that technology in the next twenty years, you can worry a lot less about climate change over the next eighty.
The opposite is also true. When someone does something you appreciate, the best way to ruin that momentum is by asking why it didn’t happen sooner. That’s putting a penalty on good behavior. And you should expect anyone who gets treated with that sort of loserthink to be less likely to be helpful in the future.
If someone does something you appreciate, it is loserthink to ask why it didn’t happen sooner.
I’ve never discovered a good way to respond to the “Why didn’t you do it sooner?” criticism. I can’t offer you a solution, but I recommend asking your critics if this is a new standard by which they are also willing to be judged. Do not play defense. Attack the standard for being absurd and unworkable. This approach has zero chance of changing any minds, but you might enjoy asking, “Why didn’t you do it sooner?” every time your critic accomplishes something.
This chapter is not an exhaustive list of the ridiculous things pundits and online trolls shamelessly say, but I think it serves as a good reminder that those people are advocates—not logicians, not historians—and they are not always true to the facts. If you choose to imitate their arguments, don’t expect others to take you seriously.
CHAPTER 12
The Golden Age Filter
If you pay attention to the news, you are assaulted with one dire warning after another about how the world is barreling mindlessly toward doom. It is easy to lose sight of the big picture: the world is doing well by historical standards, and the rate of improvement is increasing.
In this chapter, I’ll give you a quick tour of what is already going right and what is likely to continue going right. I do this to help you recognize how often you can be in a mental prison of negativity while things are actually going quite well.
I’m an optimist by nature, and I confess to putting that bias on this chapter. But you don’t need to buy into all my optimism to see the larger point that you have been sold a negative view of the future because of the business model of the press. If the press has a choice of scaring you or telling you everything is fine, one of those paths is more profitable. Fear sells. I hope this chapter helps you to keep the fear stories in context.
POVERTY AND OVERPOPULATION
In 1966, half of the world lived in extreme poverty. By 2017, the number had fallen to 9 percent.1 Once you get people out of extreme poverty, they tend to have smaller families, which means you get population control for free.
The middle class has not done so well lately because the cost of living is rising faster than incomes. When an imbalance of this sort happens in an innovative, capitalist system, you can expect new companies to spring up in response. There is always a time lag, of course, so you won’t see all of this right away. I’ll give you a brief tour of the innovations you can expect in the near future to lower the cost of living.
Inexpensive Homes
We are in the early stages of seeing entirely new home-building systems, but you can already see where things are heading. We’re seeing small but successful tests of 3-D-printed homes, factory-built homes, kits for assembling your own home, and nonstandard living arrangements, such as college students being roommates with senior citizens for mutual benefit. It is too early to know which of these approaches will dramatically lower the cost of a good home, but with this much attention on the problem, the smart money says we will soon have low-cost housing options of the type no one can yet fully imagine.
Education
Traditional education involves one instructor teaching a class of students who are in the same room. That’s an expensive model, and a bad one if you live in a place with poorly funded schools and no other options. Online learning is rapidly growing and is already cost-effective, but it is fairly primitive compared to where it is likely to evolve in a few years. Most online learning is limited to one teacher droning about a topic while the video camera is running. But eventually, and inevitably, you will see more of a Hollywood film model for online education, meaning teams of qualified people will get together to add their contributions to the product. The “teacher” might simply be a good presenter, similar to an actor. The course content might be the product of graphic artists, CGI artists, gifted writers and directors working together. Now add the tech industry’s ability to measure what gets the most clicks and who gets the highest test grades, and you have a way to continuously evolve to better and more effective forms of online teaching.
At the moment, online learning is inferior to a physical classroom experience for most subjects. But that gap will shrink rapidly, and eventually the online experience will be far superior, more widely available, and much less expensive than college. Someday we might see public schools replaced by online courses and augmented by social get-togethers for the students.
I recently bought a virtual reality (VR) system for entertainment and also to learn what is ahead for VR technology. In its current form, the content for VR is limited, and wearing the VR headset for several minutes can give users headaches and motion sickness. But as primitive as the technology is, it is already completely obvious that virtual experiences will eventually rival in-person experiences, and surpass them in many ways. This is especially important for online learning. If you can put yourself into the scene—let’s say, attending an historical event as a spectator, or assembling a virtual machine from virtual parts—your learning experience will be extraordinary compared to anything a classroom can provide.
One VR title I used at home involved taking a tour inside the Hindenburg airship that was famously destroyed by a fire in 1937. I could walk through the control room, the crew’s quarters, the public spaces, and all the interior engineering spaces at my own pace. This was full-body learning, and I remember the inside of the Hindenburg as vividly as if I had been there in person.
Probably the biggest obstacle to nontraditional learning is the value of the degree or certification one gets when done. If you have a degree from a top college, employers know approximately what they are getting. But if you learned a variety of useful skills online, and there is no degree program involved, how would anyone know your value? I expect this to change over time as credible business leaders and companies start endorsing certain collections of online classes as being degree-equivalent.
END OF UNSOLVED CRIME
Have you noticed that nearly 100 percent of high-profile crimes seem to get solved? That’s not an accident. In the United States and other developed countries, we have the technology to solve nearly any crime that merits enough resources. You are probably familiar with most of the crime-solving tools available to law enforcement. But when you see them listed together, it creates a powerful picture in which the rate of unsolved crime will approach zero.
Video Everywhere
Most businesses, and an increasing number of private homes, have video security cameras inside and out. If you are running from a crime you’ve just committed, all law enforcement needs to know is where the crime happened and approximately when, and they can usually find video of you leaving the scene.
I assume most self-driving cars of the future will have video capabilities both inside and out, meaning anything within sight of an automobile is likely to be recorded. And self-driving cars will reduce drunk driving, speeding, road rage, and most other types of vehicle-related crimes.
With the ubiquity of smartphones, you can almost guarantee that any crime in a public space will be recorded. And if the perpetrator makes the mistake of talking anywhere near a smartphone or home speaker, law enforcement might be able to find that audio file.
Digital Trail
If you own a smartphone—and nearly all criminals do—law enforcement can know where you have been, what you have been saying, with whom you have been communicating, and where you purchased what kind of goods. Unless you live off the digital grid, which is rare, you’re likely to leave a clear trail.
DNA
We have long been able to match DNA with evidence found at crime scenes. But this capability is taking a huge leap forward as more people voluntarily submit DNA samples for personal testing and for tracing their family trees on genealogical websites.2 What’s new is that a perpetrator’s DNA can now be used to locate a cousin or other relative. And once you have a family member, you can usually find the perp. Just ask cousin Bob if he has any relatives living in the town where a crime has happened. That’s often enough information to find the criminal, and this exact process has already been successfully used. As more people voluntarily submit their DNA for various personal reasons, any DNA from a crime scene is likely to lead to identification of the criminal via family connections. And once you have a suspect, that person’s digital trail will give them away.
Humans will always be tempted to commit crimes, but it usually only happens when people feel they can get away with it. The days of getting away with crime are almost over. Expect crime rates to continue falling.
WORLD PEACE
Experts disagree on whether we are experiencing a trend of declining war in recent decades.3 Like most things, it depends how you measure it. And comparisons of war dead over time are complicated by improvements in treating the wounded. But in my opinion, a number of forces are aligning to make wars far less likely in the future.
Mutually assured destruction keeps working.
Conquest is no longer economical.
Guerrilla resisters have access to better weaponry.
Economic war is a better substitute for physical war.
In olden times, it often made sense to conquer a neighboring country to plunder their resources. It could be a good investment. Today, there is little opportunity for making money from war because the conquered country would inevitably produce a well-armed guerrilla resistance to destroy pipelines, roads, and other economic assets of the conquerors. And we know the aggressor country will suffer staggering economic pressure from the rest of the developed world. In our increasingly connected global economy, making war is bad for business, and the aggressor can know with certainty they will not come out ahead.
If countries will no longer start wars for economic gain, you still have the kinds of wars in which an irrational leader brainwashes his own citizens to fight for irrational reasons. But even the most irrational leaders need to believe they have a chance of winning before they commit to battle. Hitler was crazy, but he invaded other countries only when he thought he had a good chance of winning, both militarily and economically. And in those days, when resistance forces were armed mostly with rifles, you had a good chance of occupying and holding conquered territory. None of that is true in today’s world. Conquering your neighbor in this day and age is economic suicide.
If you look at the two alleged “craziest” leaders in today’s world who also have substantial militaries—Iran’s Ali Khamenei and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un—we observe both of them responding rationally to economic pressure and military threats. Keep in mind that the press routinely describes our international adversaries as unhinged, which is almost always an exaggeration. When dictators do evil things to their critics and adversaries, it is generally in a rational, albeit immoral, pursuit of self-interest. In other words, even “crazy” dictators are not full-on crazy.
Given human nature, a dictator who crosses the line into full-on irrationality would soon be removed by his own inner circle and military. While the odds of dictators being labeled crazy by adversaries are 100 percent, the odds of a completely irrational leader staying in power long enough to wage war seems vanishingly small in this day and age.
I’ll round out my optimism about the direction of war by looking at some of the main types of military conflicts.
Nuclear Powers
We have never seen two nuclear powers go to war against each other, and in my opinion we never will. The threat of mutually assured destruction is clearly effective. The minimum requirement for starting a war is that the aggressor has to think there is a legitimate chance of winning, and no one believes a country can win a nuclear war in any sense that “winning” means something. So that’s good news.
Nuclear Powers Attacking Nonnuclear Powers
The lesson of the past few decades is that large military powers can easily crush countries with smaller militaries. But the victor can’t easily occupy and hold the defeated country for the long run because of the high cost of containing the inevitable guerrilla resistance. So we will probably see fewer wars of conquest simply because they don’t work out for the conquering power.
Proxy Wars
Big countries like to take sides in wars fought by small countries, including revolutions, whenever it suits the larger country’s national interest. We call those proxy wars. For the larger countries supporting fighters in smaller countries, the benefits of having your side prevail can outweigh the risks. Or at least that has been the case in the past. But here too we see a trend toward economic punishment of the larger countries backing a warring faction. For example, at this writing, both Iran and Saudi Arabia are experiencing economic pressure to end their proxy war in Yemen.4
Special-Case Wars
We will still see smaller wars for years to come in which there is some kind of special case involved. For example, if a conquered country’s citizens are neutral or positive about the conquering country’s intentions, and they dislike their own leaders, that situation might be economical for the conquerors. But over time, we should expect the number of special cases to shrink toward zero as those few situations are exploited.
Radical Islamic Wars
I see no end in sight for radical Islamic terror attacks because the normal cost-benefit analysis of life on earth doesn’t apply to people who believe their payoff comes after martyrdom. But the brief tenure of the so-called ISIS caliphate in Syria shows us what happens when overachieving terrorists try to hold territory: it turns them into easier targets. The advantages of being a secret terror society evaporate when you try to hold territory.
We also observe that the psychological situation in the Middle East is evolving in a positive way. The old thinking was that Israel was the common enemy of its Muslim neighbors and susceptible to some kind of eventual conquest. The newer thinking is that Israel is too strong to conquer in any rational military sense, and Iran is emerging as the common enemy of both Israel and other Muslim countries in the region. Israel has made tremendous progress in improving relations with its neighbors and has made a public campaign of friendship directly to the Iranian people, offering to help them with water purification, for example.
Put all of this together and the Middle East might be only one ayatollah away from something that looks like peace. And that ayatollah, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei, is in his eighties, with a crumbling economy thanks to sanctions and military spending, and a relatively pro-Western population. For perhaps the first time ever, conditions are ripe for major progress in eliminating war in the Middle East.
Miscellaneous Wars
Afghanistan will probably be at war with itself, with the help of various outside entities, for another hundred years. But most of that will stay within its borders. And it is reasonable to assume plenty of underdeveloped countries will have civil wars and wars with neighbors, complete with genocides and atrocities. But as countries in that category develop their economies and become tied into the global economic system, their odds of war will plummet.
For the developed world, as well as their less-developed allies, the risk of war is declining every year because economic sanctions are the better weapons of choice.
I won’t argue with anyone who tells me I am too optimistic about the future of major wars. But I am certain that the historical reasons for war have nearly evaporated, at least in terms of the largest military powers. Today, economic war makes far more sense, and I don’t see that changing.
CLIMATE CHANGE
In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a “dire” prediction that climate change could depress GDP by 10 percent in eighty years. That might be the best news you have heard on the topic, albeit disguised as terrible news. In eighty years, the world is likely to be five to ten times wealthier, assuming normal trends, and we wouldn’t even notice we were 10 percent worse off than we might have been without climate change.
But let’s say you don’t believe global warming is economically trivial. You still have reason for optimism because of the technologies that are already in the pipeline. And one can hardly imagine what we will see over the next eighty years. Here are some interesting developments in that space.
Fusion Power
Fusion power has been the “flying car” of energy conversations for many years. Futurists have consistently predicted it is coming soonish, only to leave us disappointed as the future comes and goes without it.
The dream is that fusion will be the nuclear technology that overcomes a number of limitations with older fission technology. The potential of fusion power, should it ever be solved to a commercial level, is immense. Fusion would provide clean, uninterrupted power at a cost that would annihilate all competing sources. If scientists and engineers can commercialize that technology in the next twenty years, you can worry a lot less about climate change over the next eighty.
