A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (11 page)

More than ever, the United States settles into the role of planetary superpower. It organizes networks and sets up databases to analyze, attract, persuade, and influence.

World economic growth also speeds up, with the mercantile order expanding into new market democracies. In Latin America and Western Europe, dictatorships fall one after another — Greece, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey. As of 1985 the Soviet system itself (which everyone believed to be unshakable) proves incapable of sustaining the arms race launched by the American president and supported by Western Europe. In 1998, when Mikhail Gorbachev attempts to install democracy while maintaining the rules of a planned economy and of collective ownership, he fails. It takes him less than three years to move from glasnost to
perestroika, in other words to grasp that democracy cannot exist without a market democracy. The whole Soviet bloc unravels and draws closer to the European Union.

Everywhere, the planetary system moves toward liberalism. By 2008, 137 countries practice more or less free elections; eighty-two of them are virtually democracies — in other words, their executive power is controlled by a parliament, and major human rights are respected there.

The results of this new form of the mercantile order are exceptional. Between 1980 and 2008, world GDP is multiplied by three, trade in industrial products by twenty-five. Planetary production rises above forty trillion euros and increases by more than 4 percent per year, a rate never before achieved in history. From 1985, exports once again represent 13 percent of global GDP, a ratio last reached in 1913.

Power relationships change: in relative terms, the United States stagnates; Europe declines; Asia climbs. Annual growth rates in 2008 are over 6 percent for Asia, much lower in the United States and in Europe as well. From 1980 to 2008, Asia’s GDP is multiplied by four, China’s by three, India’s by three, Europe’s by two. Between 1980 and 2008, the U.S.’s share of world GDP remains the same at 21 percent, the European Union’s declines from 28 percent to 20 percent, while Asia’s (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia) climbs from 16 to 28 percent.

Although economically united, America, Europe, and other developed nations lose ground: their productivity declines; their competitiveness fades; their
dynamism wanes; their populations age. Even though the European Union manages in 1992 to agree on a common currency, it does not become an integrated market democracy; it no longer progresses in step with the rest of the world. In 2008 its per capita GDP is 25 percent lower than that of the United States; its research efforts are much feebler; the best elements of its innovative class leave Europe for the New World; and an important share of the continent’s industry leaves for Asia without being replaced by new industries. Russia, although enormously enriched by its immense oil reserves, does not succeed in recreating the foundations for its development. Life expectancy lowers and infrastructures unravel. While social security costs are supposed to represent 20 percent of Russian GDP, in reality they represent only 2 percent of that same GDP. Yet the Russian central bank possesses more than 250 billion reserve dollars.

The Pacific becomes the world’s most important body of water. In 1990, transpacific trade already outstrips transatlantic trade by 50 percent: half the world’s trade is carried out there. Nine of the world’s twelve greatest ports are located on the Asian seaboard of the Pacific, and most airborne freight crosses that ocean.

Once more, Asia is hovering closer to the core. By 2008, two-thirds of Americans qualified in science and engineering are of Asian origin. Even though they then remain for a certain period of time in the United States, many create impressive networks with their Far Eastern partners. Many U.S. businesses (especially in California) are founded and directed by foreigners — eBay by an Iranian, Google by a Russian, Juniper by an Indian.

In 1995, Japan, which as we have seen might once have become the new core, experiences a crisis from which it emerges, much enfeebled, in 2005. Yet in 2008, it is still the world’s second-ranking economy.

From 1989, China takes off. By 2008, the world’s biggest dictatorship turns out more than half the flag-ship products of earlier forms (refrigerators, TV sets, washing machines). It is today the world’s leading consumer of copper, iron, nickel, lead, and aluminum; the second-biggest consumer of oil (seven million barrels per day, against twenty-one million in the United States and five and a half million in Japan). China even accounts for a third of the world’s annual growth in oil consumption. In 2008, China’s per capita GDP reaches $2,458 (in Shanghai, it even stands at more than $7,000). In this same year, Chinese higher education turns out 800,000 engineers, and China boasts more subscribers to the Internet than the United States. But Chinese salaries are still a twentieth of America’s.

India, which became a market democracy in 1985, also enters a period of strong growth, with an outstanding industrial sector and world-scale businesses. Despite extreme social inequalities (worse even than in China), it already boasts eighty thousand dollar millionaires, and some hundred Indian companies are already valued at more than a billion dollars. In 2008, the Indian agricultural sector still employs more than half of the population and produces only a fourth of GDP. More than 80 percent of these agricultural workers have less than two and a half acres of land. Inequalities among classes, genders, races, and regions are enormous: for example, the inhabitants of the Bihar, Orissa, and Assam regions today
are ten times less likely than a resident of New Delhi to one day achieve a higher education degrees or possess a portable phone. And the slums of Bombay shelter more residents than the whole of Norway.

Other Asian countries are also progressing very rapidly. Barely delivered of its dictatorship in 1990, South Korea shoots ahead on all fronts, from the automobile to the telephone. It is particularly ahead of the rest of the world in very high-speed fiber-optic linkages. It is also a multimedia pioneer in partnership with Cyworld, which brings together a third of the country’s population, and with OhMyNews, a site for participatory journalism that has become one of the country’s most powerful and most widely heard media outlets. Behind the greatest corporations, the
chaebol
, emerge other cutting-edge companies, such as NHN, which develops one of Google’s only serious competitors, and NCsoft, which launches one of the leading multiplayer role-playing games on its network Lineage. Korean cultural products sweep in waves over the rest of Asia, earning them the devotion of an audience ranging from Tokyo mothers to Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino youth. Korean films, soap operas, and singers make up a “Korean wave” (
hallyu
) that reflects back to Asian youth the image of a society that has succeeded in reconciling Western modernity and traditional Asian values — a model they are more inclined to accept from Korea than from Japan, which has not yet finished the labor of memory over its imperialist past.

By 2008, every Latin American country with the exception of Cuba is a market democracy. In Africa, where dictators are ousted one after the other, some
countries are even emerging from recession. From 1986 to 2008, the number of people able to read and write rises, from 42 percent to 67 percent in Rwanda, from 33 percent to 64 percent in Nigeria, from 27 percent to 47 percent in the Côte d’Ivoire, and from 40 percent to 63 percent in Algeria.

Everything thus seems to be in place for this ninth form to reduce poverty on an enormous scale and to last for a very long time.

Yet the end of the ninth form is already looming — just as it loomed for all its predecessors.

First, the mercantile order suffers from many internal contradictions. External deficits explode and their financing is increasingly dependent on foreign sources. While in 1985 the American external deficit (then at 2.8 percent of GDP) was financed at only 8 percent by foreign governments, in 2008 the deficit stands at 5.2 percent of GDP and is financed at 30 percent by foreigners. What is more, two-thirds of global reserves, payable in dollars — two trillion in Asia alone — have lost a third of their euro value since 2002.

Proliferating, excessive, limitless, and out of control, the American financial system requires profitability rates that industry cannot deliver, to the point where industrial corporations now lend their money in the financial sector rather than invest it in their own activities. In consequence, American automobiles, household equipment, television sets, and telephones are no longer
of the finest quality on the world market. And American corporations stagger under the weight of the debts owed their retired employees.

Moreover, part of American industry is threatened by the arrival of the Internet: everything that can be liquidated is progressively traded free of charge. The music industry already sells fewer CDs than ten years ago; attempts to replace CD sales by sales of digital files meet with failure. In 2005, out of the twenty billion digitized musical files fewer than one billion were purchased.

Salary-earners are also increasingly indebted, especially in regard to two public corporations (Fannie Mae, second-ranking American corporation, and the fifth-ranked Freddie Mac), which hold or stand behind five trillion dollars’ worth of mortgage loans, a debt multiplied by four in ten years. Savings rates on American salaries are now only 0.2 percent, the world’s lowest — whereas in the 1900s up until 1980 they stood at 7 percent. Between 2005 and 2008, Americans were spending virtually as much as they earned. Competition among lenders is tooth and nail. While bankers twenty years ago grumbled when 30 percent of a household’s income was earmarked for repayment of these debts, in 2008 they consider a debt of 50 percent quite tolerable. In September 2008, the United States Treasury placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal conservatorship.

Furthermore, disparities between the richest Americans and all the others soar. Between 1950 and 1970, for every dollar earned by 80 percent of the less fortunate members of the American population, the top one-tenth of one percent earned 162; today that imbalance
stands at 1:250. In short, half of the wealth created from 1990 to 2008 has benefited 0.1 percent of households. The American worker’s salary has been dropping since 1973 because of competition from immigrants and from relocation of businesses. In 2008, American salaried employees work an annual average of forty-six weeks, or six weeks more than Europeans, and they are allowed only half the annual vacation enjoyed by Europeans.

In 2008, even in California, where the minimum hourly wage is at least in principle eight dollars, one child in five lives below the poverty line. Between 2.3 and 3.5 million sedentary Americans are homeless every year. Almost one out of ten black children and one Hispanic child in twenty lives at least two months a year in a shelter. This is also true of one out of ten elderly people. In New York, more than thirty-eight thousand people are housed each night in municipal shelters, including sixteen thousand children. By 2008, some forty-seven million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, have no health insurance of any kind.

In the world at large, disparities become more and more extreme. Some 1.4 billion people live below the poverty line (estimated at $1.25 a day); by 2008, 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. The minimum hourly salary of a Californian is four times greater than the daily wage of a third of humanity. Half the world’s population has no access to running water, education, health care, credit, or housing. Seventy-eight percent of the inhabitants of the villages of the southern hemisphere live in slums. Slum dwellers make up 99.4 percent of Ethiopians. Cities grow in disorderly fashion:
Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos see their populations double from 1950 to 2008. There are some 200,000 shantytowns throughout the world. According to a June 2006 UN report, nearly one out of three people live in a shantytown. The planet’s forty-nine poorest cities, accounting for 11 percent of the global population, still receive only 0.5 percent of world GDP.

World agriculture is stagnating, while populations grow increasingly swiftly and still suffer from hunger. To feed the world’s population in 2050, world agricultural production will have to increase two and a quarter times! The number of available calories per head of population rises by only 3 percent between 1994 and 2008. In the latter year, 850 million people suffer from malnutrition — more than ever before. One billion people (a third of them women) are illiterate; more than 150 million children between six and eleven do not go to school.

Growth aggravates the destitution of many. A considerable proportion of the goods exported at very low price (clothing, toys, sports articles) to the shops of Europe and America is manufactured by ruthlessly exploited workers in the poorest countries of Asia and Latin America. One hundred fifty-eight million children aged four to fourteen — that’s one out of six — are forced to work. Never in the course of history have so many people — estimated between twelve and twenty-seven million — been enslaved. In 2008, twenty-three thousand children die in work-related accidents. In Bangladesh, for example, the minimum monthly wage in the export business does not exceed ten dollars a month and, despite riots, has not been revalued since
1994. Children work seven days a week: salaries represent less than 10 percent of production costs. And nobody looks into anything.

In Africa the situation is even worse. Between 1987 and 2008, per capita revenue drops by a fourth. As a result, sub-Saharan Africa’s debt has quadrupled, from $45 billion in 1980 to $175 billion in 2003, and the public foreign debt of Africa as a whole has gone from $89 billion in 1980 to $231 billion in 2004. In that same year, 2003, AIDS, a disease that appeared in the early eighties, afflicted over twenty-four million people, many of them adults under forty (teachers, young managers, policemen, soldiers), destroying the human infrastructure of these countries and leaving twelve million children orphaned. Only twenty-seven thousand receive treatment, since the cost of the highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) they need is twelve thousand times higher than what the average African annually spends on medication.