2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
The key to future developments will be the fact that, for the first time, the resources are now available to achieve almost all that society might want. Those resources are, though, unevenly distributed and government intervention - on the international and supranational scale - will be needed to rectify this; since this is the definitely not the sort of problem with which any market, even a politically neutral one, can deal effectively.
Subject to this redistribution, in general there is already enough food to feed everyone, enough mineral resources to supply industry and enough energy to power it - albeit not at the sort of artificially low prices which led to the wasteful excesses before the 1970s. In any case, in outer space there is all of this in abundance; not least almost free solar power.
The first impacts of this new abundance of resources were most memorably charted by Kenneth Galbraith in 'The Affluent Society'. As early as the end of the 1950s, he was signalling that the conventional economics of shortage were no longer appropriate. His consequent prediction of the emergence of economic demand being based upon irrational, to the economists at least, 'lifestyles' - though he did not call them such - was proved largely correct. Unfortunately, though, his comments were largely misunderstood - initially due to the popular misconception that his work was merely an attack on the large corporations. The ideas were ultimately drowned - to be largely forgotten - by the untimely flood of support for the monetarists. Time has moved on, and the impact of 'affluence' is now much greater. Even more than in his teachings, it is now the great driver for change; or, at least, it is the power that unlocks the chains that have bound the other drivers for change.
15 May 2003
Once more the focus is on energy, but this time in terms of global warming! Once again, however, the debate is dogged by fads. Green energy, with the countryside bestrode with giant windmills, is in favour (except for those who have to live next to them, NIMFY Not In My FarmYard!); despite the fact that it can only represent a small part of even the windy UK's energy needs. Nuclear energy, which might solve many problems in the west, is still an emotional no-no; and coal which is all the largest emerging nations have available is not discussed!
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