So, when I orginally stumbled upon this I wasn't sure if it was even real. It was produced by the United States National Intelligence Agency and it outlines very specifically what the government imagines the globalizing world to look like in the year 2025. In addition to discussing issues such as global population growth, the changing balance of power, and "state capitalism," it discusses the new transnational agenda of the government. I highly encourage you to check it out if you have the time.
http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf
Interesting read. The two things that caught my attention the most were the government views on Russia and religion in 2025. The document goes into how the role of religion will grow in 2025 and how Russia will either "boom or bust." One of the most interesting details was the predicted 18 year old male population for Russia will be 650,000 in 2017. The decline in population could make it hard to maintain its army that relies on 750,000 conscripts.
ReplyDeleteWow, this was really interesting.
ReplyDeleteI want to draw particular attention to this part:
"However, there is a dark side to the global middle class coin: continued divergence at the extremes. Many countries— especially the landlocked and resource- poor ones in Sub Saharan Africa—lack the fundamentals for entering the globalization game. By 2025-2030, the portion of the world considered poor will shrink by about 23 percent, but the world’s poor—still 63 percent of the globe’s population—stand to become relatively poorer, according to the World Bank."
It's good to see the rapid growth of a global middle class but frustrating to see the same "poor getting poorer" phenomenon intensifying. What is the World Bank, an organization often accused of perpetuating this poverty, doing about this uneven dispersion of income? And for that matter, how are current poverty alleviation programs being framed? If you take the angle that the goal is to reduce poverty in general then a 23% reduction is extremely heartening, but if you make your goal mitigating incoming disparities then this is a worrying failure. I wonder how the popular media would have viewed these findings had they been widely publicized?
Finally I worry about the implications this has for global environmental treaties, as countries too impoverished to engage in environmental conservation will increasingly fight international treaties while pointing toward the Global North's overconsumption as the real culprit of environment degradation. This will understandably anger the North, which will be pointing its fingers at the overpopulation of the South, and so the whole subject of environmental degradation will become an increasingly explosive issue.
I sincerely hope that the sustainable development movement is taken out, dusted off, and earnestly implemented around the world.