Everything, everywhere, all at once: the macro trends shaping today’s world

I would recommend the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. Its action-packed zany plot combines humour with some deep philosophical ideas expressed through multiple alternatives of its characters from parallel universes. Watching it assaults the senses and leaves the audience contemplating the nature of human existence in a different light.

A recent panel discussion I chaired, bearing the same title, had a similar effect, leaving the audience with multiple views on various global issues to ponder. Each of the three panellists was an expert in their own right on key trends that are driving the nature of human existence in today’s world.

Parag Khanna is an internationally bestselling author and founder and CEO of AI-powered analytics platform AlphaGeo; fertility expert, professor Anna Rotkirch, is a family demographer from the Population Research Institute in Finland famous for discovering the ‘baby fever’ emotion; and Phillip Brown, until recently, was distinguished research professor at Cardiff University whose research over many years has been on the future of work across advanced and emerging economies.

Three key macrotrends

Khanna sees the three key macrotrends that are driving today’s world as geopolitics, demographics combined with migration, and most consequentially, the potentially existential impacts of climate change. The linking idea for all the panellists – which Khanna also touched upon – is the future impact of technology. Clearly, technology is changing society in fundamental ways as we experience a fourth, or for some commentators fifth, industrial revolution with AI.

The impact of these changes is being experienced not only in working life, but also in human behaviour and not always in positive ways. Some of the ramifications are being seen in rapidly declining birthrates throughout most of the world bar sub-Saharan Africa.

These developments are set against a backdrop of climate change giving rise to more volatile weather and disruptions such as the recent California fires, along with increased geopolitical tensions. Climate disruptions and geopolitical tensions are causing mass migrations which will only increase as temperatures rise to levels that, when combined with high humidity, are likely to make huge swathes of the tropical belt uninhabitable unless countered by technological solutions that are also economically feasible.

There is a new world order, argues Khanna, with the US losing its hegemonic position as we head towards a multi-regional, multi-civilisational structure. He characterises this, using the language of physics, as a high-entropy world buffeted by factors such as COVID, supply chain shocks, inflation, corruption and climate volatility. “Swathes of Latin America, Africa and the Near East exhibit neither functional domestic authority nor regional coherence. The current faddish term ‘poly-crisis’ applies in spades to this large post-colonial domain,” he says.

“Swathes of Latin America, Africa and the Near East exhibit neither functional domestic authority nor regional coherence. The current faddish term ‘poly-crisis’ applies in spades to this large post-colonial domain”

Parag Khanna

But entropy is not anarchy. How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasing planetary reality of every state for itself, led by Trump’s America First philosophy? Khanna argues that in global politics, entropy is evidenced by devolution —  the surrender of power towards ever more local levels of authority. This rapid diffusion of systemic power coincides with the spectacular expansion of globalisation.

Ascending powers such as China and India have used globalisation not to serve the Western-led order but to assert themselves within an interconnected global system. Globalisation, says Khanna, has not been a tool of Americanisation but, more fundamentally, “an avatar of entropy: distributing capacity and connecting an ever-wider array of agents”.

Rotkirch, for her part, highlights another fundamental trend. The fertility of the entire human race is likely to be below or about to go below the theoretical replacement level of slightly above two children per woman, she points out. The implications of this clearly do not bode well for the future of humanity. Yet whilst migration in theory could alleviate the issues of the massive fertility decline in developed countries in particular, the political repercussions would be unacceptable.

Urging young people in those countries to have more children, however, seems to be a losing battle. “We need to rethink our attitudes more deeply towards babies and families,” she says.

Technology has given rise to online dating applications, which are now the primary avenue through which individuals attempt to find life partners. But the impact of these on human behaviour has been both profound and consequential.

Rotkirch argues that the ability to meet complete strangers with no societal links and hence no societal pressures may enable immediate physical intimacy after the first date but has also led to a lack of commitments to establish longer-term relationships that can support children. As a result, fertility decline, which has been happening for centuries, has seen a further unexpected acceleration in recent years.

Labour scarcity versus job scarcity

Whilst the number of young people appears to be decreasing at an alarming rate, attractive jobs for them may be decreasing even faster. Brown argues that it is not so much capitalism’s capacity to create new markets that’s in danger, but its capacity to generate the kinds of employment opportunities needed to sustain viable labour markets in the twenty-first century. AI is drastically changing the nature of work in developed service-oriented economies. Labour scarcity is being replaced by job scarcity for the right kind of jobs, says Brown.

The premise of labour scarcity has been that rising demand for new scientific knowledge and technological innovation requires an increasing proportion of the workforce to use higher-level cognitive, creative, and problem-solving skills, contributing to rising productivity at the same time as automation replaces routine low-skilled labour. Job scarcity, by contrast, highlights a large reduction in high-quality jobs, raising questions over the validity of a ‘knowledge’ economy and the role of education in creating an efficient and fair distribution of opportunities, work and rewards.

“AI is drastically changing the nature of work in developed service-oriented economies. Labour scarcity is being replaced by job scarcity for the right kind of jobs”

Phillip Brown

If job scarcity is really an issue of job quality, should the perceptions of what is regarded as high-quality jobs change? In his book Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, David Goodhart points out that intellectual jobs, the traditional bastion of the middle classes, have been elevated to the peak of society at the expense of those who use their hands in artisanal jobs, or their hearts in jobs such as low-paid care work.

There has been a stark and persisting revaluation of rewards within society, driven not by demand – or by value to society, as would be the norm and acceptable within free-market democracies – but by power. In this period of transition, some companies have benefited to an exorbitant extent and the issue is whether the power they exercise to create those profits needs to be curtailed.

Technology though, as Brown points out, is not our destiny even if the tech bros of the US have now become best chums of president Donald Trump. Unlike the movie though, there are no satisfactory ‘solutions’ that can simultaneously solve all the issues of the world. Trump’s ‘First Buddy’, Elon Musk, has tweeted that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming”. But there is no technological fix that can be envisaged for the former even if one is possible for the latter.

As Trump presses ahead with a more isolationist America First policy, the problems of the world cannot leave the US unscathed. Geopolitical tensions in a new multi-polar world will inevitably draw in US input, for better or worse. The issues arising from climate change in particular, cannot be wished away, but do require perhaps more radical actions including a possible renaissance of nuclear power.

Africa, a continent that Trump appears to despise, does, as the Economist Magazine in January argued, need to see a capitalist revolution to create wealth and prosperity following in the footsteps of Asia and that would be helped immensely if the tech bros come on board. And young people across the globe need to have hope and optimism that life is worth living, and children are worth having.

Joseph Mariathasan is a contributing editor to IPE, a partner of Peak Sustainability Ventures and a director of GIST Impact