Posted on 09/30/2014 1:58:20 PM PDT by Kaslin
resident Obama recently proclaimed climate change, more than any issue, will define the contours of the 21st Century. Powerful men searching for legacy often evoke grand challenges and personal solutions, but climate change is only one of several forces that will make civilization different 100 years from now.
1. Challenges to Democracy
In the 19th and 20th Centuries, democracies embracing free markets outperformed more autocratic and collectivist societies. However, over the last 60 years, majority rule in the West has fashioned government policies that redistribute income indiscriminately, displace investments in infrastructure and technology, and slow growth.
China—albeit with shortcomings—has created a neocapitalist juggernaut. Its Communist Party is not Soviet-era dictatorship but rather an oligarchy open to new members. It imposes guidance on private, as well as state owned, enterprises, and has avoided the worst impulses of prosperity—a sense of entitlement and complacency among citizens.
China and oligarchy will triumph if western democracies don’t curb politicians’ impulse to reward indolence, much as Roman Emperors did with free bread and circuses.
2. Global Migration
In advanced industrialized economies, declining birth rates compel reliance on foreign workers and immigration. Often, ethnicity defines the national character that made those societies successful, and many new arrivals bring ideas and expectations about government that caused their homelands to fail.
Advanced societies lack adequate mechanisms for assimilating newcomers and are clumsy at imparting national values—consider the backlash against immigrants in Norway, or how effectively ISIS recruits in Europe.
Ultimately, politicians’ impulse to placate whoever has a vote, regardless of long-term consequences, poses another threat to preservation of democratic capitalism.
3. Wedding Machines to Humans
Handheld computers and the internet give each person real-time access to vast knowledge and global communications, and an eerie intimacy with omnipresent devices that chronicle their lives.
Robots perform many tasks better than humans but no artificial intelligence will ever replace the human mind, because computers are only as good as what we put into them. However, within a few decades, tiny chips and processors placed inside human brains will be commonplace. By mere concentration, we will be on-line and accomplish accelerated computer-assisted access to information, problem solving and communication.
Wedded to machines, we all may become brilliant but any pretense of privacy may be lost.
4. Customized Human Beings
Bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel has written he hopes to die at 75 because as humans age, mental and physical capacities decline and old folks inevitably burden the young. He has delineated medical care he will forgo after that age, but such prescriptions are unlikely to be generally embraced.
Still, humans are living longer, and society can’t afford to retire people in their 60s and pay pensions into their 90s. Computer implants will permit repair and customized enhancement of the brain, extend work into our late 70s and make life more productive and rewarding longer.
Breakthroughs in DNA and stem cell research will make organ replacement and enhancement routine. A more durable and intelligent human race will be reality, not science fiction.
5. Climate Change
Humans are unique among species in their ability to adapt and change their environment, and have been doing so since the Ice Age to cope with natural climate cycles.
Local populations fell to extinction or conquest if they failed to cope. Now humanity must act as one to address rising atmospheric temperatures. Otherwise, individual societies will be forced to mitigate the consequences, and the Darwinian cycle among competing cultures will continue.
As influential as that challenge may be, reinventing democracy and reengineering the human species are likely to be as big.
It takes a lot of hubris to say you can see the world a century from now—this writer included.
Peter Morici is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
Shaping the century will be Islam V Christians.
1) Growing dependence of the American electorate upon government
2) Cratering demographics in the West which is not producing enough children to replace itself.
3) Severely constrained US Military due to shifting of budgetary priorities into social programs (see #1 above)
4) Horrible unseen biological consequences of screwing around with the DNA of nearly every living thing.
5) Nuclear weapons in the hands of fanatical Islamic regimes like Iran.
Yep. His point 2 about Global Migration is right on.
An Islamic Europe under Sharia Law will soon be a reality.
I just hope I’m dead before Obama’s goal of bring Sharia Law to the US is realized.
We just need to play “Cowboys and Muzzies”. Problem solved.
Shaping the century will be Islam V EVERYBODY ELSE!....................
Not one mention of plagues like Islam or Ebola.
The idiot puts the lie of climate change ahead of the threat of Islam. Fool.
money
money
money
money
Money!
Half or more of the US electorate don’t know what century they are living in. That is the type of ignorance that will shape the world.
Number 5 is imaginary, so why should we think they got any closer to reality on the first 4?
The writer forfeited his credibility when he revealed he believes in the hoax of climate change.
Or a fat bag of money.
Weak article, lots of non-sequiturs, like that reference to bread and circuses. How does that fit? (Not.)
They told me that would happen if gay marriage went through ...
Your thoughts, more likely.
#5 shows the author to be a raving loon:
“Now humanity must act as one to address rising atmospheric temperatures. Otherwise, individual societies will be forced to mitigate the consequences, and the Darwinian cycle among competing cultures will continue.”
It takes a lot of hubris to advocate junk science to make your Socialist masters appear that they know what they’re talking about when they vomit out misinformation about the Climate Change Scam.
Too bad this list is already outdated.
With the announcement of the first confirmed case of Ebola about 45 minutes ago our world has been turned upside down. For the next several months everything has be to based on pandemic control. This means massive changes to our social networks.
The happy talk about what the hospital is doing to prevent the spread is just that. It only covers the period since 28 Sept. What about the days between 20 Sept (Saturday) and 28 Sept (last Sunday).
There are five to 10 days of travel by the American Case ZERO that needs to be totally accounted for. By this I mean not only his travel but everyone who traveled with him by plane, car, bus, or on foor in the terminal area. Then everyone identified must be tested; possibly several times to insure you get readings after the first three days after possible exposure. Then the process repeated for any that tested positive. I have no idea how many times this cycle needs to be repeated. My gut feeling is at least four times. Depending on the number of positives this testing cycle will last for weeks and could eventually cover most of the CONUS.
Kind of like British soldiers worrying about whether or not judges in England will continue to wear powdery wigs when a raiding party is sneaking up on them during the French & Indian War.
“Wigf are our greateft peril!”
~Capt. Odious P. Limebottom 1757
Not the choice of words I'd use – increasingly, (primarily) Western nations either don't care to enforce their national values because of respect for "diversity" or fear of retribution, or their leaders are taken in by the myth that their beliefs are responsible for the evil in the world & must atone for it by ignoring long-held traditions.
“reliance on foreign workers and immigration. Often, ethnicity defines the national character that made those societies successful, and many new arrivals bring ideas and expectations about government that caused their homelands to fail.”
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