2050 is not far away. Only twenty six years from now. I’ll be 91 years old, and hopefully still kicking. As I write this today, there is a global outage of some internet systems causing over 5,000 flights to be cancelled. In Bangladesh over 100 have died in a series of protests over university enrollment that has morphed into wider social unrest. The wars continue in Ukraine and Gaza and civil war in Myanmar and parts of Africa. Both major political parties in the US are headed to an election in November, with an 81 year old candidate who has just announced he will not run again, and a 78 year old who survived a recent assassination attempt. Crazy times.

One of the ways I find solace in the present global context is by looking at a very long history over thousands of years. Mankind is still here on this earth, in fact over nine billion of us. But I also find comfort in taking a ‘long view of the future’, in this case even if 2050 is not really that long a distance away. To be able to project ourselves and life around us into the future even 25 years is to possibly provide a relief from the immediacy of the present struggles. What can seem like ‘doomsday’ finds a very different perspective when you have lived already through earlier versions of it!

This is one reason why looking at the future is so similar to studying history and learning lessons from that study. When we look back and see how we personally or as a nation have overcome terrible circumstances, it gives hope to see today with different eyes. As an example, for many in the United States the present political quagmires and potential political violence are fraught with despair. This was brought up again so visibly in the recent attempted assassination of former President Trump. But when we remember the year of 1968 in the USA, when two major leaders were assassinated just three months apart, combined with an ongoing bloody war in Vietnam, it can bring hope that this nation did survive. And it will survive into the future.

Looking forward of course does not provide us a crystal ball, but it can emphasize trends and alternative possibilities that even in a small way removes some of today’s sense of inevitability. For me, reading Science Fiction does open up some of those possibilities. Though much of the genre is dystopian, thinking of other worlds and exploration and settling of space can remind us that this earth and all its problems is part of a much larger story potentially in the future. There is also much literature of a non-fiction variety that discusses trends in the future and projections and possibilities.

One such book that I read a few months ago is The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future by Scottish economist Hamish McRae. This last March in Delhi, India I saw this book and it reminded me of his earlier book The World in 2020. I had read that one while living in Pune, India in about 2007, and still have it in my library. McRae is cautious in his projections, and his main emphasis is economic trends. As an example of my point above about how looking into the future can bring hope today, McRae on pgs. 201-202 discusses where the USA will be in 2050. He is writing this in 2022, but it certainly rings true now in the summer of 2024: ‘Now, in the early 2020’s, the United States feels dissonant, uncomfortable with itself and worried about the future at every level.’

That assessment of the US in the years up to 2024 seems spot-on to me. McRae goes on to write that he believes that there could be another decade or so of strife and turmoil especially politically, though he does not believe it will result in civil war or even a deep level of civil unrest. He thinks the social institutions of the country are too strong for that. In fact, by 2050 he believes that though the competition with China may still ‘cast a cloud’ over the US, there are three reasons to believe that a strong confident US will continue. First is that the US will ‘still remain the most powerful magnet for global talent.’ Second reason for confidence is that the ‘rebalancing of the US racial mix will make the country accept its truly multiracial future as it grapples with its past’. And last reason is that the US will still be the most ‘technologically advanced and innovative nation on earth’.

McRae recognizes that events of enough magnitude can happen in the US or any nation to change trends in demographics or cultural dynamics. For example, a war between China and the US before 2050 would certainly result in a much darker world. Or even more rapid climate change could result in parts of the planet being uninhabitable. There are no guarantees that catastrophic change will not occur in the next twenty five years. But as with previous decades and centuries in the past, the doomsday-sellers have consistently been proved wrong at least so far.

In comparing his earlier book on 2020, McRae reflects on the question, what were the developments globally he missed the most? He names two primary ones: First, the rise of Artificial Intelligence, how fast and how widespread it would grow by 2020. And second, and especially interesting to me, was how he felt he missed the power of the rise of India and countries around India in South Asia. (Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives). In this book about 2050, McRae projects India to be the third largest economy after China and the US. And if enough integration could happen in South Asia and avoidance of the deep obstacles to that integration, then by 2050 he thinks India and the surrounding countries together could have the largest economy in the world!

I will have more to say about the rise of India in a future post. But as I finish this one, I am writing as a global tech outage resulted in the paralyzing of airports, banks, hospitals is still being sorted out. It showed again how really interconnected much of the earth is. Of course we saw that in another way through the Covid pandemic of 2020-2021. We must see our nations not in isolation, but as globally connected as they are in reality. What can start as a tiny glitch in a computer program, or a virus of still to be determined origins, can spread literally to the far corners of the earth.

Yes, the future for many is a very scary place. But it can also be a place of great hope and imagination, of new opportunities and dreams for millions upon millions of people.