The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in economics, business, political science, sociology, law, futurology and related subjects.

The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future is by the economics journalist Hamish McRae.

The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of future studies.

As the publisher’s description page explains,

What will the world look like in 2050? How will complex forces of change – demography, the environment, finance, technology and ideas about governance – affect our global society? And how, with so many unknowns, should we think about the future?

One of Europe’s foremost voices on global trends in economics, business and society, Hamish McRae takes us on an exhilarating journey through the next thirty years. Drawing on decades of research, and combining economic judgement with historical perspective, Hamish weighs up the opportunities and dangers we face, analysing the economic tectonic plates of the past and present in order to help us chart a map of the future.

A bold and vital vision of our planet, The World in 2050 is an essential projection for anyone worried about what the future holds. For if we understand how our world is changing, we will be in a better position to secure our future in the decades to come.

Climate change and new approaches to globalization should affect civil servants in the near future.

Among proposed influences on future change: demography, the environment, trade and finance, technology, and ideas about government and governance.

In terms of demography, populations in Europe, Japan and North America will become older and decreasing, especially in Japan, and China. In the United States of America, Canada, India and Africa, populations are expected to increase.

Economically, by 2050 China is expected to be surpassed by India.

Last year, Hamish McRae informed the Global Government Forum, a publishing, events and research business that helps senior civil servants around the world to meet global challenges by building their expertise, knowledge and connections:

Concern about the environment throws up a string of other challenges, some of which we are aware of now, but some where we really are only feeling our way forward. Of course climate change dominates everything. Governments are also in the front line here, and the great question is whether the present actions they are taking will be sufficient to slow the juggernaut, or whether there will be some kind of discontinuity if and when it becomes clear that they are not. Public servants have already played a huge role in refocusing government environmental policy, including the Stern Review in the UK in 2006, which set out the economic case for tackling climate change. That role will grow over the next decade.

Trade and finance will be transformed in the coming years with the recasting of what we call globalisation, so that its benefits are retained while its costs reduced. We tend to forget that the great post-war institutions that facilitated the burst of prosperity from 1945 onwards – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization – were built and run by international civil servants. Indeed they and the other bodies, notably the United Nations and its affiliates, have given a new direction to public service – service to the citizens of the world rather than to any particular national government. Politicians give leadership, as they must, but keeping trade and financial flows open requires huge, detailed efforts of millions of administrators. As trade patterns change their task will become ever more complex and ever more important.

As technology advances, as it inevitably will, there will be new demands on the public sector both to regulate how the private sector deploys technology for the good of all, and to use whatever is available to increase the efficiency and responsiveness of government services.

As far as regulation is concerned remember how recently the US high-tech giants – Apple, Google, Facebook and so on – have transformed the ways in which the world communicates. But we don’t know how technology will be used. The iPhone was launched in 2007, but even then Steve Jobs did not envisage the selfie, for that first iPhone did not have a front-facing camera. We know there will be other similar leaps forward in technology that we cannot predict, and we therefore also know that governments will scramble to keep up. Politicians cannot hope to master the detail, so the burden will be on their officials to guide them.

And efficiency? The public sector is essentially a service industry, and as such it faces the challenges that face all service industries. This is to achieve similar increases in productivity and improvements in quality that global manufacturing has managed to deliver. You can automate a car assembly plant but you cannot automate a hospital. But the combination of big data and artificial intelligence should enable all service industries, including healthcare, to deliver better outcomes. We just have to learn how to do so.

That leads to the final challenge, perhaps the greatest of all: governance. How do democratic governments satisfy the increasing demands made on them? Even those of us, like myself, who are confident of the robust nature of the democratic system must acknowledge that it faces a very difficult period. How well it comes through the next 30 years will depend on how well it meets citizens’ hopes and fears with effective action. It has, so to speak, to lift its game. The politicians are a tiny crust on top of a vast army of public servants. The lifting has to be done by that army.

I end the book by acknowledging my fears (one of which was that Russia would suffer some sort of destructive convulsion) and my hopes. My final hope is that we will build a more harmonious relationship between humankind and our planet. I do think we can and indeed must. We have nowhere else to go. That puts a burden on the people who work in public service at all levels and in all countries. They – you –  matter a great deal to the future of the world.

The book’s Introduction asks:

Why should anyone take predictions about the future seriously when so many in the past have turned out to be not just wrong, but absurdly so? That is the core challenge that this book faces. I believe it is worth tackling that challenge for three reasons.  First, if one is looking one generation ahead, twenty-five or thirty years, many of the broad economic trends that will dominate this period are already evident. Beyond that we move into science fiction. Thus we already know roughly how many people will be alive in 2050 and more or less where they will live. We can judge which countries and regions are likely to grow swiftly and which are likely to lose pace. We can see in broad outline the technologies that will drive economic development, though their details and the pace at which those technologies will be adopted are both hard to predict. And we can make some judgements about political and social developments, though turning points are always hard to catch. After all, we are helped by the intergenerational mathematics. The key decision-makers of the next thirty years are alive now, perhaps still studying in schools or universities, or maybe starting out on their chosen careers. Their ideas will shape the world.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)