Predictions for 2019 and Beyond

France in the year 2000, as predicted in 1899.

Worth ignoring, of course. My predictions are always wrong, just like everyone else’s.

To begin with, let’s assert that things are getting better year by year.

Apparently this is not obvious. My leftist friend Xerxes wrote a New Year’s column saying everyone is looking to 2019 with fear and trepidation. Oddly, just as those who now call themselves “liberal” do not believe in individual liberties like free speech or the right to life, those who now call themselves “progressives” do not believe in progress.

That is, in the end, the most prominent dark cloud on our horizon: the modern left. They are actually working against progress, against civilization, against the future. They are now aggressively trying to shut down dissent.

The good news, though, is that I think this is near or beyond the tipping point at which they are doing no more than to discredit themselves in the popular mind. They demands have come to openly defy common sense. These are now the thrashings about of a dying beast.

A quick overview, then: the poorer parts of the world are broadly rising rapidly out of poverty. The proportion of the world that is desperately poor is declining rapidly. Famine, not long ago a fact of life, is now increasingly rare. We are defeating the worst diseases, one by one, and life expectancies are obviously rising—with a tragic reservation in the case of addictions and “mental illness” in the developed world. Farewell polio, tuberculosis, smallpox, scarlet fever, and so on.

The Twentieth Century was an era of near-apocalyptic wars. The Nineteenth was better, thanks to Pax Britannica, but there still were almost inconceivable bloodbaths: the US Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of any new major war has receded; we seem to find ourselves in one of the most peaceful periods in history. Granted, there are local horrors in the Middle East; but on a much smaller scale than we saw even during the Cold War. Granted, many fear the rising power of China. But so far, that has only been an economic competition. With benefits to everyone.

You will say, as Xerxes did, but what about global warming? Nothing else matters, since the world is all about to end from global warming.

But even here, things have gotten better. All my life, the world has been about to end in a great ball of fire. In grade school, they tested out the air raid systems, and everyone was making their emergency plans and building bomb shelters in their back yards. The end was bound to come at any moment.

In my final year of high school, our biology teacher made us all read Erlich’s The Population Bomb. In university, the Club of Rome released The Limits to Growth. We were solemnly warned by all our profs and teachers that, at some point in our own adulthoods, the world would no longer be able to feed itself. We would run out of all resources. We would be fighting to the death for the nearest source of potable water. A friend decided that his only hope was, on graduation, to emigrate to New Zealand.

And this is not to mention the dire and immanent effects of depletion of the ozone layer, which would kill us all with skin cancers, and acid rain, and mass poisoning from DDT, not to mention an almost limitless list of other industrial pollutants, and the impending ice age.

And now all we need to worry about is the earth getting warmer? And the pollutant is—carbon dioxide? Sounds like a good deal to me.

It also does not help my lack of confidence in the future, of course, that all of these earlier predictions of imminent doom seem to have been wrong. Self-evidently, we are still here. The price of most raw materials has actually declined since these dire predictions were made in the Sixties and Seventies.

Peak oil? Oil production is way up; it is the price that peaked and started to decline.

Running out of arable land, and the inability to feed such a large world population?

Do you know which country, excluding city-states, is the most densely populated in Europe?

The Netherlands.

Do you know which country is the world’s second largest exporter of food?

The Netherlands.

Obviously, we are nowhere near running out of agricultural capacity to feed the world population. Which, in any case, seems poised to tip into general decline.

So on to the future.

The rise of social media has made all governments less stable, just as the development of the printing press did in its day. We have seen the outburst on the streets of Paris most recently. On the whole, this is a very good thing. It forces democratization and greater equality.

And it makes the survival of either authoritarian regimes or regimes out of touch with their populations more doubtful.

The first current regime that comes to mind in this regard is China.

There are lots of signs that the Chinese leadership itself feels vulnerable. Xi has been cracking down and shaking sabres. It is inevitably an unstable, threatened regime that shakes sabres; consider the former juntas in Greece or Argentina.

I also cling to a fantasy that regimes that are transparently built on false premises are not likely to last more than a human lifetime—as with the Soviet Union. That is, they are not likely to long survive those who first created them, and who are therefore deeply committed to the original fantasy. Once they all die off, someone is going to notice that the emperor wears no clothes. By that measure, China is due for its morning wake-up call. The legitimacy of the government has of recent years hinged on growing prosperity. A bump in that road could bring it all crashing down. Demographics say a bump is due.

Iran ought also to be at high risk. The fall in the price of oil, and the reimposed US sanctions, cannot help.

Russia’s position is also dicey. There have been prior signs of upheaval. But these things are also unpredictable. Who expected the riots in France?

The fall in the price of oil should also force Russia to stay closer to home; there is an economic pothole in their path as well. The future for Saudi Arabia likewise looks grim. This also means sources of funds for Islamic terrorism, and Islam’s prestige in poorer parts of the world, should decline. Put it all together, and the new and greater availability of oil and natural gas should spontaneously reduce many of the political/military/security troubles in the world. A lot of troubles with insurgencies in Africa and South America ended with the loss of funding from the old Soviet Union. The troubles in Northern Ireland seemed to fizzle when Gaddafi in Libya pulled funding for the IRA.

Speaking of which, the government of Cuba is probably in big trouble. They were in a pickle when the Soviet Union fell, got a lifeline from oil-rich Venezuela. Now this surrogate sponsor is also bust. The Obama administration stupidly (or disloyally) threw them an undeserved few extra years by lifting sanctions, just as they did for Iran. But it is not likely to be enough.

I expect a hard Brexit, for reasons given in this blog previously. It is not in the interest of the Brussells bureaucrats to give Britain a better deal than a hard exit would. But as soon as the UK is out, they will be back at the table to make a sensible trade deal. There is already news that Ireland has gone to the EU with a tin cup seeking financial support in the case of a hard British exit. When and if this happens, Ireland will be the biggest loser. Then the calculations change: if the EU still insists on not dealing reasonably with the UK, rather than discouraging others from leaving, they may force an Irish exit as well.

I expect the Liberals to win the next Canadian election, slated for the coming year. I think that there is a potential populist revolt in Canada, as we have seen in France or Britain with Brexit or Trump’s election in the US. But there is currently no clear Canadian electoral alternative that could be a vehicle for it. Neither Scheer nor Singh have the guts for this. They are typical Canadian nice guys not about to raise any ruckus. Bernier might have, as Conservative leader. As leader of a new party, he might make gains, but not enough in one run to take power; just enough to split the opposition.

The Conservatives are, on the other hand, a dead cinch to return to power in Alberta. Trudeau will soon face a wall of provincial intransigence. This is where the real opposition will form.

In the tech field, Apple’s recent revenue warning confirms my longstanding prediction: it’s going moribund without Steve Jobs. I expect a slow decline from here on out. It’s living on the prestige Jobs banked.

Facebook is toast. It never had much to offer, to my mind. Nor was Mark Zuckerberg some visionary who was ever going to be a font of new ideas. The Facebook concept itself was taken from others. He’s just a wheeler-dealer, who has had a remarkable run.

Patreon has pretty obviously publicly slashed their own wrists, and is likely to go down fast. Twitter faces similar problems, for similar reasons: trying to censor their users. That’s not likely to work in a free market situation, and one in which the economic bar for new entrants is rather low. You cannot bank too heavily on established user base. Ask Nokia, or Blackberry, or America Online, or MySpace, or Internet Explorer. They are both going to be remembered mostly as fascinating case studies in business schools.

I used to have a pretty good idea of what technical innovations were likely to appear next: when the digital revolution was younger, it was ridiculous how many great opportunities were just lying there, and nobody had gotten around to them yet. Now the future is less clear, at least to me. I did not see driverless cars coming, nor delivery drones.

I think 3-D printed houses and buildings ought to become a thing. The economies look compelling.

One sector that has been clearly crashing out is retail. Main streets and malls are shuttering, as purchasing goes online. Nevertheless, main streets and malls perform a vital social function, and I expect they will reincarnate accordingly. But they will look more like farmers’ markets, featuring local crafts and produce, targeting unique local tastes. It is the chains and franchise operations that have most to fear, and the result may be better for community.

I expect education to move almost entirely online. Again, the economies seem obvious. If universities and colleges are still doing reasonably well in North America, it is largely as a kind of travel experience, like the old Grand Tour done by the English aristocracy, most appealing to foreigners wanting a taste of American life. They tend to sell themselves to students on the quality of campus life.

When education proper goes online, people will be able to shop around for the best option for each course, and study on an as-needed basis, not having to move or devote long years to not earning an income. If institutions like Oxford or Harvard survive, other than as travel experiences or finishing schools, it will be as evaluators, providing tests and certifications of acquired knowledge. You go to take the proctored test, or to present the thesis.

Everyone has been worrying for some time about jobs disappearing as a result of these many innovations. Some forms of work will indeed go, but the evidence seems to be that unemployment is going down, not up. This was predictable in theory, and so should continue. Automation makes things cheaper; people then buy more things; on balance, then, more jobs. Nobody fifty years ago would have believed you could get someone to pay good money for bottled water, or pay five bucks for a fancy cup of coffee.

Manual labour was mechanized long ago. Now it is the professions that are going to be in increasing trouble. Here is a case of an elite amassing power, prestige, and wealth on the premise of special knowledge. Since WWII, indeed perhaps since the turn of the century and the Progressive Era, there has been an over-emphasis on formal education and on relying on “the experts.” Every job wanted to constitute itself as a profession. It has all been oversold and overbought.

That seems likely now to suddenly be thrown into reverse.

Like the printing press, the Internet and the digital revolution democratizes knowledge. Suddenly everyone can read; suddenly everyone has the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. As a result, the claims of and the need for the professions are less tenable—exactly like the claims of the clergy at the dawn of the Reformation. Many professions are being exposed, now that the information is more widely available, as mostly smoke and mirrors and loud quacking noises; journalism and teaching being two examples. A lot of what others do can be more efficiently done by computer: searching the law books for legal precedents, medical diagnosis, much accounting; all that filling out of forms of all kinds. You may still need a human operator, but not years of study.

In the long run, I think everyone will gradually become some kind of artist or craftsperson or planner or manager. Just less boring, repetitive work.