The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  We know this from the ancient memories of glaciers, deep ocean sediments, tree rings, cave speleothems, and other natural archives. Most spectacular are tiny air bubbles trapped within Greenland and Antarctic ice, each a hermetically sealed air sample from the past. Loose air inside a glacier’s surface snowpack gets closed off into bubbles as the weight of still more snowfall fuses it into ice. Annual layers of these bubbles have been quietly laid down for hundreds of thousands of years, before being drilled from the guts of Greenland and Antarctica by a rare breed of scientist. The gas levels inside them prove we have now elevated the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere higher than they’ve been for at least eight hundred thousand years.

  Eight hundred thousand years. Jesus Christ walked barely two thousand years ago, Egypt’s pharaohs four. Our first agricultural civilizations began ten thousand years ago; twenty thousand years before that, there still were Neanderthals alive. But the world has not seen atmospheric CO2 levels like today’s for eight hundred thousand years—and they are now approaching those of fifteen million years ago in the Miocene Epoch, when the world’s temperatures were 3° to 6°C warmer, its oceans acidic, polar ice caps diminished, and sea levels twenty-five to forty meters higher than today.43

  This, too, is a global force to be reckoned with.

  These four global forces—demographics, resource demand, globalization, and climate change—will shape our future and are recurring themes throughout this book. As each force comes up, the corresponding icon from the set that headed the four preceding sections will head the discussion. While I have described these forces separately they are, of course, intimately intertwined. Greenhouse gas comes from the exploitation of natural resources, which in turn tracks the global economy, which in turn relates partly to population dynamics, and so on.

  A fifth force twining through the first four is technology. Fast global communications facilitate global financial markets and trade. Modern health care and pharmacology are shifting population age structures in the developing world. Advances in biotech, nanotech, and materials science affect demand for different resource stocks. Smart grids, solar panels, and geoengineering might combat climate change, and so on. Under our “No Silver Bullets” rule, technological advances like these are evaluated as enablers or brake pads on the four global forces, rather than as an independent force of its own.

  The thought experiment is begun. Its assumptions and ground rules are stated, its four overarching themes defined. Let us turn now to the first subject of scrutiny for the year 2050—ourselves.

  PART ONE

  THE PUSH

  CHAPTER 2

  A Tale of Teeming Cities

  “Tomorrow morning we will release our sales numbers for the month of November.

  This event is overshadowed by the tragic death of Jdimytai Damour at our Valley

  Stream, New York, store on November 28. . . .”

  —Statement from the president of the Northeast Division, Walmart USA (December 3, 2008)

  Italy, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and the United States.

  —Economies projected by Goldman Sachs to be overtaken by one or more of China, India, Russia, or Brazil before 2050

  “From here on out, it’s an urban world.”

  —Joel E. Cohen, Professor of Populations, Rockefeller University and Columbia University

  It was one o’clock in the morning when Leana Lockley, twenty-eight years old and five months pregnant, lined up with her husband and two family members outside the Green Acres Mall Walmart store in Valley Stream, New York. Whining engines and lights pierced the night as jets came and went from nearby JFK Airport. It was November 28, 2008, the day following Thanksgiving called “Black Friday,” the busiest American shopping day of the year. The global economy was crashing, everyone was looking for bargains, and Walmart was cutting its prices for six hours only. By the time the store opened at five o’clock a.m. there were two thousand people crowded restlessly against the glass storefront, waiting to get in.

  The doors unlocked and people surged forward. Lockley was literally picked up off her feet and carried through the door opening. There were loud cracking noises as hinges broke off, and the sounds of crashing glass. An older woman fell. Lockley tried to pick her up but was knocked to her knees. A large man saw her and tried to help. “He was facing the crowd, and he had his hands up, trying to push them back in order for me to escape,” she later recounted on Fox News. “He was trying to block the people from pushing me to the ground and trampling me . . . he was on his knees, I could look at him eye to eye, and he was trying to push them back and then the crowd pushed him down, and he fell on top of me.”44 His body covering hers, hundreds of deal-hungry shoppers stomped and shoved over them and streamed into the store.

  Lockley and her unborn daughter survived, as did three other injured shoppers sent to area hospitals. But the man who saved her life, thirty-four-year-old Jdimytai Damour, was killed. As paramedics attempted to resuscitate him, shoppers continued to jostle past; then became irate when officials announced the store was being closed.

  The only son of Haitian immigrants, Jdimytai Damour was a very large but gentle man who enjoyed watching football and talked about being a teacher one day. The reason he was there that morning was not to buy, but to work. Because of his size—he was six feet five inches tall and weighed 270 pounds—he had been assigned to the front door. But he wasn’t a trained security officer. He was a temporary worker, a subcontractor, hired by Walmart to help them help us to consume more stuff during the busiest retail season of the year.

  Far less tragic—and certainly less attention-grabbing—was a second, very profound event that also happened in 2008. Its exact timing will never be known, but at some instant during the year, the number of people living in urban areas grew to briefly match, for a few seconds, the number of people living in rural areas. Then, somewhere, a city baby was born. From that child forward, for the first time in our history, the human race became urban in its majority.

  For the first time ever, we have more people living in cities than out on the land. For the first time, most of us have no substantive ability to feed or water ourselves. We have become reliant upon technology, trade, and commerce to carry out these most primitive of functions. Sometime in 2008, the human species crossed the threshold toward becoming a different animal: an urban creature, geographically divorced from the natural world that still continues to feed and fuel us.

  What does the awful death of Jdimytai Damour have to do with our transformation to an urban race? Aside from occurring in the same year, what connection may be drawn between these two events?

  From a macroeconomic perspective, the frenzied horde that killed poor Mr. Damour was, in its own mindless way, helping to build cities all over the world. Most of the items for sale in the Valley Stream Walmart were made overseas, by urban workers in the hundreds of Asian towns and cities churning out the cell phones, flat-screen televisions, netbooks, and other essentials of twenty-first-century life. Cities around the world have participated in the process of getting those products onto Walmart’s shelves.

  A global supply web was needed to transfer the raw materials and components to manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, and Bangalore. Then, the finished goods were sent to the United States, very likely in freighters and steel shipping containers built in places like Geoje (South Korea), Nagasaki (Japan), and Ningbo (China). These vessels were unloaded in the American ports of Long Beach or Los Angeles before being trucked east to Gloucester City, New Jersey, for redistribution. From there, they were trucked once again to Valley Stream, New York. Financial transactions between New York City and Hong Kong, as well as Chicago, Tokyo, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Seoul were taking place. So every time a new flat-screen TV is sold by Walmart, urban agglomerations around the globe all win another little economic boost.

  These invisible ties across the globe hum, the economic wheels turn. C
onsumption fuels commerce, thus growing cities, further enlarging the overall consumer base.45 The urban economy grows—as it must, to support its growing number of residents and the many services they now require. Salaries rise such that even menial entry-level jobs pay better than a farm-worker’s wages.

  The reason that the world’s rural people are moving into cities is that they can make more money in town. This is partly because of the described growth of urban economies, and partly because demand for farm labor falls as agriculture commercializes, mechanizes, and becomes export-oriented. Worldwide employment in agriculture is falling fast and in 2006, for the first time ever, it was surpassed by employment in the services sector.46 And because every new urban resident is also a new urban consumer, the cycle is self-reinforcing. More urbanites buy more electronics, services, and imported processed food, prepared and served to them by others. More entry-level jobs for new migrants are created. More managerial posts are needed. Ladders rise and the urban economy grows .47

  This urban shift is driving major demographic changes around the globe. City dwellers are projected to roughly double in number by 2050, rising from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 6.4 billion in 2050.48 However, the geography of this is not uniform. Urban majorities came to Europe and America decades ago, in the 1960s, 1950s, or even sooner. These places are already more than 70% urban today. This new trend is most dramatic in the developing world, especially Asia and Africa, the most populous places on Earth.

  For the last two decades, cities in the developing world have been growing by about three million people per week.49 That is equivalent to adding one more Seattle to the planet every day. Asia is only about 40% urban today, but by 2050 that number will top 70% in China, with over one billion new city slickers in that country alone. Already, places like Chongqing, Xiamen, and Shenzhen are growing more than 10% annually.

  About 38% of Africans live in cities today, but by 2050 more than half will. While Africa will still be less urbanized than Europe or North America today, this is nonetheless a profound transformation. When combined with its fast population growth rate, this means that Africa will triple the size of its cities over the next forty years.50 At 1.2 billion people, Africa will hold nearly a quarter of the world’s urban population.51

  Tucked away in the back of a 2008 report by the United Nations Population Division are some stunning data tables.52 They rank our past, present, and future “megacities”—urban agglomerations with ten million inhabitants or more—for the years 1950, 1975, 2007, and 2025. The projections may surprise you:

  World Megacities of Ten Million or More

  (population in millions)

  1950

  New York-Newark, USA (12.3)

  Tokyo, Japan (11.3)

  1975

  Tokyo, Japan (26.6)

  New York-Newark, USA (15.9)

  Mexico City, Mexico (10.7)

  2007

  Tokyo, Japan (35.7)

  New York-Newark, USA (19.0)

  Mexico City, Mexico (19.0)

  Mumbai, India (19.0)

  São Paulo, Brazil (18.8)

  Delhi, India (15.9)

  Shanghai, China (15.0)

  Kolkata (Calcutta), India (14.8)

  Dhaka, Bangladesh (13.5)

  Buenos Aires, Argentina (12.8)

  Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, USA (12.5)

  Karachi, Pakistan (12.1)

  Al-Qahirah (Cairo), Egypt (11.9)

  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (11.7)

  Osaka-Kobe, Japan (11.3)

  Beijing, China (11.1)

  Manila, Philippines (11.1)

  Moskva (Moscow), Russia (10.5)

  Istanbul, Turkey (10.1)

  2025

  Tokyo, Japan (36.4)

  Mumbai, India (26.4)

  Delhi, India (22.5)

  Dhaka, Bangladesh (22.0)

  São Paulo, Brazil (21.4)

  Mexico City, Mexico (21.0)

  New York-Newark, USA (20.6)

  Kolkata (Calcutta), India (20.6)

  Shanghai, China (19.4)

  Karachi, Pakistan (19.1)

  Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (16.8)

  Lagos, Nigeria (15.8)

  Al-Qahirah (Cairo), Egypt (15.6)

  Manila, Philippines (14.8)

  Beijing, China (14.5)

  Buenos Aires, Argentina (13.8)

  Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, USA (13.7)

  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (13.4)

  Jakarta, Indonesia (12.4)

  Istanbul, Turkey (12.1)

  Guangzhou, Guangdong, China (11.8)

  Osaka-Kobe, Japan (11.4)

  Moskva (Moscow), Russia (10.5)

  Lahore, Pakistan (10.5)

  Shenzhen, China (10.2)

  Chennai, India (10.1)

  Paris, France (10.0)

  The century of megacities has already begun. From just two in 1950 and three in 1975, we grew to nineteen by 2007 and expect to have twenty-seven by 2025. Furthermore, in sheer size alone our global urban culture is shifting east. Of the eight new megacities anticipated over the next fifteen years, six are in Asia, two in Africa, and just one in Europe. Zero new megacities are anticipated for the Americas. Instead, this massive urbanization is happening in some of our most populous countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan. New York City was the world’s second-largest metropolis in 1977, when Liza Minnelli first sang the hit song “New York, New York” (later popularized by Frank Sinatra) to Robert De Niro in a Martin Scorsese movie. By 2050, the “City That Never Sleeps” will be struggling just to stay in the top ten.

  The story doesn’t end with megacities. People are flocking to towns of all sizes, large and small. Indeed, some of the fastest growth is happening in urban centers with less than five hundred thousand people. According to the United Nations model, the number of “large” cities—those with populations between five and ten million—will increase from thirty in 2007 to forty-eight by 2025. Three-quarters of these will be in developing countries. By 2050 Asia—the world’s most populous continent and still dominated by farmers today—will be nearly as urbanized as Europe.53

  What does all this mean for life in the countryside? The world’s rural population is projected to peak somewhere around 3.5 billion in 2018 or 2019, then gradually fall to around 2.8 billion by 2050. Most of this rural depopulation will happen in the developing world, because OECD countries have now largely completed this shift. Take a drive through rural America. You’ll find it littered with ghostly relics of formerly bustling farm towns. The developing world is repeating now—on a much grander scale—the same emptying out of rural regions that began in developed countries in the 1920s.

  If you’ve been adding and subtracting these various numbers, then you’ve already realized that the rural population declines are too small to offset the urban increases. The world’s total population of people will continue to grow substantially in the next half-century. We are now on a trajectory to add nearly 40% more population by the year 2050, raising our number to around 9.2 billion.54 Who will we be in 2050? In that year, for every one hundred of our future children and grandchildren born, fifty-seven will open their eyes in Asia and twenty-two in Africa, and mostly in cities.

  What Kind of Cities Will They Be?

  So the people of Earth are rushing into town. “The twenty-first century,” declared the United Nations, “is the Century of the City.”55 But what kind of cities will they be? Will they be prosperous or Dickensian? The best of times, or the worst?

  There is certainly reason for optimism. The economic downturn of 2008-09 notwithstanding, the long-term trends all point to continued economic globalization, rising urban wealth, and a host of new technologies to help make cities cleaner, safer, and more efficient. It seems plausible to imagine the ascendance of shining, modern, prosperous cities all over the world. Take, for example, the success story of Singapore.

  A port city situated on a large island at the southern tip of the Malay Penins
ula, Singapore began as a British trading colony in 1819 and remained under colonial rule for one hundred and forty-one years before gaining independence in 1960. Since then, despite its small size (less than 270 square miles), few natural resources, and no domestic fossil fuel supply, Singapore’s growth and economic success have been phenomenal.

  Between 1960 and 2005 Singapore’s population grew rapidly, averaging 2.2% annually or doubling every thirty-six years. Once a calm British trading outpost, Singapore today has nearly five million people and has become a throbbing services, technology, and financial hub for Southeast Asia. It is a global supplier of electronic components and runs the busiest port in the world, with over six hundred shipping lines. Despite having no oil to speak of, it is a major oil refining and distribution center. Singapore is also attracting major foreign investments in pharmaceuticals, medicine, and biotechnology. With a 2008 gross domestic product (GDP) of USD $192 billion, Singapore’s economy is bigger than those of the far more populous Philippines, Pakistan, and Egypt.

  Geopolitically, Singapore has become one of the most globalized, stable, and prosperous countries in the world. Per capita income is over USD $50,000, higher than in the United States. It has a democratically elected government and ranks second in the world’s Index of Economic Freedom. 56 It is a member of the IMF, WTO, UNESCO, Interpol, and many other global institutions. Since the 1970s the performance of its sovereign wealth funds has been legendary. Through heavy global investments they’ve returned 4%-10% annually, growing a few humble millions into over USD $200 billion today.57