The future of almost eve.., p.17
The Future of Almost Everything, page 17
One thing is certain: many more men are seeking professional advice because they are anxious about their own sexual performance. At the same time, more women are also seeking ways to achieve greater satisfaction, or to give pleasure to their partners.
Most men over 50 have some degree of mild erectile dysfunction from time to time, a potential market of up to 300 million men by 2025. And 5% of 40-year-old men and 20% of 65-year-old men have serious long-term problems with impotence.
Sales of drugs like Viagra and Cialis are already worth more than $4.3bn a year. Expect a wider range of such drugs in future, with faster action, longer effects, at lower cost – some of which are likely to be available from pharmacists without prescription in some nations by 2030.
Busy professionals are becoming too tired for sex
Busy young professionals may be in relationships, but their love-life may often be non-existent, which can increase the temptation to look elsewhere. One of the common causes of lack of intimacy in younger people is chronic tiredness and stress. Couples are often affected by long working hours, young children, broken nights or night shifts, financial worries and crowded housing with lack of privacy.
A growing number of male and female executives will be faced with a choice between aggressive pursuit of an exciting career or a fulfilling long-term relationship, with well-balanced children and (hopefully) a happy love-life.
Arranged marriages will decline
Over a billion people live in communities where marriage partners are chosen by family, and where marriage is still regarded as a noble and exclusive institution, with dire consequences for unfaithfulness, or for pre-marital sex, especially in the case of women.
Expect more frequent culture clashes in traditional families now living in a developed nation, where children are rejecting arranged marriages, or where there are few suitable matches for parents to select from in the host nation in which they have settled.
More virtual relationships and e-marriages
It is already the case that 20% of all new romantic relationships start online in some nations, with someone that the person would never have otherwise met. Video links such as Facetime or Skype will become increasingly important to hundreds of millions of couples, and wider families. However, it will continue to be very rare for an enduring romantic relationship to remain primarily or completely virtual.
Gay marriage and diverse expressions of family
Expect gay marriage to become very widely accepted as a normal expression of long-term commitment between two men or two women, across almost all the EU, most of North America and a growing number of other nations. It is easy for residents of such nations to think that the rest of the world is just backward, and will soon fall into line with modern thinking, yet laws for gay marriage will continue to be viewed with deep hostility in many of the 72 nations where all homosexual activity is still criminal, let alone marriage.
We are likely to see increasing polarisation over this issue between developed and emerging economies, with greatest opposition to gay marriage in strongly Islamic or Christian nations like Malaysia or Nigeria. Nations like Russia and Belarus will also tend to be fairly traditional in outlook for the next decade or two.
The word ‘family’ is already being redefined in many developed nations by those who believe that alternative models are equally good for individuals and society as a whole. Families with two dads or two mums – using surrogates or sperm donors to create their children. Families with children from one, two, three or four different relationships, or children made by combining genes from three parents.
However, more studies are likely to confirm the findings of a large body of research suggesting that, on average, the lowest-risk environment for the emotional well-being of a child is in a happy home in which it is cared for by its own biological mother and father.
Extended families will cluster together
Despite many predictions about the atomisation of society, most people in developed nations like France, Spain or the UK are still living within an hour or two’s drive of parents, and not far from where they were born.
What is more, more young adults are at home until around age 30, or spend long periods during their twenties with one or both parents. A major reason is economics, with rising house prices, more time in education, and higher unemployment. The same has been happening with grandparents, who are more likely to be living under the same roof as one of their children than they were a decade ago, often helping with grandchildren. This is particularly the case if their own child is a single parent.
Products for the ‘precious child’
I have already described the ‘era of the precious child’ (see p. 97).
Part of this growing obsession with children is due to families having fewer of them. The entire hopes and dreams of two parents are often focused on the development of a single child.
We will see rapid growth of products, services, techniques and educational tools to ‘hot-house’ child development. Ways to encourage your child’s genius to shine. How to create a musical prodigy by the age of five. How to help your child to be trilingual by the age of three.
Entire industries will spring up to service the hopes and worries of pregnant mothers. Ways to encourage child development before birth. Hyper-nutrition to boost brain development in the womb. Exposing the unborn child to ambient music or other stimulation. How to give your child a perfect birthing experience.
Some of these things may matter more than most people realise. For example, we know that the genes your child inherits are permanently affected by your own nutritional status when conceiving, and by environmental factors in the lives of your own parents, and grandparents. So what happens when your unborn child is still in the womb could possibly affect the well-being of your great-grandchildren in subtle ways. Such insights will just add to the pressures felt by mothers-to-be.
Changes in drug and alcohol use
We have already seen how a younger generation in many nations is spending less on alcohol or drugs than a decade ago. People are usually introduced to these things by others in the same tribal group, and consumption is often a social activity.
Alcohol will be a growing problem
Alcohol dependency is one of the world’s most complex challenges. Globally, alcohol kills 3.3 million people every year, and 3 times as many teenagers than all illegal drugs. It is responsible for 7.6% of all male deaths and 4% of all female deaths. Half the world’s population does not drink alcohol at all, but those that do consume on average 17 litres of pure alcohol each year. European figures are higher than the global average.
In America, 6% of the population, or 16 million people, drink more than their bodies can cope with long term, and 10% of all health problems are related in some way to alcohol consumption. Around 40% of all crimes across America are committed while under the influence of alcohol. In the UK, 9 million people are ‘problem drinkers’. The cost of alcohol misuse to the UK economy is over £21bn a year.
We can expect a wide range of measures in many nations, including education about health risks, stricter controls on sales to young people, and higher taxes on alcohol (the single most effective measure in reducing consumption). Expect more investment in specialist centres and support teams to help people break a serious drinking habit, and more research into medications that take away the craving to drink, or interfere with pleasure pathways inside the brain.
Tobacco sales switch to the poorest nations
Tobacco will continue to be a huge global industry, as companies switch marketing from developed to emerging economies. Smoking kills 419,000 Americans a year and costs $100bn in health care as well as productivity losses. However, the proportion of people who smoke in the US has fallen from 43% to 18% – after 50 years of health campaigns, social pressures, taxes, restrictions on marketing, and a ban on smoking in public.
The government of China is also likely to become increasingly hostile to smoking over the next three decades. China lights up 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year (25% of the population smoke, more than 300 million adults), making it the world’s largest producer and consumer.
Most Chinese smokers are male and smoking kills over 400,000 men a year, a figure expected to rise to 2 million by 2025. On the other hand, the Chinese tobacco industry is one of the largest sources of state revenues, with total sales of more than $100bn.
Tobacco smoking is the usual door-opener to cannabis smoking. Therefore it is no surprise that cannabis use is falling in countries where smoking is out of fashion. Research clearly shows that cannabis use is not addictive, and less dangerous to life than tobacco or heavy alcohol use. However, cannabis alters important brain pathways, and heavy use often affects personal motivation, aspiration and achievement, especially in children and young people, and even more so if stronger types of cannabis are taken. Risks of psychosis are 5 times greater in people who smoke ‘skunk’ cannabis every day. In the UK, a six-year study suggested that one in four people with hallucinations, delusions, paranoid ideas or schizophrenia were mentally ill because of smoking extra-strong varieties of cannabis.
How the drugs economy will evolve
The global trade in illegal drugs is worth around $400bn a year – now included in official GDP figures of EU nations. That includes 450 tons of heroin, mainly from Afghanistan, which (after seizures by police) supplies 17 million addicts. A further 17 million people are addicted to cocaine or crack, of whom 40% live in America and 25% in Europe.
The global drugs economy will continue to be highly profitable, funding wider criminality and terrorism. Trade in illegal drugs will continue to destabilise several nations.
Failure of drugs control
America has spent over $1 trillion since the 1970s on targeting drug cartels in Latin America. In 2006, Mexico declared a ‘war’ against drug gangs. In the space of 8 years, 100,000 Mexicans died and 27,000 disappeared. A similar 20-year crackdown in Colombia cost 15,000 lives. Yet there is no evidence that these efforts cut consumption in America. The number of heroin addicts doubled to 680,000 in 6 years, and the price of heroin halved in real terms between the 1980s and 2014.
Uruguay and Bolivia have now liberalised laws relating to illegal drugs, and other Latin American nations are likely to review their own laws over the next two decades.
In the US 55% of voters now support the legalisation of marijuana. The logic is that as prohibition failed for alcohol in the 1930s, drug policies are also set to fail, and merely encourage criminality. Decriminalisation in some American states will be watched closely. Expect small steps in the same direction in many other developed nations, while death penalties remain in some emerging economies for drug trafficking. At the same time, the Netherlands is now moving to tighten up drug laws, having had the most liberal attitudes in Europe to drug use for a generation.
Falling drug use in many tribes
The numbers of people taking heroin, cocaine, crack and cannabis have fallen over the last decade in many other nations, despite wide availability of cheap heroin from Afghanistan. In the UK, for example, cannabis use fell from 11% of the population to 7% in the 10 years to 2011, while LSD use has also become less popular. Heroin and crack use fell from 332,000 to 298,000 in the 6 years to 2011. As we have seen, alcohol consumption has also fallen significantly – especially binge drinking in young people.
Expect huge growth in consumption of ‘designer drugs’, however, created by chemists, of which ecstasy is one of the best known. Each experimenter can make several types of new drug a year, none previously seen in government laboratories nor classified under ‘old’ drugs laws. Most of those who take these designer drugs do so on an occasional basis, but there are many unknown risks. Governments will struggle to respond to this trend.
Future of crime – tribal patterns
Crime rates have fallen in almost every developed country, in a consistent way, over the past 40 years. In many parts of the UK, for example, rates of reported crime have halved for various types of criminal activity. In the past, crime tended to rise or fall as unemployment rose and fell, but the link appears to be broken now. So what has happened and what will criminality look like in future?
Why recorded crime is falling in many nations
Societies in general are becoming more caring and sensitive. This is based on a wide range of historical trends going back hundreds of years, well described by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature. Here are some examples:
Attitudes to women have become more respectful as part of the feminisation of culture; human rights are widely supported; fathers are expected to be involved in caring for their children; most urban dwellers are very squeamish when watching the slaughter of a chicken; cruelty against animals makes many people very angry.
Cruel and degrading punishments such as beheadings, burning people to death, public torture and slow deaths for political enemies are almost unknown today in developed nations.
Falling rates of drug addiction means less crime. A single heroin or crack addict may need hundreds of dollars a day to buy drugs, and may commit several crimes a day to survive. In some communities, a small group of addicts can be responsible for most thefts.
Better security. Car theft used to be very common, but is now almost impossible. Cash machines are better protected. Burglar alarms are more reliable, and more likely to be connected to police stations. Locks on windows and doors are more likely to be robust.
Crime is moving online. E-commerce and online banking have created more than 1 billion people to target with scams, frauds and other activities. Every business has become a target for online theft. The risks of being caught are low, and prosecutions are very difficult across borders. These crimes are often not reported properly in official statistics.
Expect further progression towards less violent and aggressive societies over the next two hundred years – punctuated by shocking lapses into atrocities and anarchy, mostly in wars, civil conflicts or terror attacks.
Expect better ways to close down online scams at the speed of light. Expect recent falls in traditional types of crime to stabilise. Expect more wealth to be stolen online than in all other kinds of small-scale criminal activity, by 2020.
Despite falls in crime in many nations, we will see a rapid growth of private security services for people with wealth, because of the unsustainable and growing gap between rich and poor. Private security in America already represents three times the amount spent on the police. Countries like Russia and South Africa have ten times as many private security guards as public police officers.
*
So, then, we have seen how tribalism is the most powerful positive and negative force on earth: the basis of teams, brands, customer groups, nations, and families. The balance to the tribal Face of the Future is the Universal one, which includes globalisation, manufacturing, retail, travel and banking. The two faces pull in opposite directions. So what will be the drivers of a more Universal future?
Footnote
* http://www.globalchange.com/leadership-ethics-and-dealing-with-corruption-eu-commission-lecture.htm
Chapter 4
UNIVERSAL
THE FOURTH FACE OF THE FUTURE, universalism, is the exact opposite of tribalism. Universalism means English and McDonald’s everywhere. Tribalism and universalism feed each other, each the reaction to its opposite.
Globalisation is an unstoppable force: the result of the free movement of capital, technology, goods, services and information across national boundaries. Globalisation will continue to increase competition and lower profit margins in many countries.
Future of regional trading blocs
Expect more of the world to be aligned within regional trading blocs, allowing tariff-free movement of goods and services. The number of regional trade agreements increased from 100 to over 250 in the last decade alone. Expect strengthening of NAFTA, ASEAN, a Russian-based bloc, and a Southern African trade area, in addition to the EU. And expect growing frustration as many countries realise that they are losing control of their own economies, as a result.
With the expansion of regional trading blocs, interest rate or tax differences between nations become less sustainable, and capital flows unstoppable. Governments will be forced to harmonise laws, taxes and benefits. Countries out of line with what the global investment community thinks is reasonable will rapidly lose foreign direct investment (FDI).
Costs will converge and power will be centralised
In a globalised world, market forces mean that commodity prices tend to converge in different parts of the world, and this will also be the case with prices for labour, despite resistance in developed nations like America and calls for trade barriers. So China’s wages will rise, and Europe’s will fall, relatively. Expect organised labour movements to campaign increasingly against free trade and in favour of trade blocs.
Global investors, such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, will become increasingly involved in big corporate decisions, effectively hiring and firing the most senior executives and exercising a veto on strategy. Trading by institutions is already 90% of the volume and value of transactions on Wall Street. Institutions already own the vast majority of US stock.
Future of mega-corporations
Our world needs more economies of scale to achieve greater efficiencies. Expect to see many more mergers – and also de-mergers as corporations make mistakes, or refocus on key areas.
Scale will reduce choice. It may seem surprising, but even a market of 10 billion people will be too small to support more than two main airline manufacturers – Boeing and Airbus. The same will be true of mobile phone operating systems and their communities of App developers; our world may be able to support three, but not four. Android and iPhone will endure beyond 2025, but Windows for mobile may struggle. Expect similar consolidation in telcos, defence, banking, car manufacturing, pharma, the film industry, energy companies, and so on.
