The Tower of Babel
Amsterdam 2020 – The world has suffered increasing shortages of oil in the last decade. After dramatic fluctuations between 2008 and 2012, oil prices have stabilised at a high price levels in the last decade. This has caused many of the oil dependant economies to suffer.
Western governments have been unable to sustain their start of millennium levels of spending, giving space to a free market economy, in which big multinationals take up their corporate social responsibility.
The truly free market economy has given multinationals the opportunity to introduce technology in developing and poor economies, resulting in considerable growth of these economies. They successfully marketed their low wage labour and natural sources, which has given them a competitive advantage. In addition, many of the economies designated as “developing” in the last quarter of the 20th century, have been provided with powerful alternatives to oil derivatives and other technological innovations.
This innovation is the long term result of the strong trend in education of the latter part of the 20th century. The 2005 projection of the US Bureau of Labour Statistics that scientific and engineering occupations would grow at three times the rate of the overall workforce came true as well. The last years this effect gave a huge boost on the innovative power of eastern economies. Innovation is now more and more governed by Asian companies and their inventions boost the technical development of efficient and effective production techniques.
Despite a temporary set back between 2007 and 2010, caused by overheating of the economy and temporarily large stocks, Asian economies keep growing at healthy rates between 4 and 6 % year on year. In addition, Asians internal market is on the rise due to the increased prosperity, which balances against the decreased possibilities of exports to the western economies. The increased prosperity gives many Asians the possibilities of visiting countries in the entire world. They become familiar with alternative cultures and they have the spending power to allow them to access to the global economy.
This happens as the result of the more equal spreading of global wealth: the traditional rich countries have suffered consistently in comparison to the rapidly growing emerging economies, which are able to move the political decisions making machines considerably quicker than the traditional economies. This decreases the tensions between the haves and have-nots.
The prosperity becomes better distributed across the world, while the influence of the western governments is decreasing. The Asian economies are flourishing and they succeed where Western governments failed in the second half of the twentieth century: they are treating the developing countries as economical partners and not as beggars holding up their hands.
The increasing relative shortage of oil on the other hand, has now become fully transparent after the major oil companies declared, in a unified statement, that their total resources are now definitely decreasing.
This caused a surge in the search for the application of alternative energy sources. This means that the former developing economies still hold their competitive advantages, since they have built their new economies on new energy technology. In addition, the global political arena became tired of the ‘war on terrorism’ stories of many of the Western countries, headed by the United States. The search for alternative sources of energy unites the world in a similar but more positive manner than the war on terrorism did in the beginning of the millennium.
Sufficient sources of (cheap) alternative energy sources become available as a result, and the price of these energy sources dives below the price of oil. Consumers switch to gas and alternative energy sources and the growth of the global economy has not been levelled as a result of the lack of energy. Moreover the effects of oil usage have now decreased and pollution trend is countered: the world becomes a cleaner place. With the promise of energy production using cold nuclear fusion becoming profitable in the near future, oil and gas lose importance as an energy source but keep their importance as a raw material (e.g. for plastics). Through selling oil and gas as a raw material, the oil and gas producing countries have to change their economies to healthy, raw material producing economies.
The oil producing countries manage this transition due to their political systems of centralised control, but the price of this rapid switch is the stronger calling for democracy in these countries too.
The western societies, although coping, struggle to keep up witjh the new economical powerhouses: their population is not used to going through difficult times of change and are not willing to endure hardship. The ageing population of western economies is compensated by migration of (younger) workforce from the east and south – borders disappear and enhance the development of the new global economy.
On balance, the world is a happy and balanced global village. In 2019, the number of flights across the world is fourfold of that in 2000, yet pollution levels are significantly lower now than they were as a result of new aircraft engine technology. In a suburb of Shanghai, a number of school girls became seriously ill. Since this particular suburb is home to many international headquarters of the big multinationals, the contagious disease is spread across the main business centres of the world within 48 hours. It turns out that the virus that caused the 2006 bird flu pandemic is resistant to current vaccinations. Within three days, intercontinental flying connections have grinded to a halt and within a week international flying has stopped completely. 60 Million people across the world have caught the bird flu, which has a death rate of 30%.
The global village falls apart as a house of cards. Local economies are forced to with draw from the global forum and have to become self sustainable. There is a growing awareness that the seemingly infinite growth of the world economy is indeed finite and that the material growth has seen its peak. The world is ready for a new balance.