This weekend I started (and finished) George Friedman's engaging book, 'The Next 100 Years', in which he attempts to forecast the geopolitical trends of this century. He makes many claims that, on their face, seem entirely surprising and nonsensical — for example:
- Russia will collapse and fragment within the next two decades, without being able to expand to its former (Soviet Union) borders
- China will recede into de facto three separate nations within thirty years
- The dominant world powers in a half-century will be the United States, Japan, Turkey, and Poland
- Towards the end of the century, the United States will have a tense, (probably) violent confrontation with Mexico
Friedman defends his method against his more skeptical readers by showing us how it works: demography, geography, and economy combining into a single analysis.
His primary axiom is stated foremost: that human beings, and consequently human nations, are fundamentally rational; that they will always act from their own self-interest; and that they will always act with imperfect knowledge. The freedom of the will is circumscribed within those limits essential to human life - e.g., the desire for an assured food supply.
Now one question that arises: what does this science (if it is a science) do for a Philosophy of History?
Is History rational? Is it predetermined? Does it have an End (or, if you will, an "attractor basin")?
I fear I have difficulty taking seriously anyone whose predictions are supposedly based in meaningful part on demography, who nevertheless thinks that Japan will be a major world power in 50 years. The other three predictions, perhaps oddly, don't seem all that implausible to me.
ReplyDeleteNow that you mention it, that part of his story doesn't quite make sense.
DeleteOn the one hand, Japan has no choice but to become a major power (for the same reason it invaded Manchuria and bombed Pearl Harbor: Japan has native resources only to support a pre-industrial subsistence economy).
On the other, the Japanese are just beginning to experience a horrible demographic implosion; and they've always been extremely averse to the social and political consequences of immigration.
So they need to look *somewhere* for labor. Friedman suggests that, at first, Chinese firms will be happy to accept Japanese capital and in effect lend their labor forces to the Japanese.
But he then starts saying that the Japanese and Chinese will soon be at odds -- "there ain't room enough in the South-East Pacific for the two of us" kind-of thing -- and doesn't return to the labor problem.
(What does that entail? Roboticize *everything*? Annex Korea (again!)?)