Here are just a few of the challenges coming head-on:
First, if we have four more years of Trump, we’ll probably lose any chance of keeping the global average temperature from rising only 1.5 degrees Celsius instead of 2 degrees — which scientists believe is the difference between being able to manage the now unavoidable climate-related weather extremes and avoiding the unmanageable ones.
Second, as Ray Dalio, the founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund, recently pointed out, there has been “little or no real income growth for most people for decades. … Prime-age workers in the bottom 60 percent have had no real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) income growth since 1980.” In that same time frame, the “incomes for the top 10 percent have doubled and those of the top 1 percent have tripled. The percentage of children who grow up to earn more than their parents has fallen from 90 percent in 1970 to 50 percent today.That’s for the population as a whole. For most of those in the lower 60 percent, the prospects are worse.”
The anger over that is surely one of the things that propelled Trump into office and, if not addressed, could propel someone even worse, like Donald Trump Jr., in the future.
Third, the next four years will redefine relations between the world’s two biggest economies — the U.S. and China. Either the U.S. will persuade China to abandon the abusive trade practices it adopted to go from poverty to middle income and from a technology consumer to a technology producer, or we’re headed for a world divided by a new digital Berlin Wall. There will be a Chinese-controlled internet and technology sphere and American versions — and every other country will have to decide whose to join. The globalization that provided so much peace and prosperity for the last 70 years will fracture.
Fourth, technology is propelling social networks and cybertools deeper and deeper into our lives, our privacy and our politics — and democratizing the tools for “deep fakes,” so that many more people can erode truth and trust. But the gap between the speed at which these technologies are going deep and the ability of our analog politics to develop the rules, norms and laws to govern them is getting wider, not narrower. That gap has to be closed to preserve our democracy.
Fifth, today’s workplace is distinguished by one overriding new reality, argues Heather McGowan, an expert on the future of work: “The pace of change is accelerating at the exact same time that people’s work lives are elongating.”
When the efficient steam engine was developed in the 1700s, McGowan explains, average life expectancy was 37 years and steam was the driving force in industry and business for around 100 years. When the combustion engine and electricity were harnessed in the mid-1800s, life expectancy was around 40 years and these technologies dominated the workplace for about another century. |
