Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Futurist

Solving world problems in 20 years: tackling world-scale problems with global networks could curb globalization''s perils. (Book Review).(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
J.F. Rischard, the Paris-based World Bank vice president for Europe, wanted to title his book It's Not Globalization, Stupid. The publisher prevailed, and it's just as well.

The author was right in thinking that, in local streets as in international bureaucracies, the for-and-against debate about globalization "brings about paralysis of the brain." But globalization is happening, not only in international trade and finance but also in the interactions of microbes and insects, of beneficent and lethal chemicals, of cultures and religions, and above all of people and their ideas. It has probably been happening, as Walter Truett Anderson suggests in All Connected Now, since the human adventure on this globe began.

Indeed, despite Rischard's opening salvo against the concept of globalization, his book turns out to be full of wise and practical strategies for how to make decisions about it.

Two Big Forces

In Rischard's global world, "two big forces" are pushing us toward whatever-we-call-it. One is the demographic explosion--a world with 3 billion people in 1960, 5 billion in 1990, more than 6 billion now, and 8 billion shortly. Curiously, he treats population growth as an unmitigated disaster, producing nothing but "stresses" with "few redeeming features" (which he doesn't think are worth mentioning).

Population stresses are undeniably serious--placing pressures on food, energy, health, forests, fisheries, water; causing many different kinds of pollution; and accentuating the troubles with poverty, aging, and the accelerating migration of people into cities and around the world. But every new baby is born with not only a body but also a brain. Freed and stimulated to learn, each of those brains has the potential, in a world where knowledge is the dominant resource, to produce much more than its body consumes.

In most poor countries and in the poorest parts of richer countries, this hasn't happened yet. But the obstacles are of human design, not inherent in the numbers of babies. Think of Singapore and Taiwan; think of South Korea, which, half a century after its start...