The World in 2100

[WeepingElf]

Your observation that emigrants are usually poor people brings me to a possible solution of the Fermi Paradox. In order to be able to colonize other planets, a planetary society must obviously be technologically highly advanced - way more advanced than we are. But unless they allow for a ridiculous degree of social inequality, such a highly advanced society will also be very prosperous, so there won't be many people so poor that they seek their fortunes under a different sun.

And of course, the question is whether there are colonizable planets at all! That a planet supports life does not mean that it supports Earthly life. Alien lifeforms will probably be, even if their handedness is right, different enough in their biochemistry as to be inedible to humans, and for the same reasons, Earthly crops will fail in alien soil. And the atmospheric composition is also likely to throw up problems, etc.

[Gareth3]

OK, there seems to be enough interest in this, so I'll start. First of all, why 2100? It's a nice round number that's within the lifespan of a child born today, which makes the extrapolations easier. Coincidentally it's also when Wells' The Sleeper Wakes and the RPG GURPS Transhuman Space are set.
This process will be loosely inspired by John Barnes' "How to Build a Future" article in Apocalypses and Apostrophes. I won't necessarily use his techniques, but I'll go from topic to topic as he does. The first topic is economic growth. Barnes chose to have Gross World Product annual growth go between 1 and 6 percent, but that was thirty years ago. I may as well look at some real growth figures to update it. This is the World Bank data from 1961 to 2017:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.kd.zg
The peak is 6.7 in the 60s and the trough is -1.7 in the GFC. It's a little amusing that Barnes' projection for the worst depression in the next three hundred years wasn't nearly as bad as the one we all lived through. To be fair, he gives another alternative to use -3 to 9 percent.
Anyway, I'd prefer to look back 82 years for my data, since I'm projecting 82 years forward. Maybe even 86 years, back to the trough of the Great Depression, since that seems like an appropriate floor for the growth rate. However, GWP data doesn't seem to be available that far back. The best I can do is US GDP growth, from the Federal Reserve:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RL1A225NBEA
Since this is a single country it bounces around a lot more, from -13 in the Great Depression to 19 in the middle of WWII. The world equivalent would be much flatter - The Soviet Union was hardly affected by the Depression, for example. Wikipedia says that GWP dropped 15% from 1929 to 1932. Divide that by three and that's 5% shrinkage per year. I'll use that as the floor and 7% growth as the ceiling, rounding up from the World Bank data. Estimating by eye from the same data, the average seems to be around 3% growth.
So over the next 82 years, we'll say Gross World Product growth varys between -5 and 7 percent, with an average of 3. It's easy to calculate the economy is about twelve times bigger in 2100, which at least is less nuts than what I got trying to go to 2300. But if we want more detail, how should the growth rate vary between the limits? I'll tackle that in the next post.

[Axiem]

Before you get to extrapolating out minutiae like GWP and such, you really ought to read Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist.

[zompist]

Yeah, that's a great article, seriously thought-provoking for anyone who wants to build medium-future sf.

Even without that, Gareth's growth estimates are probably way too optimistic. One problem is simply the multiple blows of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and crunches in other resources. Getting positive growth at all may be a struggle.

But even if those problems are solved, the growth rates for the last 80 years are seriously skewed by the worldwide postwar boom. Advanced economies outside the US were recovering from total devastation, developing countries were going from feudalism through the industrial revolution, and the US was selling to everyone. You can't keep repeating those tricks.

The growth rate in advanced countries is now more like 1.8%.

There's likely to be spectacular growth in some developing countries, but e.g. China's 10% growth rate over decades is not going to keep up for even half the century.

[Salmoneus]

Before you get to extrapolating out minutiae like GWP and such, you really ought to read Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist.

His argument on the energy floor is, no pun intended, flawed. Yes, there's a floor price for energy, but it needn't be a percentage of GDP.

The argument works by saying that if energy is too cheap, someone could corner it, producing a very large profit. That energy therefore has a value at least equal to the value of the chance to corner it, and since the value of a corner depends on the value of all goods that depend on what you've cornered - in this case, everything in the world - the value of the energy goes up with the value of the total GDP too. This is very clever.

But it relies on the possibility of anybody cornering the market. It relies on the assumption that the actions of any one actor could effect the total price of the good. But that can be prevented through legal and if necessary military measures.

Similarly, water in the UK isn't very expensive. But what if somebody bought all the water in the UK and closed down the ports to imports? Since everyone needs water to live, they'd pay through the nose to buy the water then!.... ...except, that doesn't mean we actually spend a fortune on water. It just means that we spend a moderate amount on having institutions that prevent warlords from monopolising our water supply. And the cost of those institutions doesn't necessarily go up as our GDP goes up. So, likewise, an advanced economy in which energy was only a small fraction of GDP would have had to evolve institutions that prevent anyone from cornering the energy market.


--------------


However, the general point is good. GDP isn't what drives a model of the future - it's the result. GDP will vary widely depending on your assumptions about the future.

To give some historical examples, let's take 100-year average annual growth rates from 1270 onward in the UK
1270-1320: +0.1%
1320-1370: -0.7% [largely due to the UK losing a little under 25% of its economy in a single, You Know Which, year]
1370-1420: -0.1%
1420-1470: -0.2%
1470-1520: +0.5%
1520-1570: +0.7%
1570-1620: +0.8%
1620-1670: +0.3%
1670-1720: +0.9%
1720-1770: +0.5%
1770-1820: +1.4%
1820-1870: +2.3%
1870-1920: +1.5%
1920-1970: +2.3%
1970-2017: +2.2%

...and if we divide that last 120 years into 30-year periods we get:
1897-1927: +1.2%
1927-1957: +2.1%
1957-1987: +2.8%
1987-2017: +2.1%

What's a reasonable GDP rate? Well, in the abstract, who knows? If the idea is "the next century will be like the last 90 years", a growth rate of a little over 2 is reasonable - maybe even 3 if we do well and learn to avoid catastrophes. Indeed, the 19th century averaged 2% as well. So if our prediction is "we will continue to produce transformative industrial revolutions like those of the 19th and 20th centuries", that's a fair target. And add in better economic management, maybe even 2.5 or 3 is possible. And that's not unreasonable. We can point to the digital revolution and the AI revolution, and maybe the energy revolution, and maybe the space revolution, and hopefully the equality revolution (where a number of developing countries make their Great Leaps Forward through internal reforms, building infrastructure and cutting out corruption and economic mismanagement). It's totally possible that that's how the next century goes.

Indeed, it's not implausible that things go better than that. Maybe between the equality revolution and those other things, all at once, the whole world undergoes a Great Leap Forward and we get 4% or 5% growth. That's not impossible either. It's never happened at the level of the whole world, for that long, but that growth has been achieved for shorter periods, and in specific areas. It's just within the realms of possibility that that happens.

But maybe it doesn't. Maybe we're generally peaceful and have a flourishing commercial sector, but there is no great revolution - maybe these things are less like the industrial revolution and more like the age of exploration. In which case, we might expect a nice round 1% growth, like the Tudors and Stuarts and Hanoverians had (minus that pesky civil war). The average growth since 1270 has been about 0.85%. And this is totally possible too.

Or maybe everything stagnates. Maybe we've pretty much reached the end of the line for growth, and for the next century any gains are offset by losses. Maybe we get 0% growth.

...or maybe we don't. Maybe we have flooding and drought and starvation, mass unemployment, war, civil war, and nuclear war and we run out of oil and antibiotics stop working. In which case maybe we should look at the example of the Great Famine, the Black Death, The Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses, and maybe then we should expect an average annual 1% contraction for the next century. Or worse! That's also totally plausible...

[Gareth3]

Thanks for the feedback. The exponential economist thing seems valid, but they're talking in much longer timescales than I'm dealing with. They also agree to rule out any economically significant use of outer space, which might be going a bit too far.
As for 3% being too optimistic, I'm assuming that climate change, resource depletion, and so forth don't cause economic crises any worse than we've seen in the last 86 years. This is not because I'm that optimistic about the outcome, but because it's too hard to extrapolate anything else. Climate change could drown every coastal city, destroy trillions in infrastructure, and kill billions from new disease vectors moving out of the tropics. How do you plug that into the equations? So this is necessarily the optimistic version.
On the other hand, is 3% too skewed by the postwar boom? Maybe. A quarter of the world population is still subsistence farmers. Bringing them all up to today's middle class involves a whole lot of economic growth.

[zompist]

As for 3% being too optimistic, I'm assuming that climate change, resource depletion, and so forth don't cause economic crises any worse than we've seen in the last 86 years. This is not because I'm that optimistic about the outcome, but because it's too hard to extrapolate anything else. Climate change could drown every coastal city, destroy trillions in infrastructure, and kill billions from new disease vectors moving out of the tropics. How do you plug that into the equations? So this is necessarily the optimistic version.

You can be optimistic, but I don't think you can wish the problems away! You can assume that new technology solves the problems somehow, but you can't assume that what worked in 1940-2020 will work for 2020-2100.

The thing is, for near-future fiction, you kind of have to decide how you're going to handle climate change, oil depletion, and automation/robotics because these determine what kind of society you have, at a very vivid level. If you don't want to deal with those things at all, why not just set your story in 2030? Then you can assume things are more or less as they are, with just the miraculous FTL as a change.

On the other hand, is 3% too skewed by the postwar boom? Maybe. A quarter of the world population is still subsistence farmers. Bringing them all up to today's middle class involves a whole lot of economic growth.

Very roughly, yes, you could get 3% if you assume that that downtrodden quarter moves up to China levels of prosperity. Note, though, that this exacerbates all those problems you were hoping to set aside: it means more climate change, more energy usage, more problems with water and forests.

[Salmoneus]

The problem with relying on the developing counties growing is that because they're poor, they make up only a small percentage of world GDP. So even if that small percentage grows, it's still only a small percentage relative to the world.

At the moment, Africa's combined GDP is around $2 trillion. But the world's GWP is around $80 trillion. (both nominal figures). So Africa's GDP could quintuple and it still would barely make a dent on GWP percentage growth.

As an extreme example: if Africa's current GDP were added to Africa's GDP every single year for the next 25 years (so 2tn the first year, 4tn the second, 6tn the third, 8thn the fourth, and so on)... that would make African GDP per capita the same as North America's, but the total GWP growth would still equate to only 1.8% annually worldwide. And that would require Africa's GDP to grow at over 12% annually... it's currently under 4%.

If Africa grew at 4% a year, it would be 92 years before it reached the rest of the world's GWP today. [At current rates it'll take something like another 2 centuries for Africa to catch up]

[Gareth3]

The thing is, for near-future fiction, you kind of have to decide how you're going to handle climate change, oil depletion, and automation/robotics because these determine what kind of society you have, at a very vivid level.

Sure, I'll deal with that in more detail later on. Barnes' article doesn't actually mention the environment at all, other than a handwave technology to get lots of cheap energy. But I'll add it as a topic.

The problem with relying on the developing counties growing is that because they're poor, they make up only a small percentage of world GDP. So even if that small percentage grows, it's still only a small percentage relative to the world.

That's a fair point. I'll have to reconsider what a reasonable average growth is.

[Gareth3]

Considering the feedback, I've decided the average GWP growth will be 2% per year. In 82 years, that means the economy will be five times bigger. Maximum annual growth will be 7%, and worst annual shrinkage (probably not the correct economic term) will be 5%. As for how the growth varies between these limits, Barnes uses economic cycles. Sine waves of 54, 18, 8, and 3.5 years, added together to give a complex periodic pattern. That's always bothered me a bit, because it's starting to be less simplified worldbuilding for non-specialists and more actual pseudoscience. Some people believe the real economy can be predicted from these cycles, which is obvious nonsense. Barnes tries to squash any notion of "prediction" and firmly say he's just creating a self-consistent setting, but it still feels like writing an SF story with E-meters and Thetans. Still, what's the alternative? Just generating a random growth rate for each year would make it jerk up and down in a unrealistic manner. Even doing a three-year average to smooth out the curves wouldn't make the distribution any better. Maybe I should just take the World Bank figures and try to fit a few sine waves to them, creating my own "economic cycles" instead of using the more popular ones.

[Ares Land]

Seconding Sal's advice, I don't think I'd start with GWP.
Rather, I'd advise figuring out, roughly, what kind of technological advances and political change you'd expect for the next decades, and then based on these figure out a rough idea of world GDP.

Once you've done that, and assuming you don't pick the more extreme options (nuclear total war; the Singularity -- but then again I understand you won't pick these scenarios) maybe you can plot depressions and booms using some kind of economic cycle model. (Sure it's pseudoscience, but the result will look realistic).

Regarding the FTL miracle-worker, one question I would ask right away is: which of the world power have the means to lock him under a bunker, and what are the military applications? I think the obvious political reaction would be, sadly, to use FTL to teleport missiles in key locations and that deep-space exploration would come a distant second.

[Axiem]

what are the military applications?

If my studies of the history of technology have taught me anything, this is the first and foremost question to ask when thinking about any fictional/futuristic technology. Sometimes there aren't any, but when there are, the military will be there.

[Zaarin]

what are the military applications?

If my studies of the history of technology have taught me anything, this is the first and foremost question to ask when thinking about any fictional/futuristic technology. Sometimes there aren't any, but when there are, the military will be there.

This is why I'm totally behind Space Force. NASA gets defense budget spending? Yes, please.

[Axiem]

This is why I'm totally behind Space Force. NASA gets defense budget spending? Yes, please.

My understanding is that NASA is not a military organization. And the military already had several sub-organizations (I think primarily in the Air Force, unsurprisingly) that were involved in the whole militarization of space bit already. They were already there, and pumping quite a lot of money into R&D for space militarization (consider: GPS). Additionally, Congress (who actually has the Constitutional power to decide how the United States military is organized, as I understand it) was apparently already considering this sort of thing and the various people in the military advised against that, and instead wanted to build better inter-branch communications between the space-related sub-organizations. As I understand it, they're not exactly wild about the sudden increase in expenditures for an entire new set of bureaucracy, military rank system, land purchases, academies, and all of the other things that come along for the ride with another branch of the military.

That said, it's probably inevitable that a branch of the military—probably with the name of Space Force—would have sprung up anyway to handle it. However, the United States used planes in their actual military operations for literally decades before we actually spun out an Air Force (prior to that, I seem to recall it was simply a part of the Army).

[mèþru]

You can use these numbers a friend of mine made up for a future history: http://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7OQUUQ ... 8zWTNUajE4

[mèþru]

I think Congolese Unification is the most egregious of them all; what possible reason is there for them to unite?

[Gareth3]

Thanks. I'm not sure it's necessary to generate data for every country, but the result is interesting. As for Congo, there's a temptation to merge countries together to save effort when you're creating these settings. The past few years have shown that's not necessarily realistic.

[Salmoneus]

Though African unificationism in general wouldn't surprise me. There's in many countries not a great deal of actual identification with African 'nations' per se, so supernational organisations may find it easier to gain allegiances. I wouldn't be surprised if at least Uemoa, if not Ecowas as a whole, was effectively a country in a few generations.

Then again, maybe regions flirt with unionism early in their independence, but gradually back away - both the pan-Arab union and the federation of the west indies seemed like done deals at one point, but have become pipe-dreams.

[mèþru]

General unificationism yes, but the two Congos don't have a history (of a desire for) unity with just each other.

[Gareth3]

GWP (3).png (48.3 KiB) Viewed 9711 times

After grumbling a bit, I went with a modified form of the economic cycles Barnes uses. Tweaking the period of the longest cycle makes them roughly match GWP growth rates from 1961-2018, and the 2020-2100 extrapolation is above. My first attempt had no growth at all for 25 years, which wasn't what I was looking for. So I just added 1% growth to all years. Obviously this can't be any kind of realistic prediction, just a plausible-looking pattern. Think of it as the economic equivalent of photographing peeling paint to make a map of a fantasy world.