Millennials get their revenge on the Boomers

I’ve been concerned about increasing generational conflict for many years. Some of it is justified, some isn’t, but in an era of fake news and conspiracy theories, it’s hard to resist having some fun with the idea. There’s too much reality right now. In any case, reality counts for little while perception is everything, and if your bubble tells you to feel aggrieved, that’s a lot easier than doing actual research on the figures. So here goes. Don’t take it too seriously.

The boomer generation had an easy ride through life, buying their big houses cheaply and getting fat index-linked pensions from their late 50s, lazing around on golf courses, while millennials and zoomers are having to pay too much for their homes, won’t get the nice pensions and will have to work far longer. Also, the boomers trashed the environment and wrecked the climate, filled the world with nuclear weapons, and did nothing to reduce racial or LGBT oppression. They even forced the UK to leave the wonderful EU, so now all our businesses will die and it won’t be long before we’re all on minimum wage with nothing to eat but recycled cardboard. Millennials are having to fix everything, absorb all the debt and pay all the bills, and won’t even inherit anything until we are old and grey.

So, payback time then. What mechanisms are available to punish the horrible boomers and restore fairness for millennials.

Sadly, we can’t just go and murder them all, well not unless we defund the police first anyway. We could try that, and see how it works, maybe some scope for experimentation with different approaches. A few manipulated riots and who knows how many we can get rid of?  We could do with some sort of  Logan’s Run style carousel, where the over 60s are ceremoniously terminated. Too obvious in that form, but applying some basic PR gumption,how about a system that allows them to be killed for their own good, with us making the decisions of course? So we needs a nice name that sounds compassionate and caring. How about Liverpool Care Pathway?, Yeah that’ll do, maybe we can tweak that now and then if people start to get wise to it. Perhaps design a nice form and smile sweetly while asking them to sign it so they suspect nothing. After all, a nice doctor from the wonderful NHS, what could possibly be wrong. They’ll assume DNR is just another medical term, like check blood pressure or something. Most of them won’t know what resuscitate means anyway. “Do not resuscitate”, they’ll think we mean not to wake them too early in the morning, let them lie in a bit or whatever. They grew old trusting the NHS so won’t suspect a thing. So, a couple of forms and we can get rid of quite a few of the old scroungers.

Oh look, a virus, that kills old people. Who’d have thought? If anyone suspects it was commissioned by Obama funding research in the Wuham virus lab, adapting a bat virus for human transmission, we can just dismiss that as a conspiracy theory – the Chinese are good at hiding stuff anyway so there won’t be any proof, they’ll just disappear anyone that might give the game away. Nobody would ever believe it and the media will all help to keep it quiet. So all we have to do is let it come over in planes and ships, not do anything at all to stop if until it’s everywhere and boomers will start dropping dead. If we say we need space in hospitals, we can chuck lots of infected boomers out of hospitals into old folks’ homes where they’ll infect loads more. Keep feigning incompetence, make sure the infection gets all the best chances of spreading, keep the old people in homes and delay any promising medications for any that get to hospital and before you know it, tens of thousands of them will be history. Think of all the pensions and benefits and the huge care and medical costs we’ll save. And all the inheritances that will be passed on years earlier.

But there will still be millions left, so we’ll need more viruses every few years.

Meanwhile, we still need ways of transferring their money. Boomers have loads of savings and investments so we need a way to transfer that to the state so we can have low taxes but still get all the good things. Taxes would work, but they’re too obvious. This idea of printing money is pretty good though. Let’s call it quantitative easing so people won’t pay attention and will just get bored if they investigate. So we borrow loads or money and increase public services, but then print loads of money to pay off the debt instead of raising taxes. That means any existing money is diluted, so its value falls, but the debt is worth less. Magic! Sure the existing money is worth less, but the boomers have most of that, we don’t have much yet, so they pay, and we don’t, our taxes stay low and the boomers pay. Serves them right. Everyone sees inflation of course, but the we will get pay rises to keep up, but the horrible boomers that didn’t work in the public sector probably won’t have their pensions index-linked, so will see their pensions worth less and their savings evaporate as the value transfers to the state, keeping our taxes low. In fact, while we’re at it, if we can persuade them to swap their pensions for cash, let’s call it transferring out, the quantitative easing will work much faster so we can get their money even quicker. The public sector boomers will still get their index linking, but we’ll still get their savings, and they’ll carry on voting for the left too – what’s not to like? So, suppose we do £1 Trillion of QE, that’s a decent start, but probably won’t even get any headlines. 15k per capita if it was everyone paying, but 50% don’t pay net tax and most of the rest only pay a bit, so that’s like a £50k Boomer tax, £100k for a couple. And we can do that every few years, and most will never notice, they’ll just carry on whining about increasing prices and we’ll just carry on making fun of them.

So we get to legally kill off a lot of them, and as for the survivors, we get to take their pensions and their savings. Best of all, we still get to make them feel guilty about how awful they’ve made it for us.

Revenge is sweet!

 

 

Post-lockdown tribalism

Locked at home, people have spent more time on the net. Dismayed by MSM unithink and government data-picking, they have discovered new news sources. In a sense, they’ve built extensions on their bubbles – same architectural style, just more space to move in.

Humans are tribal in their basic nature. For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in small groups, looking after each other and treating other groups as competition for the best access to resources. Those groups were 20-100 people typically. People would have a strong bond with their family members, a fairly strong bond with other tribe members, and often hostility to others. In spite of political correctness making it fashionable for some to pretend that we’ve left tribalism behind, it’s clear that those same people have retained strong tribal allegiance to their tribe and are hostile to those not in it. In fact, many surveys have shown that those most vocal about loving everyone are more likely to dislike others who aren’t like them than  other people, so they haven’t evolved above tribalism, they’ve just become more adept at hypocrisy.

Tribalism transformed into a hybrid of physical and virtual almost 30 years ago for a few, 20 years ago for everyone. The left-right divide has certainly flourished (though it has evolved and lost some of its former class correlation) with people forming stronger allegiance to similar groups in far-away countries than to neighbors who hold differing political views. Thanks to the net, it is easy to get all the news you can consume without ever leaving your comfy media bubble. Market forces have followed the customer, and media has become ever more polarized, reinforcing the trend in a positive feedback loop.

Lockdown has reinforced some of that existing tribalism, and created more dimensions for variation, so identity is evolving. Some of the divisions are becoming very obvious as we start to exit lockdown.

Financial effect

The first obvious split is around the effect of the lockdown on personal financial well-being. Some people have remained in full employment, on full pay, and a few have even become wealthier. A somewhat less fortunate group have been furloughed, and receive 80% of their previous pay, but with less outgoings on travel, catering and office attire have still been very comfortable. By contrast, many other people were made redundant early on as their company owners realized potential losses lay ahead and many others have followed. At the same time, many business owners have had to borrow heavily to pay staff and meet ongoing fixed costs, so have seen their savings badly depleted, debts growing and wealth based on the value of their company greatly reduce. Many other self-employed have received little or no state support, being on too high income to qualify or taking their income as dividends. So, even though all these groups went into the same lockdown, they have experienced it very differently in terms of financial effect.  Someone who has lost a great deal through no fault of their own, but because the government effectively closed their business, will exit lockdown with very different attitudes to those who sailed through it having a fully paid holiday in their back garden.

Public v Private Sector

That split correlates very strongly with working in the public or private sector. Just as in the 2008 crash, the public sector has been protected while the private sector takes a huge hit, but nevertheless is already managing to moan loudly about possibly not getting quite as generous pay rises as usual. Public sector unions are already making it hard to return to normal economy by linking returning to work to meeting pay demand and other unrelated conditions. Private sector employees who have kept their job at all will be grateful to have survived, very often noting that many of their colleagues haven’t. The public-private divide was already a major stress-line, but will now be an even stronger foundation for tribal conflict. Loud demands for pay rises for highly insulated public sector employees with secure jobs, higher pay and gold plated pensions will not go down well with people who have been suffering real hardship and whose wealth has been heavily depleted, especially when the main reason given for the lockdown was ‘to protect the NHS’, poster child of the badly managed public sector. With teachers and lecturers similarly playing the virus for every advantage and with local councils increasing taxes to make up holes in their budgets as no private sector company possibly can, this fault line could well become a quake.

For or against lockdown

Another lockdown tribal split is between those who want lockdown to end soon and quickly, many of whom always thought it too extreme a measure to deal with a virus which kills relatively few people, and those who are quite comfortable in lockdown and want it to continue. This split also correlates with the public-private divide, though many who want it to continue work for big companies and can easily work from home. A small number in the continue lockdown camp are simply lazy and are now too used to getting near full pay for doing nothing and now see going back to work as an extra 37.5 hours a week for no extra pay.

Now that we’re seeing lockdown being gradually lifted, tribal divisions are becoming even more pronounced. A lot of people are not only strongly resistant to going back to work, but also fiercely critical of people making the most of lockdown being lifted, especially those going to pubs or to beaches. Much of the criticism seems to hold a degree of snobbery, looking down on the sorts of people who go to the pub or the beach as inferiors with obviously poor characters. It is like a new class war. By contrast, many of those doing these activities just want to get back to some sort of normality and argue (with strong statistical justification) that the incidence of the virus is now so low that there is only a very small risk.

NHS Worship and #blacklivesmatter

Another tribe is the NHS worshippers, a peculiarly British phenomenon, engaging in the tribal ritual of going outside to clap in unison. Their elevation of the NHS is pseudo-religious and strongly resistant to new information showing that more than half of the UK’s deaths can be attributed to NHS failings. This has some similarities with the tribalism around the Black Lives Matter that surfaced four years ago and recently resurfaced. Last time around, people outside the tribe would often insist instead that all lives matter. This time, the antagonism has increased, but with more social media use now, it has become all-out hashtag warfare – #whitelivesmatter, #whitelivesdontmatter, #bluelivesmatter, #allblacklivesmatter and even #nolivesmatter, each with their own distinct tribal identities. That is rather similar to the non-NHS worshippers pointing out that supermarket shelf packers, checkout assistants, bus-drivers and many other workers are equally important to nurses and doctors for the survival of the nation.

Even before lockdown started to lift, anti-racist protesters in the #blacklivesmatter tribe started to demonstrate, right across the West, acting as an attractor for the usual far left anti-capitalists, but also creating a quite new trend of pulling down statues and demanding ‘decolonization’. As expected, some small opposition gathered from right wing groups, but what was more surprising was the lack of opposition from the large but very silent majority. It seemed to be accepted that this was as much a symptom of lockdown fever as support for anything in particular, but amplified by a significant degree of self-radicalization with people gazing at screens all day looking at propaganda from their bubbles.

COVID Victim-hood & Immunity Passports

Some people have lost loved ones, others have suffered tremendously themselves, others suffered varying degrees of symptoms, some were infected but had no symptoms, and most were not affected directly at all. Shared suffering can often be a factor in bonding, so COVID status will be a tribal factor.

Add to that immunity passports, certificates that someone carries COVID antibodies, and therefore the holder can access various places and activities closed to non holders. Holders and non-holders will have very different privileges and that is certain to cause tribal tensions.

Personal and Business Growth

Many people have used to lockdown situation to take courses, learn new skills, start new businesses, read lots of books or otherwise self-actualizing. Others have taken the opportunity to take stock of where they are in life, to better figure out who they are, what they want, and who they want to be with. Many of us have just carried on and tried to cope as best we can, not expecting any more than getting through it in one piece. When we get back to anything like normality, there will inevitably be some readjustment in social pecking orders in the many tribes to which we all simultaneously belong. Some people will have joined new tribes, some will change tribes, some will change employer, or even change friends.

Business tribes will also see changes in pecking order. Some companies will have done rather better than others, sometimes by pure luck or local circumstances, or by having different client bases, sometimes by better management. Status in business peer groups will inevitably change as a result.

Political tribal piggybacking

Many people have used to opportunity of the crisis to push various political views. There have been quite a few, and some have tribal-style behaviours and  allegiances. One that sprung up almost immediately after lockdown was mentioned was UBI (Universal Basic Income). In the weeks following, this has been overtaken in magnitude by the demands of environmentalists, often insisting for no reason in particular other than opportunism, that any solution to the virus or rebuilding after emerging from lockdown must also include sustainability and carbon reduction. In some cities, such as London, there are extremely rapid moves afoot to embed climate activist solutions before the opportunity evaporates. A good many even more tangential demands to migrate to non-growth systems or even to socialism have been piggybacked too. Authoritarianism has flourished, with many rules and personal tracking systems put in place superficially to control the spread of the virus, but with strong suspicion that they will be left in place ‘to control crime’ long after the virus is history. Privacy groups have fought against these systems but have been losing. Nonetheless, the freedom/privacy/rights tribe will fight afterwards with the many who favor an authoritarian society.

It remains to be seen how strong these new facets of tribal behavior remain as the lockdown moves into memory, and how they will interact. As with most things during the current crisis, things are changing too fast and too deeply to make accurate predictions yet. All we can really do at this stage is to spot some of the various factors that will interact.

Global tribalism – a newer, colder war

With increasing discussion about the origins of the virus, two opposing viewpoints exist, with those who believe the virus originated in a research lab (whether accidentally or deliberately) dismissed as stupid conspiracy theorists by those who want to believe it originated in a wet market. There seems remarkably little tolerance of a middle ground where it might have originated in either but more evidence is needed. However, what started off as a simple discussion about its origins has evolved into a new cold war. What was the USA versus Russia now has China as its new focus, with Russia reduced to a secondary role. This new even colder war divides the world into a more united West v a more united East. Although unconnected, the virus has caused Chinese telecoms involvement in the UK to be cancelled, general suspicion of 5G, and a greatly increased trade war. The level of distrust of China has greatly increased, though those who list the lab origin as conspiracy theory seem strongly to want to exonerate China generally from any blame, using the tried and tested racism slur where they can squeeze it in.

The rise of Dr Furlough, Evil Super-Villain

Too early for an April Fool blog, but hopefully this might lighten your day a bit.

I had the enormous pleasure this morning of interviewing the up-and-coming Super-Villain Dr Furlough about her new plans to destroy the world after being scorned by the UK Government’s highly selective support policy. It seems that Hell has no fury like a Super-Villain scorned and Dr Furlough leaves no doubt that she blames incompetent government response for the magnitude of the current crisis:

Dr Furlough, Super-Villain

“By late January, it should have been obvious to everyone that this would quickly grow to become a major problem unless immediate action was taken to prevent people bringing the virus into the country. Flights from infected areas should have been stopped immediately, anyone who may have been in contact with it should have been forcibly quarantined, and everyone found infected should have had their contacts traced and also quarantined. This would have been disruptive and expensive, but a tiny fraction of the problem we now face.  Not to do so was to give the virus the freedom to spread and infect widely until it became a severe problem. While very few need have died and the economy need not now be trashed, we now face the full enormous cost of that early refusal to act.”

“With all non-essential travel now blocked”, Dr Furlough explained, “many people have had their incomes totally wiped out, not through any fault of their own but by the government’s incompetence in handling the coronavirus, and although most of them have been promised state support, many haven’t, and have as Dr Furlough puts it ‘been thrown under a bus’. While salaried people who can’t work are given 80% of their wages, and those with their own business will eventually receive 80% of their average earnings up to £2500/month whether they are still working or not, the two million who chose to run their small business by setting up limited companies will only qualify for 80% of the often small fraction of income they pay themselves as basic salary, and not on the bulk of their income most take via dividends once their yearly profits are clearer. Consequently many will have immediately dropped from comfortable incomes to 80% of minimum wage. Many others who have already lost their jobs have been thrown onto universal credit. The future high taxes will have to be paid by everyone whether they received support or were abandoned. Instead of treating everyone equally, the state has thus created a seething mass of deep resentment.” Dr Furlough seems determined to have her evil revenge.

With her previous income obliterated, and scorned by the state support system, the ever self-reliant Dr Furlough decided to “screw the state” and forge a new career as a James-Bond-style Super-Villain, and she complained that it was long overdue for a female Super-Villain to take that role anyway. I asked her about her evil plans and, like all traditional Super-Villains, she was all too eager to tell. So, to quote her verbatim:

“My Super-Evil Plan 1: Tap in to the global climate alarmist market to crowd-fund GM creation of a super-virus, based on COVID19. More contagious, more lethal, and generally more evil. This will reduce world population, reduce CO2 emissions and improve the environment. It will crash the global economy and make them all pay. As a bonus, it will ensure the rise of evil regimes where I can prosper.”

She continued: “My Evil Super-Plan 2: To invent a whole pile of super-weapons and sell the designs to all the nasty regimes, dictators, XR and other assorted doomsday cults, pressure groups, religious nutters and mad-scientists. Then to sell ongoing evil consultancy services while deferring VAT payments.”

“Muhuahuahua!” She cackled, evilly.

“My Super-Plan 3: To link AI and bacteria to make adaptive super-diseases. Each bacterium can be genetically enhanced to include bioluminescent photonic interconnects linked to cloud AI with reciprocal optogenetic niche adaptation. With bacteria clouds acting as distributed sensor nets for an emergent conscious transbacteria population, my new bacteria will be able to infect any organism and adapt to any immune system response, ensuring its demise and my glorious revenge.”

By now, Dr Furlough was clearly losing it. Having heard enough anyway, I asked The Evil Dr Furlough if there was no alternative to destroying the world and life as we know it.

“Well, I suppose I could just live off my savings and sit it all out” she said.

 

On the good side…

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” works for society as well as individuals. Already it’s obvious that as the dust settles, and it will, there will be some lingering changes across society, politics and the economy, and some of them are good. I’ll try to keep my list waffle-light.

We’ll certainly come out of this with a greater appreciation of the value of life, taking it less for granted, more aware of our mortality, and make sure to value every day and make the most of the time we have.

We’ll value kindness more, the little things, the small gestures, things like making your neighbour know you’re there and willing to help if they need it, that you’ll try to pick up something they need along with your own shop, or if they run out of toilet roll, you’ll spare a few. Closer relationships with neighbours and more support for the elderly and vulnerable will be a big improvement for many parts of the UK, especially the South, where people are nor renowned for being close to their neighbours. Some friendships will be made through the adversity that will last.

We’ll all have a bit more self-reliance too, not expecting that everything will always work just fine, but that things might go wrong and we might have to rely on ourselves for a while.

We already have more appreciation of our loved ones, especially the elderly. Maybe we already say “I love you” a little more often, and that might last too. But we might also show a little more self-love, taking more care of ourselves, doing more exercise, eating better. Nothing focuses the mind on exercise better than knowing you won’t be prioritized for treatment if you are too frail.

While we’re on the theme of appreciation, we’ll all soon be desperate to get outside, enjoy the parks, countryside, and places we can’t go right now. Some of those places are closed and will need every bit of support once the doors open again, and I expect they will enjoy more traffic and custom than ever.

There is also a little re-levelling of attitudes in our class system. We’re being forced to realise which people are really essential in running our society and also that some really are just decoration.

Some benefits are political. Everyone right now appreciates the massive efforts of every health care worker looking after victims, but once it’s over, it is important that the NHS as a whole is reformed to make sure it is much better able to cope the next time, and sadly there will be a next time. There will be much greater willingness to reform the NHS and make sure it is fit for purpose, not badly managed, inefficient and poorly focused as it has been.

We’ll also have a better and long lived understanding of the dangers from globalisation, how easy travel with poor checks contributed to the rapid spread, and more willing to bolt the stable door before all the horses have gone next time.

Closer to home, with everyone familiar with home working, many will stay at home more often, so there will be a bit less commuting, with less congestion, less pollution, and lower CO2.

The markets will have had a thorough shaking, and a lot of weaker players will be bought or replaced by stronger ones, so whatever economy emerges from all this will surely be more robust, with better logistics, better managed, with support systems improved.

There has already been a marked shift in attitudes to celebrities and self-sanctifying SJWs, who are being put in their place very quickly as people get bored with their ‘me, me, me’ attitudes.

So, sure it’s bad, but it isn’t all bad, and some good things are already starting to show through.

Apocalypse Tomorrow

This post was co-authored with Bronwyn Williams (details below)

I recently watched a documentary about the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, where 918 Peoples Temple followers died, many of them children, killed by their own parents. Before it even started, my own memories of it in the news made me realize that the current global socio-political climate makes such an ‘unthinkable’ event likely to happen again, possibly on a much bigger scale, perhaps even in several places at once.

The biggest factor by far is the global replacement of religion (mostly Christianity) by secular religion substitutes. These secular substitutes for the meaning, direction and purpose formerly provided by religion take many forms, from a revived interest in paganism, witchcraft, and general “no name brand” spiritualism and mysticism, through to a new almost religious fervor for political causes. Now, while finding solace for the horror of the human condition in crystals or astrology is relatively benign (unless you are getting into debt betting your children’s school fees on the stocks recommended in your daily horoscope app, for example); mass movements driven by tribes of True Believers, are far more concerning.

New converts to any mass movement – religious or secular – are invariably among the most passionate believers, so we now have a massive and global pool of people newly susceptible to the same forces that enabled Jim Jones to do what he did. Every day on social media we witness first hand that enthusiasm, driving the secular equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition and targeting anyone and everyone not devoutly following every detail of their new faith. Jones strongly policed his followers and strictly punished any rule breaking or heresy. That same practice is greatly amplified in social media, to billions of people instead of the thousand followers Jones had influence on.

I’ve written many times about the strong similarities between religion and belief in catastrophic climate change, environmentalism, woke doctrine, veganism, New Ageism, and others. All these triggers tap in to the same anchors in human nature, first of which makes people want to believe they are ‘good people’ on the right side of history; the second of which is tribalism, the basic human instinct of wanting to belong to a group of like-thinking people, while clearly marking the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time, as people are forced to decide which side to stand on, the gulf between the “us” and ‘them’ is always widening, amplifying both the fear of – and the real consequences of – being cut out of the circle of trust of their chosen tribe, just as Jim Jones did.

Importantly, the scientific truth and proven facts behind these causes are less important than how the causes make the new true believers feel; particularly when it comes to signalling the moral superiority of the in group compared to the infidel, unconverted out-group.  As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, for the adherents of most mass movements, “The effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is.”.

Now, these tribal drivers are immensely strong forces, the likes of which have underpinned crusades and wars since the days of ancient civilizations. Now that far fewer people believe in formal religions, many of those who previously would have been enthusiastic believers have turned instead to these secular substitutes that push the same psychological buttons. Another documentary this week on veganism shows exactly the same forces at play being harnessed as in religion – secular equivalent to sin, shaming sinners, fear of rejection, tribalism, and especially demonstrating the impact of a charismatic ‘priest’. Jones was highly charismatic, and a master at using these forces. Compare the influence today that a single person can have in pushing a particular agenda in the name of social justice or climate change action.

Fear was a very powerful weapon used constantly by Jones, and today’s climate catastrophists do all they can to ensure as many other people share their fear as possible. It seems that every negative news item is somehow tied to ‘climate change’. If the climate isn’t enough, rising seas, ocean acidification, plastic pollution are all linked in to enhance the total fear, exaggerating wildly while a scared media lets them get away with it. Millions of people now pressurize governments and social media, screaming and shrieking “DO SOMETHING, NOW!!!!!”. Jones enhanced fear by talking frequently about death, even using mock suicides to amplify the general climate of fear. Now, witness the frequent death cult demonstrations of animal rights protesters and climate change catastrophists. Extinction rebellion excel in this area, with their blood-red meta-religious uniforms. It is impossible not to see parallels with Jones’ cult followers.

Jones was also adept in creating fake news. He used fake healings and even a fake resurrection to amplify faith and ensure his reign as leader. Fake news in today’s work is virtually indistinguishable from reality, and worse still many people don’t care, as long as it backs up what they already believe.

Another strong parallel is socialism. Jones gift-wrapped his cult in socialism Utopianism. Most people won’t join a movement just from fear alone, there needs to be a strong attractor to get them to join up, and fear can keep them there afterwards. Today we see a new enthusiasm among young people (a gospel enthusiastically spread to young minds via their state school teachers) for socialism. Via skillful use of Orwell’s doublespeak, with activists redefining words over a decade or more, they are presented with all the wonderful Utopian claims of ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘love’, ‘tolerance’ and so on, while non-believers are listed as ‘evil’, ‘deplorable’, ‘fascists’, and ‘deniers’. Even the USA is seeing strong enthusiasm for socialism and even communism, something that would have been impossible to imagine just 25 years ago.

Socialism, environmental catastrophism and religious fervor make a powerful trio. Promised salvation, status and utopia if you follow, doom and catastrophic punishment such as social ostracizing and career destruction on the light end, and complete civilizational and environmental collapse if you don’t.

Other forces still add to this. Generations raised on social media and social credit scores (both official and unofficial) are rewarded (in status and income) for narcissism and self-censorship and reversion to the group mean. This, of course, further reinforces echo-chamber group-think and a sincere, yet unfounded superiority complex, creating a tribal inter-generational hostility to older people that prevents them from accepting accumulated wisdom. They happily absorb emotional fake news and distortion as long as it massages their need for affirmation. Likes outweigh facts any day. Indeed, even holding a PhD is no longer an effective immunization against collective delusion, in a world where social scientists are punished with their careers for publishing results of scientific studies that falsify popular politically correct consensus opinions (As Eric Hoffer said, “There is an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.”)

Self-hate is another powerful trend; the dishonor of being born Western (or even more damningly, male) has strong Biblical parallels to man being born into sin; and the need to recognize, confess and atone for the sins of one’s birth and forefathers.

So where does this take us?

Jones was highly charismatic. He was a natural master of using strong emotional forces built into human nature. History has many examples of equally charismatic leaders (from Obama to Oprah), who used their charm and power for good. (Unfortunately, history also provides us with myriad of converse examples, from Hitler and Stalin to Jones). It likely that we will now see new leaders emerge to galvanize today’s new tribes of true believers. Whether the new leaders exploit the passion of the masses for good or ill; or march them to the Promised Land or into a catastrophic Great Leap forward into famine, disaster and mass death, only time will tell.

Already, we have heard many activists talk about how we need to greatly reduce human population. As an example, just days ago, The Guardian published this article. The radical vegan anti-natalist movement, advocating for the extinction of the human race as the only way to save planet Earth is growing in popularity around the (mostly Western) self-hating world. Some activists have even suggested mass-killing climate change deniers.

Similarly, controversially, there is a related emerging enthusiasm for abortion. Far beyond a woman’s right to choice and autonomy over her own body, the new celebration of abortion – not as a woman’s right, but as something actively encouraged and applauded by extreme environmentalists- marks a distinct turning point in society’s values towards human life in general.  Would-have-been parents claim they are so sure about climate doom that they can’t bear to bring a child into this world; similarly, young men are getting vasectomies as a sign of commitment to their cause (not unlike religious circumcision). It’s voluntary sterilization as virtue signalling, as a political message, sacrificing a child to make a point.  Abortion rates may well start to rise again after a long steady decline as Climatism makes its mark.

(Indeed, the anti-fertility campaigns of Western aid and health workers in low income African and Asian countries is symptomatic of how human life is increasingly perceived as a form of pestilence, to be minimized, if not eradicated (by its own kind if necessary); rather than something intrinsically valuable.)

Following along these lines, we can see echoes of Jonestown. At the end, Jones made sure that adults gave poison to their kids first before taking it themselves. He knew that if parents had deliberately killed their kids, they would be much more likely to kill themselves.

Imagine therefore that a new charismatic leader were to spring up, adept at social media and in manipulating language, emotions, and people. Imagine that they were to gain a large following across the English-speaking world. That they advocate reducing human population, targeting heretic ‘climate change deniers’, reducing carbon footprint via vegetarianism, veganism, giving reparations to developing countries for climate damage, supporting no-borders to allow anyone to immigrate as a ‘climate refugee’, encouraging abortion to reduce birth rate. Such a package would find a very large audience who demonstrably want to feel holy, that they are good while others are evil. A charismatic leader could thereby create a strong tribe. Using abundant funding from the membership, they might well build socialist Utopian towns. Maybe in a jungle like Jones, but just as likely out in the wilds in Canada, the USA, or Australia, a Scottish island, or all of these. Perhaps they could have hundreds of thousands of people join, with millions more online ‘associates’. Millions compared to Jonestown’s thousand.

And then perhaps, in the end, to force the rest of humanity to listen by means of a coordinated mass suicide, to go down in history as martyrs to the environment, saviors of the Earth.

Is an anti-civilizational suicide pact inevitable? No, not at all.

But imaginable, feasible, perhaps even likely? In my opinion, yes it is. And it could well happen in the next few years, while this perfect storm of forces is peaking.

About Bronwyn Williams

Bronwyn Williams is a futurist, economist and trend analyst, who consults to business and government leaders on how to understand the world we live in today and change the world’s trajectory for tomorrow. She is also a regular media commentator on African socio-economic affairs. For more, visit http://whatthefuturenow.com

 

 

Can you claim to be on the right side of history?

On several major issues, we all need to decide where we stand. We can obfuscate and waffle and use distractions and other tricks to avoid discussing them and perhaps having an argument, or losing friends if we make our position clear, but your conscience knows what you think, and whether you do anything about it or try to hide.

I’ve lost a lot of social media followers and quite a few former friends by repeatedly laying out my own opinions on controversial issues such as climate change, trans rights v women’s rights, antisemitism, capitalism v socialism, freedom of speech and what I often call the new dark age. I don’t have any grandchildren yet but hope one day I will, and if any of them ask me what I thought and said and did when big decisions were being made around now, I will either be proudly able to say I was on the right side of history, or – and we all must accept this is always a possibility – that I got it wrong, that I believed and said and did the wrong things.

We all live in different information environments. We have different friends, different educations, different personalities, and consume different media. Some of it is not our fault, some of it is results of personal choices. You can’t excuse yourself for not being aware of something if you choose to only ever read media that ignores that issue or always puts heavy spin on it. That’s your free choice (though it is certainly getting harder to find media without bias).

Elections are a time where such personal choices come to the fore.  Us Brits have to vote this week, my yank followers are deep in the very long run up to theirs. In both cases, the decisions are more about big moral issues and will have deeper consequences than most previous elections. Our choice counts, not just for this election, but for our future consciences, for the notional personal account we could give our descendants in the world we have helped architect (or opposed).

It’s not for me to tell you how to vote – it’s your decision and your conscience you’ll have to live with years down the line. My blogs and tweets lay out my own positions on the important issues frequently and my regular readers will know them. But this is my blog, so I’m happy to lay them out briefly again. Maybe it will help think more about your own positions.

Antisemitism: I don’t know if I know any Jews (I don’t know anyone who has told me they are), but I do know that antisemitism is wrong. The Holocaust was only possible because many people stood by and let it. I will not be one of them now. If anyone votes for an antisemitic party, they are complicit in antisemitism. If Jews feel they have to leave the UK because an antisemitic party gains power, that will be shameful for the UK, and anyone who helps them gain power should feel deeply ashamed. It has become very clear that Labour is currently an antisemitic party. I have voted for them several times before, but I will certainly never vote for them again while they are antisemitic.

Capitalism v socialism: Capitalism works. Socialism doesn’t. A socialist government would make it much more difficult for people to lead comfortable lives, including the poorest in our society, and would leave massive debts crippling our children and grandchildren. I don’t want that on my conscience.

Climate change: we have seen some warming in the last few decades. Some of that is likely caused by nature – mainly ocean and solar cycles, but some of it, an unknown amount, is probably caused by humans. CO2 emissions of course but also deforestation, pollution, industry, farming, and all of our personal lifestyle choices. I believe we should not be complacent about any of these, and should work towards a cleaner environment and better stewardship, including developing better forms of clean energy. However, although I want a cleaner world with better environmental stewardship, I most certainly do not agree we are in a ‘climate emergency’, that we are all doomed if we don’t dramatically change our way of life immediately. I believe much of the information we are presented with has been distorted and exaggerated, that the climate models predict too high levels for future warming, and that deeply reduces solar activity likely to last until around 2050 will provide a cooling effect that at least offsets warming, and perhaps even results in net cooling. Consequently, nature has effectively give us a few decades to carry on developing solar and fusion energy technology, that we can invest gradually as free markets incentivise development and reduce the costs, and that we do not need to spend massively right now, because the problem will essentially go away. By 2050, CO2 output will be a lot less than today, the real warming we see by then will be much smaller than is often predicted in the media and there is therefore no real reason to jeopardise our economies by massively overspending on CO2 reduction while the associated costs and lifestyle impacts are so high. Massively spending on scales wanted by XR, the Green party etc, would cause huge harm to our kids’ futures with no significant benefit. If we want to spend huge sums of money, we have a duty to aim for the biggest benefit and there are plenty of real problems such as poverty and disease that could use those funds better. Waste trillions on pointless virtue signalling, or make the world a better place? I know where I stand. None of my local candidates come out well here.

Trans rights v women’s rights: I support trans rights to a point, but we are quickly passing that point, and now eroding women’s rights. Women have had to fight long and hard to get where they are today. In my view, women being forced to accept former men competing with them in sports (or indeed in any field where biological men have an advantage) is unfair to biological women. Having to share changing rooms and lavatories with people who still have male genitalia is unfair to biological women. Deliberate conflation of sex and gender as a means to influencing debate or regulation is wrong. Encouraging young children to change gender and schools preventing parents from even knowing is going too far. Given the potential life consequences, great care should be exercised before gender change is considered and it seems that care is not always present. Making it illegal to discuss these issues is certainly going too far. If someone feels they are in the wrong body and wants hormone treatment or surgery, or if they want to cross-dress or call themselves by a different gender, I don’t object at all, and I’d even defend their right to do so, provided that doing so doesn’t undermine someone else’s rights. Women are a vulnerable group because of physical and historic disadvantages compared to men, and in conflict between trans rights and women’s rights, I think women’s rights should take priority. Good luck with finding a party that agrees.

Freedom of speech and the new dark age: I believe people should be able to say what they want and others should be able to challenge them. I believe in a few sensible restrictions – e.g shouting “FIRE” in a crowded cinema, or deliberate incitement to violence. I disagree with the concepts of hate speech and hate crime, invariably used to close down debate that is essential for a free and cohesive society. Making the law into a tool to restrict freedom of speech (and thought) has already resulted in harm, and has created a large and rapidly growing class of ‘truths’ that everyone must give lip service to even if they believe them to be wrong. They must also lie and state that they believe them if challenged or face punishment, by the law or social media mob. This is simply anti-knowledge. It inhibits genuine progress and the development of genuine knowledge and it therefore inhibits quality of life. Even naming such anti-knowledge is punishable, and it has already caused a high degree of self-censorship in journalism and blogging, so you must use your own judgement on what it includes. My censored thoughts on the new dark age are here: https://timeguide.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/the-new-dark-age.pdf. Again, most parties seem very happy to take us further into the dark age.

I could have picked many other policies and issues. Every reader has their own priorities. These are just some in my mind today.

I don’t think any of the parties come out well today. For many people, spoiling their vote is a valid alternative that officially says they’re not prepared to support any of those on offer on the ballot paper. Others will vote for who they see as the lesser of evils. Others will happily support a candidate and turn a blind eye to their associated moral issues.

Your conscience, your choice, your future memory of where you stood. Choose well.

 

The future of reproductive choice

I’m not taking sides on the abortion debate, just drawing maps of the potential future, so don’t shoot the messenger.

An average baby girl is born with a million eggs, still has 300,000 when she reaches puberty, and subsequently releases 300 – 400 of these over her reproductive lifetime. Typically one or two will become kids but today a woman has no way of deciding which ones, and she certainly has no control over which sperm is used beyond choosing her partner.

Surely it can’t be very far in the future (as a wild guess, say 2050) before we fully understand the links between how someone is and their genetics (and all the other biological factors involved in determining outcome too). That knowledge could then notionally be used to create some sort of nanotech (aka magic) gate that would allow her to choose which of her eggs get to be ovulated and potentially fertilized, wasting ones she isn’t interested in and going for it when she’s released a good one. Maybe by 2060, women would also be able to filter sperm the same way, helping some while blocking others. Choice needn’t be limited to whether to have a baby or not, but which baby.

Choosing a particularly promising egg and then which sperm would combine best with it, an embryo might be created only if it is likely to result in the right person (perhaps an excellent athlete, or an artist, or a scientist, or just good looking), or deselected if it would become the wrong person (e.g. a terrorist, criminal, saxophonist, Republican).

However, by the time we have the technology to do that, and even before we fully know what gene combos result in what features, we would almost certainly be able to simply assemble any chosen DNA and insert it into an egg from which the DNA has been removed. That would seem a more reliable mechanism to get the ‘perfect’ baby than choosing from a long list of imperfect ones. Active assembly should beat deselection from a random list.

By then, we might even be using new DNA bases that don’t exist in nature, invented by people or AI to add or control features or abilities nature doesn’t reliably provide for.

If we can do that, and if we know how to simulate how someone might turn out, then we could go further and create lots of electronic babies that live their entire lives in an electronic Matrix style existence. Let’s expand on that briefly.

Even today, couples can store eggs and sperm for later use, but with this future genetic assembly, it will become feasible to create offspring from nothing more than a DNA listing. DNA from both members of a couple, of any sex, could get a record of their DNA, randomize combinations with their partner’s DNA and thus get a massive library of potential offspring. They may even be able to buy listings of celebrity DNA from the net. This creates the potential for greatly delayed birth and tradable ‘ebaybies’ – DNA listings are not alive so current laws don’t forbid trading in them. These listings could however be used to create electronic ‘virtual’offspring, simulated in a computer memory instead of being born organically. Various degrees of existence are possible with varied awareness. Couples may have many electronic babies as well as a few real ones. They may even wait to see how a simulation works out before deciding which kids to make for real. If an electronic baby turns out particularly well, it might be promoted to actual life via DNA assembly and real pregnancy. The following consequences are obvious:

Trade-in and collection of DNA listings, virtual embryos, virtual kids etc, that could actually be fabricated at some stage

Re-birth, potential to clone and download one’s mind or use a direct brain link to live in a younger self

Demands by infertile and gay couples to have babies via genetic assembly

Ability of kids to own entire populations of virtual people, who are quite real in some ways.

It is clear that this whole technology field is rich in ethical issues! But we don’t need to go deep into future tech to find more of those. Just following current political trends to their logical conclusions introduces a lot more. I’ve written often on the random walk of values, and we cannot be confident that many values we hold today will still reign in decades time. Where might this random walk lead? Let’s explore some more.

Even in ‘conventional’ pregnancies, although the right to choose has been firmly established in most of the developed world, a woman usually has very little information about the fetus and has to make her decision almost entirely based on her own circumstances and values. The proportion of abortions related to known fetal characteristics such as genetic conditions or abnormalities is small. Most decisions can’t yet take any account of what sort of person that fetus might become. We should expect future technology to provide far more information on fetus characteristics and likely future development. Perhaps if a woman is better informed on likely outcomes, might that sometimes affect her decision, in either direction?

In some circumstances, potential outcome may be less certain and an informed decision might require more time or more tests. To allow for that without reducing the right to choose, is possible future law could allow for conditional terminations, registered before a legal time limit but performed later (before another time limit) when more is known. This period could be used for more medical tests, or to advertise the baby to potential adopters that want a child just like that one, or simply to allow more time for the mother to see how her own circumstances change. Between 2005 and 2015, USA abortion rate dropped from 1 in 6 pregnancies to 1 in 7, while in the UK, 22% of pregnancies are terminated. What would these figures be if women could determine what future person would result? Would termination rate increase? To 30%, 50%? Abandon this one and see if we can make a better one? How many of us would exist if our parents had known then what they know now?

Whether and how late terminations should be permitted is still fiercely debated. There is already discussion about allowing terminations right up to birth and even after birth in particular circumstances. If so, then why stop there? We all know people who make excellent arguments for retrospective abortion. Maybe future parents should be allowed to decide whether to keep a child right up until it reaches its teens, depending on how the child turns out. Why not 16, or 18, or even 25, when people truly reach adulthood? By then they’d know what kind of person they’re inflicting on the world. Childhood and teen years could simply be a trial period. And why should only the parents have a say? Given an overpopulated world with an infinite number of potential people that could be brought into existence, perhaps the state could also demand a high standard of social performance before assigning a life license. The Chinese state already uses surveillance technology to assign social scores. It is a relatively small logical step further to link that to life licenses that require periodic renewal. Go a bit further if you will, and link that thought to the blog I just wrote on future surveillance: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/future-surveillance/.

Those of you who have watched Logan’s Run will be familiar with the idea of  compulsory termination at a certain age. Why not instead have a flexible age that depends on social score? It could range from zero to 100. A pregnancy might only be permitted if the genetic blueprint passes a suitability test and then as nurture and environmental factors play their roles as a person ages, their life license could be renewed (or not) every year. A range of crimes might also result in withdrawal of a license, and subsequent termination.

Finally, what about AI? Future technology will allow us to make hybrids, symbionts if you like, with a genetically edited human-ish body, and a mind that is part human, part AI, with the AI acting partly as enhancement and partly as a control system. Maybe the future state could insist that installation into the embryo of a state ‘guardian’, a ‘supervisory AI’, essentially a deeply embedded police officer/judge/jury/executioner will be required to get the life license.

Random walks are dangerous. You can end up where you start, or somewhere very far away in any direction.

The legal battles and arguments around ‘choice’ won’t go away any time soon. They will become broader, more complex, more difficult, and more controversial.

Future Surveillance

This is an update of my last surveillance blog 6 years ago, much of which is common discussion now. I’ll briefly repeat key points to save you reading it.

They used to say

“Don’t think it

If you must think it, don’t say it

If you must say it, don’t write it

If you must write it, don’t sign it”

Sadly this wisdom is already as obsolete as Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. The last three lines have already been automated.

I recently read of new headphones designed to recognize thoughts so they know what you want to listen to. Simple thought recognition in various forms has been around for 20 years now. It is slowly improving but with smart networked earphones we’re already providing an easy platform into which to sneak better monitoring and better though detection. Sold on convenience and ease of use of course.

You already know that Google and various other large companies have very extensive records documenting many areas of your life. It’s reasonable to assume that any or all of this could be demanded by a future government. I trust Google and the rest to a point, but not a very distant one.

Your phone, TV, Alexa, or even your networked coffee machine may listen in to everything you say, sending audio records to cloud servers for analysis, and you only have naivety as defense against those audio records being stored and potentially used for nefarious purposes.

Some next generation games machines will have 3D scanners and UHD cameras that can even see blood flow in your skin. If these are hacked or left switched on – and social networking video is one of the applications they are aiming to capture, so they’ll be on often – someone could watch you all evening, capture the most intimate body details, film your facial expressions and gaze direction while you are looking at a known image on a particular part of the screen. Monitoring pupil dilation, smiles, anguished expressions etc could provide a lot of evidence for your emotional state, with a detailed record of what you were watching and doing at exactly that moment, with whom. By monitoring blood flow and pulse via your Fitbit or smartwatch, and additionally monitoring skin conductivity, your level of excitement, stress or relaxation can easily be inferred. If given to the authorities, this sort of data might be useful to identify pedophiles or murderers, by seeing which men are excited by seeing kids on TV or those who get pleasure from violent games, and it is likely that that will be one of the justifications authorities will use for its use.

Millimetre wave scanning was once controversial when it was introduced in airport body scanners, but we have had no choice but to accept it and its associated abuses –  the only alternative is not to fly. 5G uses millimeter wave too, and it’s reasonable to expect that the same people who can already monitor your movements in your home simply by analyzing your wi-fi signals will be able to do a lot better by analyzing 5G signals.

As mm-wave systems develop, they could become much more widespread so burglars and voyeurs might start using them to check if there is anything worth stealing or videoing. Maybe some search company making visual street maps might ‘accidentally’ capture a detailed 3d map of the inside of your house when they come round as well or instead of everything they could access via your wireless LAN.

Add to this the ability to use drones to get close without being noticed. Drones can be very small, fly themselves and automatically survey an area using broad sections of the electromagnetic spectrum.

NFC bank and credit cards not only present risks of theft, but also the added ability to track what we spend, where, on what, with whom. NFC capability in your phone makes some parts of life easier, but NFC has always been yet another doorway that may be left unlocked by security holes in operating systems or apps and apps themselves carry many assorted risks. Many apps ask for far more permissions than they need to do their professed tasks, and their owners collect vast quantities of information for purposes known only to them and their clients. Obviously data can be collected using a variety of apps, and that data linked together at its destination. They are not all honest providers, and apps are still very inadequately regulated and policed.

We’re seeing increasing experimentation with facial recognition technology around the world, from China to the UK, and only a few authorities so far such as in San Francisco have had the wisdom to ban its use. Heavy handed UK police, who increasingly police according to their own political agenda even at the expense of policing actual UK law, have already fined people who have covered themselves to avoid being abused in face recognition trials. It is reasonable to assume they would gleefully seize any future opportunity to access and cross-link all of the various data pools currently being assembled under the excuse of reducing crime, but with the real intent of policing their own social engineering preferences. Using advanced AI to mine zillions of hours of full-sensory data input on every one of us gathered via all this routine IT exposure and extensive and ubiquitous video surveillance, they could deduce everyone’s attitudes to just about everything – the real truth about our attitudes to every friend and family member or TV celebrity or politician or product, our detailed sexual orientation, any fetishes or perversions, our racial attitudes, political allegiances, attitudes to almost every topic ever aired on TV or everyday conversation, how hard we are working, how much stress we are experiencing, many aspects of our medical state.

It doesn’t even stop with public cameras. Innumerable cameras and microphones on phones, visors, and high street private surveillance will automatically record all this same stuff for everyone, sometimes with benign declared intentions such as making self-driving vehicles safer, sometimes using social media tribes to capture any kind of evidence against ‘the other’. In depth evidence will become available to back up prosecutions of crimes that today would not even be noticed. Computers that can retrospectively date mine evidence collected over decades and link it all together will be able to identify billions of real or invented crimes.

Active skin will one day link your nervous system to your IT, allowing you to record and replay sensations. You will never be able to be sure that you are the only one that can access that data either. I could easily hide algorithms in a chip or program that only I know about, that no amount of testing or inspection could ever reveal. If I can, any decent software engineer can too. That’s the main reason I have never trusted my IT – I am quite nice but I would probably be tempted to put in some secret stuff on any IT I designed. Just because I could and could almost certainly get away with it. If someone was making electronics to link to your nervous system, they’d probably be at least tempted to put a back door in too, or be told to by the authorities.

The current panic about face recognition is justified. Other AI can lipread better than people and recognize gestures and facial expressions better than people. It adds the knowledge of everywhere you go, everyone you meet, everything you do, everything you say and even every emotional reaction to all of that to all the other knowledge gathered online or by your mobile, fitness band, electronic jewelry or other accessories.

Fools utter the old line: “if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear”. Do you know anyone who is innocent? Of everything? Who has never ever done or even thought anything even a little bit wrong? Who has never wanted to do anything nasty to anyone for any reason ever? And that’s before you even start to factor in corruption of the police or mistakes or being framed or dumb juries or secret courts. The real problem here is not the abuses we already see. It is what is being and will be collected and stored, forever, that will be available to all future governments of all persuasions and police authorities who consider themselves better than the law. I’ve said often that our governments are often incompetent but rarely malicious. Most of our leaders are nice guys, only a few are corrupt, but most are technologically inept . With an increasingly divided society, there’s a strong chance that the ‘wrong’ government or even a dictatorship could get in. Which of us can be sure we won’t be up against the wall one day?

We’ve already lost the battle to defend privacy. The only bits left are where the technology hasn’t caught up yet. In the future, not even the deepest, most hidden parts of your mind will be private. Pretty much everything about you will be available to an AI-upskilled state and its police.

The future for women, pdf version

It is several years since my last post on the future as it will affect women so here is my new version as a pdf presentation:

Women and the Future

The future of land value

I don’t do investment advice much, and I am NOT an investment adviser of any kind, just a futurist doing some simple reasoning.

World population is around 7.7Bn.

It will increase, level off, then decline, then grow again.

Any projections you see are just educated guesswork. 9.8Bn figure is the UN global population estimate for 2050, and I won’t argue with that, it seems as good a guess as any. Everyone then expects it to level off and decline, as people have fewer kids. I’m not so sure. Read my blog five years ago that suggested it might grow again in the late century, perhaps reaching as high as 15Bn:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/will-population-grow-again-after-2050-to-15bn/

I only say might, because there are pressures in both directions and it is too hard to be sure in a far future society which ones will be stronger and by how much. I’m just challenging the standard view that it will decline into the far future, and if I had to place a bet, it would be on resumed growth.

Population is one large influence on demand for land and ‘real estate’.

Another is population distribution. Today, all around the world, people are moving from the countryside to cities. I argue that urbanization will soon peak, and then start to reverse:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/will-urbanization-continue-or-will-we-soon-reach-peak-city/

De-urbanization will largely be enabled by high technology and its impacts on work and social life. It will be caused by increasing wealth, coupled to the normal desire to live happier lives. Wealth is increasing quickly, varying place to place and year to year. It is reasonable, given positive feedback effects from AI and automation, to assume average real growth of 2%, including occasional recessions and booms. By 2100, that means global wealth will be 5 times today’s. Leaving aside the lack of understanding of exponential growth by teachers indoctrinating schoolkids to think of themselves as economic victims, taken advantage of by greedy Boomers, that means today’s and tomorrow’s kids will have one hell of a lot more money available to spend on property.

So, there will be more people, with more money, more able to live anywhere. Real estate prices will increase, but not uniformly.

Very many of them will choose to leave cities and with lots of money in the bank, will want somewhere really nice. A lovely beachfront property perhaps, or on a mountainside with a gorgeous view. Or even on a hill overlooking the city, or deep in a forest with a waterfall in the garden. Some might buy boring homes in boring estates surrounded by fields but it won’t be first choice very often. The high prices will go to large and pretty homes in pretty locations, as they do today, but with much higher differential, because supply and demand dictates that. We won’t build more mountains or valleys or coastline. Supply stays limited while demand and bank balances rockets, so prices will rocket too.

Other property won’t necessarily become cheaper, it just won’t become as expensive as fast. Many people will still like cities and choose to live there, do business there, socialize there. They also will be richer, and there may be a lot more of them if population does indeed grow again, but increasing congestion would just cause more de-urbanization. Prices may still rise, but the real money will be moving elsewhere.

Farmland will mostly stay as farmland. Farms are generally functional rather than pretty. Agricultural productivity will be double or triple what it is today, maybe even more. Some food will be made in factories or vertical farms, using tissue culturing or hydroponics, or using feed-stocks based on algae grown at sea, or insects, or fungi. The figures therefore suggest that demand for land to grow stuff will be lower than today, in spite of a larger population. Some will be converted to city, some to pretty villages, some given back to nature, to further increase the attractiveness of those ultra-expensive homes in the nice areas in the distance. Whichever way, that doesn’t suggest very rapid growth of value for most agricultural land, the obvious exception being where it happens to be in or next to a pretty area, in which case it will rocket in value.

As I said, all of this is educated guesswork. Don’t bet the farm on it until you’ve done your own analysis. But my guess is, city property will gain modest value, agricultural land will hold its value or even fall slightly, unless it is in a pretty location. Anywhere pretty will skyrocket in price, be it an existing property or a piece of land that can be built on and stay pretty.

As a final observation, you might argue that pretty isn’t everything. Surely some people will value being near to centers of power or major hubs too? Yes they will, but that is already factored into the urbanization era. That value is already banked. Then it follows the rules just like any other urban property.