Blogs
Lesson Two from Brexit and Trump
One month after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Fifty Year Perspective compared expectations and results of both the election and the U.K. vote in June 2016 on leaving the European Union, referred to as “Brexit.” The blog post, titled “Lessons...
Read MoreRenewable Energy Sources
Two articles appearing a few days apart in June 2024 suggest that bountiful, cheap, clean energy is on a path to achievability by mid-21st century. The June 22, 2024, edition of The Economist featured a cover story titled “Dawn of...
Read MoreTrust in Government Institutions
Gallup News conducts annual polls of the public’s trust in government institutions and actors. The results of the 2023 poll reveal two worrisome facts: U.S. confidence in national government, judiciary, and other key institutions had decreased significantly since polling...
Read MoreThe Charmed Life Cycle of Baby Boomers
After the deprivation and rationing of the Great Recession and Second World War, Americans looked with optimism toward a future of peace and prosperity. The country entered a period of plentiful jobs, increasing wages, and factories converted from wartime production...
Read MoreReturn-to-Office Mandates
After World War II ended, the nation’s labor force returned to civilian life. By the end of 1945 more than four million soldiers returned to civilian status. More than six million women held wartime jobs in factories and three million...
Read MoreWhat Is a Cult?
Amanda Montell, linguist and author of "Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism," concludes that the United States has a relationship with cults well beyond that found in other developed countries. “The U.S. is an exception … and full of believers”...
Read MoreGermany’s Labor Shortage
Like many aging countries, Germany is experiencing a labor shortage that only promises to become more severe. Its 84 million residents make it the 19th largest country in population, and its labor force is the world’s 15th largest. It has...
Read MoreAn Exclusive Interview with Uncle Sam
Two years away from the 250th birthday of the United States, the country is going through one of its darkest periods. Anger, hatred, incivility, and violence have intensified in an unusually extreme time of polarization. Uncle Sam, who has lived...
Read More2024 Election Platforms
Election Day is November 5, less than nine months away. Republicans and Democrats do not typically know who their presidential standard-bearers will be this far in advance. But this is not a normal election. Plenty has been written and said...
Read MoreChanging Faces of Immigration
Meet Z.S. He is a 28-year-old who has dealt with a lot of setbacks. He is a high school graduate whose parents are migrant workers. He has worked in a factory and on an assembly line. Last year he decided...
Read MoreNot All Authoritarians Are Divine
A favorite poem of mine in high school was Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I knew the poem was based on an ancient Egyptian ruler, but until I read a recent book by Toby Wilkinson titled Ramesses the Great: Egypt’s...
Read MoreA Warning From 17th Century England
One of the many year-end lists of best books of 2023 included a history of 17th Century England. It is titled “The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689,” by Jonathan Healey. A brief description concluded, “This account...
Read MoreA Debt Reduction Plan
In “Reviving the American Dream,” several positive signs of progress toward avoiding recession were highlighted. Constructive assessments by liberal and conservative think tanks concurred regarding economic goals and what is necessary to achieve them: promoting job creation and supporting...
Read MoreReviving the American Dream
The politics of low taxes, small government and a laissez faire attitude toward the market economy, often referred to as “neoliberalism,” is being ushered out the door by institutions supporting a “bottom-up” economy that provides well-paying jobs and support for...
Read MoreLosing the American Dream
As a presidential election year approaches, pollsters are searching to measure the pulse of those who will be voting in 2024. A question is confounding analysts examining poll results, why is a U.S. economy that is exceeding expectations with low...
Read MoreDemography As Destiny – Part Two
Following the rise in births in mid-20th-century, and again at the century’s end, annual births in the U.S. have been steadily declining. Add to that an aging population with deaths on a constant upward trend, and soon the inevitable will...
Read MoreNot So Different?
Polarization in the United States expresses itself in clashes of conservatives vs liberals, Republicans vs Democrats, and rural citizens vs urban citizens. Urban voters are more liberal than rural voters on social and political issues. A 2018 Pew Research...
Read MoreGrowth and Decline in World Populations
What at one time seemed a never-ending growth in world population that would eventually overwhelm the earth’s capacity to feed the people, now is presented as a looming population peak followed by rapid decline. United Nations population projections are...
Read MoreInsecurity’s Susceptibility to Authoritarianism
The recent blog post on values, “Are There Universal Values?” progressed to a discussion of security and insecurity. People who feel insecure, physically or economically, are apt to embrace traditional values of family and religion and have lower levels...
Read MoreUnnatural Disasters
A Wall Street Journal article in October 2018 reported that some areas may become uninsurable due to disaster risk probabilities, or the cost may become so high as to make insurance prohibitively expensive. Five years later this prediction has come...
Read MoreAre There Universal Values?
Surveys are ubiquitous, especially global surveys. Cross-national surveys tell us what countries have the highest high school math scores, the highest obesity rates, the highest gross domestic product, the lowest infant mortality rate, the highest church attendance, the slowest population...
Read MoreRosenwald Schools
As the heat of August intensifies, I am turning away from tense political issues to write about a heart-warming story that only recently came to my attention. Rosenwald Schools have been researched, documented, reported in print, broadcast and video, yet...
Read MoreBidenomics
By slim margins, bipartisan legislation passed in the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term has begun to show signs of success. Targeting infrastructure, green energy and job creation for middle income workers, economists are attributing recent GDP...
Read MoreAmerican Compass Economic Plan
In a previous Fifty Year Perspective post, I described a movement among a small group of Republican leaders who have proposed a fundamental redirection of U.S. economic policy. The group, called American Compass, is led by Oren Cass, a...
Read MoreBipartisan Green Shoots
From a recent (June 2023) document come these four quotes by a conservative political organization:
But the free market alone does not guarantee that individual and public interest will in fact align. Market fundamentalism’s basic error is to misunderstand...
Read MoreAnti-Poverty Policy
The recent blog post, Rethinking the Federal Budget, described U.S. underperformance in provision of numerous services that provide for the population’s education, health, infrastructure, and well-being in preparation for their future; and it reviewed misappropriation or underfunding of the...
Read MoreRethinking the Federal Budget
A US default has once again been averted, and the debt ceiling will be raised. Suspending the debt ceiling, even temporarily, provides an opportunity to evaluate the budget-setting process. Time for a rethink. The current approach would lead one to believe...
Read MoreCongressional District Boundary-setting
“Reinventing American Democracy” was the objective of a 2018-2020 commission by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, involving a broad and diverse group of hundreds of American citizens. The report of the commission is titled Our Common Purpose....
Read MoreSupreme Court Reform
Before the Supreme Court came under daily scrutiny of its judicial neutrality and ethical standards, it was under the microscope, along with other branches of government, in efforts to improve our democracy. In 2020 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
Read MoreBlue Cities in Red States
Is there a relationship between which states are recording rapid employment and population growth and which political party dominates in those states? Growth has tended to be in warmer parts of the country, and many of those Sun-Belt states tend...
Read MoreHow Did Citizens United Work Out?
A citizen of Switzerland who has lived in the United States for decades is among the small group of billionaires donating hundreds of millions of dollars to various political causes. That’s supposed to be illegal. Among his donations are...
Read MoreWhat Does “Limited Government” Look Like?
It’s budget time in the US Congress. What needs more money and what can be cut? What is untouchable and what is unnecessary? Can the conservative goal of “limited government” be met? Can the liberal goal of providing a wide...
Read MoreChina’s Population Problem
China silences critics of the Communist Party China imprisons minority Uyghurs in forced labor. China requires foreign-owned businesses to divulge intellectual property. China disregards patent protections. China reneged on commitments to Hong Kong’s freedoms. China threatens Taiwan’s independence. China uses technology to spy on its citizens. China...
Read MoreGuns and Gun Deaths
In case you are feeling like gun violence has become more frequent in recent years, you are not imagining it. It’s real. In 2019, the year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States recorded 14,414 firearm homicides, according to data...
Read MoreDealing with Deficits
The recurring Congressional battle of the budget is playing out again: What can be cut? Should the borrowing limit be raised? Can funds be moved from A to B? Historically, the battle ends with Republicans and Democrats agreeing to raise...
Read MoreDon’t Write Off the 118th Congress, Yet
Thanks to an inauspicious beginning to the 118th Congress, the consensus among many observers is, don’t expect much from the 2023-2024 session. If fifteen votes were required before agreement was reached on a Speaker of the House, how can it...
Read MoreMigration as Employment Policy
High on the to-do list of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government is immigration policy. Who is allowed entry to the country, what is their reason for entering, the circumstances of entry, legal or otherwise, are subject...
Read MoreElection of 1860
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected 16th president of the United States, having won 39.8% of the popular vote and 180 of 303 electoral votes. The years leading up to that election encompassed events not unlike those surrounding...
Read MoreA Year-end Report Card
We live in the wealthiest country the world has ever known. We enjoy amenities of daily life unknown to the most powerful royalty of centuries past. For the most part these conveniences are not limited to those with upper income:...
Read More118th Congress Agenda
The mid-term elections are over and a divided Congress goes to work in January for a two-year term. The elections seemed at times to be more about personalities than policies. Hopefully that will change when the term begins. Among the voters’...
Read MoreThe Challenge to Diverse Democracy
When the United States was founded in the eighteenth century as a self-governing democratic republic, it was “a time when similar undertakings had miserably failed in every country where they had been tried.” So wrote Yascha Mounk in The Great...
Read MoreReligious Freedom 1790-1791
On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the 13th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. President George Washington had visited New England states in the Fall of 1789, deliberately bypassing Rhode Island, which had refused to call a state convention...
Read MoreIs Civil War in the U.S. Future?
In the previous Fifty Year Perspective blog post, the scatter-pattern map of red- and blue-colored counties representing 2020 presidential voting highlighted the political divisions within states. Blue-colored counties indicate more liberal populations, mostly urban areas, while red-colored counties indicate...
Read MoreDissecting Red States and Blue States
Presidential election results tend to be used for designating states as red (for Republican) or blue (for Democratic). A U.S. color map of the 2020 election results displays 25 red states and 25 blue states. Five states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,...
Read MoreImmorality in Government
Living through this period of confrontation, polarization, hate, and absence of compassion, it is hard to avoid reading about the desperate state of the nation; the trauma has been examined and analyzed thousands of times. The recent publication of a...
Read MoreChina’s Heat Wave
When Matthew Bossons set out with his wife and daughter for a camping trip, he expected to find mountain streams, cooler temperatures and favorite swimming holes west of Chengdu in southwestern China. Bossons is a Shanghai-based journalist and managing editor...
Read MoreWill the Metaverse “Revolutionize Everything?”
Multinational corporations of all stripes are writing Metaverse into their business plans, even though examples of what the Metaverse might look like almost always involve video games. A much-discussed book by Matthew Ball is titled, The Metaverse and How It...
Read MoreEmployment Back to Pre-recession Level After 29 Months
As of July 2022, the number of employed persons in the U.S. had fully recovered to the level of February 2020, the beginning of the recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Compared to recessions of 1990, 2001, and 2007, the...
Read MoreResponding to Crises
Ian Bremmer is an American political scientist and founder and president of the Eurasia Group. The firm is a leading global research and consulting company, assessing political risk for major business and investment decisions around the world. He is foreign...
Read MoreWords
Words. So many words. In posting two hundred essays to Fifty Year Perspective, I have written over 125,000 words. I’m running out of words. From the outset in 2014, my objective was to write about trends in the economy, technology, education,...
Read MoreA Grateful Immigrant
Recently a funeral took place for a woman who had immigrated to the United States from Russia in the early 1990s. Irina (not her real name) was an engineer in Russia and her husband started a small business that achieved...
Read MoreLooking Forward, Looking Backward
Before I posted the essay “Red Covid” on June 19th, my intent was to write on fewer topics, possibly with less frequency. The political character of the Covid data caught my attention, leading to the “Red Covid” essay posted on...
Read MoreRed Covid: How Politics Changed the Course of a Pandemic
Has there ever been a health threat studied, measured, documented, and reviewed to the extent of Covid-19? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) records daily figures by state for new cases, total cases, new deaths, and total...
Read More200
On June 2nd, 2014, I posted the first essay on Fifty Year Perspective, titled "Technology and the Future of Work." Now, eight years later, this is my...
Read MoreCooperation Is Essential to Existence
Confronting extinction has a way of focusing one’s attention. It’s the ultimate existential threat: No survivors. That was on the mind of Martin Nowak when he wrote a book called SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed....
Read MoreFifty Years in China
On February 21, 1972, President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing, the first U.S. president to visit the Chinese mainland, accompanied by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. After a weeklong visit, the two countries issued the Shanghai Communique, stating positions...
Read MoreNatural Disasters and Conflict
“In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil,...
Read MoreRisking Deglobalization
April 10, 2022
The last thirty years of globalization have recorded huge increases in international trade, world GDP, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), migration, multinational enterprises, and global value chains. Globalization has lowered costs for consumer goods, and raised living... Read MoreWhy DID Putin Wait Until Trump Was Out of Office to Invade Ukraine?
March 27, 2022
In a stroke of editorial genius, two letters to the editor appeared sequentially in the March 2, 2022, St Louis Post-Dispatch, six days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Mr. A wrote:Isn’t it ironic that Russian President...
Read MoreGood Economy? Bad Economy? Two Answers
That’s the question: Are these good times for the U.S. economy, or bad times? It depends on who you ask, and both answers have backup supporting data. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released change in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for...
Read MorePreparing for the Next Pandemic
The first approval of a Covid-19 vaccine occurred in late August 2021; protests against the vaccine and against mandates for its use began soon after. Since the beginning of 2022 opposition to Covid restrictions have brought thousands of demonstrators to...
Read MoreBalancing Market Freedom and Government Policy
For four decades the American Economic Association (AEA) has presented economists with a number of economic propositions and asked if they agreed or disagreed with each proposition. Compared to previous surveys, the 2021 survey found increased consensus on many propositions. Over...
Read MoreAnemic Post-Recession Job Recovery
The year 2021 ended with a December gain of 199,000 jobs, slightly above the monthly average for the 2011-2020 decade. But after losing over 22 million jobs at the start of the pandemic, the December gain was half the total...
Read MoreSocial Mobility and Fairness Correlated to Populism
Anxiety over populism in democracies has engulfed countries large and small, leftist, and conservative, newly democratic and established, and threatens the very existence of liberal democracy. Populism has been addressed by Fifty Year Perspective in the past, most recently in...
Read MoreLegitimacy of One-Party Government in China
A recent post to Fifty Year Perspective described challenges facing China in establishing its strategy toward achieving leadership abroad while maintaining tranquility and stability at home. Technology is central in achieving national and domestic objectives - it serves China’s...
Read MoreFear
Reading for Fifty Year Perspective exposes me to a variety of perspectives on current events in general and politics in particular. Several of my recent posts have examined causes and effects of polarized politics, and I am no longer surprised...
Read MoreTechnology Is About to Make Economics and Politics Much More Fraught
Like a parlor game, we often amaze ourselves with comparisons between the worlds of the past and the present. Who could have foreseen the changes brought by cars, or electricity, or telephones, let alone the Internet? As technology changed, governments...
Read MoreDesalination
In 2019 Iranian drones and missiles staged a surprise attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. An article in The Economist noted the Saudi’s vulnerability to a wider conflict, adding Saudi officials worry “that a well-placed salvo of missiles aimed...
Read MoreAre Workers Gaining the Upper Hand?
The previous post on Fifty Year Perspective, recounted many of the causes of the slow recovery in employment following Covid-19. Closed schools, lack of child daycare and elder care, generous unemployment benefits, repeated spikes in infection rates, and doubts...
Read MoreThe Challenging Course to Reviving the Post-pandemic Economy
There is a direct line from anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers to the slow recovery of employment since the outbreak of Covid-19. In September 2021 only 194,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy, well below the projection of 500,000 jobs;...
Read MoreHow European Citizens View America
The disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan gave further credibility to the perception that the country has lost the status it enjoyed as the Cold War ended. That status as the world’s only superpower was eroded by the ill-advised...
Read MoreClimate Migration
Climate change skepticism has always been an easy sell in the U.S. Why worry about, or even believe, something that is not an immediate threat, doesn’t seem serious if it only means summer will be two or three degrees warmer,...
Read MoreInequality Tracked Through Six Decades of Graphs – Part 2 of 2
This is Part 2 of 2 posts about shifts in the U.S. economy and society. Part one reviewed distribution of income and wealth among families, household inequality, worker pay vs productivity and CEO pay, and union membership. Changes in the Federal...
Read MoreInequality Tracked Through Six Decades of Graphs
Research and writing for Fifty Year Perspective is devoted to preparing for the future by understanding lessons from the past. An overriding objective in seven-plus years of writing has been sustainability: What trends, if allowed to proceed unchecked, would produce...
Read MoreBuilding Physical and Social Infrastructure
In July of 2012 President Barack Obama was campaigning for reelection. At a rally in Roanoke, Virginia, he advocated for government investment to grow the economy. Citing past investment that paved the way for new businesses to thrive, he said,...
Read MoreSocial Values and the Role of Government
A report from the Pew Research Center on U.S. political values stated, “As Americans head to the polls this November, their values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.”...
Read MoreA Different Kind of Recovery
Recessions are measured in months and relate to decreases in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A negative growth in GDP, over a period of months, defines the length of the recession. The shortest recession of the last hundred years occurred over...
Read MoreWho Is Helped by Proposed Legislation?
Changes to capitalism and the social contract have been reviewed in two recent blog posts to Fifty Year Perspective. With its laser focus on profits, capitalism is being challenged to acknowledge the harm it has imposed on global warming,...
Read MoreCan/Must the Social Contract Change?
The previous post to this blog asked “Can/Must Capitalism Change?” The charge against current practices of capitalism is the priority of profitability over all other concerns, including inequality, human rights, and global warming. Institutions and laws facilitate the function...
Read MoreCan/Must Capitalism Change?
Capitalism is “one of humanity’s greatest inventions, and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen.” Capitalism is “a menace on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society.” Economists, politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs, historians – and capitalists - are...
Read More2020 Census Count Confirms Social Trends
Although arriving four months later than normal, the United States finally learned its 2020 Census population count. With 331,449,281 people, population increased 7.35%. Only one decade in the country’s history, the 1930s, was the rate of growth lower – by...
Read MoreLegacy of Fantasy
“As the American dream of endless upward economic mobility came to seem increasingly like myth, all sorts of pure myths and fantasies became still more appealing and seemed more real.” Author and journalist Kurt Andersen looked through American history in...
Read MoreMandatory Vaccination
On February 18, 2021, Isaac Legaretta was notified he must be vaccinated within five days. Legaretta is an employee in the Dona Ana County, New Mexico County Detention Center. In January county first responders and detention center staff had...
Read More“I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.”
In his inaugural address in January 1981, Ronald Reagan spoke of the current economy burdened by “the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history.” He cited “a tax system which penalizes successful achievement,” and decades...
Read MoreChina’s Challenges Foreign and Domestic
China’s Demographic Time Bomb described the projected change in China’s ratio of workers to retirees over the next thirty years. The country’s extremely low birth rate is producing fewer workers in relation to the population reaching retirement. In 2020...
Read MoreLessons From The Great Recession
The Great Recession of the last decade is fresh in the minds of most adults, but what it teaches us about the COVID-19 recession remains arguable. The two recessions differed significantly in suddenness of onset and scale. But both occurred...
Read MoreMaersk Line’s Role in Globalization
The Maersk Line is the world’s largest container shipping company. Maersk has been a leader in the globalization of trade and the introduction and expansion of containerized shipping for over 60 years. It is hard to imagine the path of...
Read MoreChina’s Demographic Time Bomb
When the United Nations published its latest population projections, the expected aging of the world’s population foreshadowed impending challenges for national and regional economies. Low birth rates and increased longevity are drastically altering the balance between numbers of young and...
Read MoreDid the 2020 Pandemic Change Everything? Part 2 of 2
This is the second part of a blog posted January 17th, 2021. Part one covered changes due to COVID-19 in Science, Medical Research, Technology, Business, Work Places, World Trade and Government. Health Care New technologies for creating vaccines have been developed at...
Read MoreDid the 2020 Pandemic Change Everything? Part 1 of 2
“This changes everything” is a phrase often used in marketing to describe some new product or discovery. COVID-19 truly changed life for every person on earth in a matter of months. The pandemic changed every aspect of daily life. This...
Read MoreMaking the Case for Stimulus
As 2020 ended, the U.S. economy was far from recovering losses from the recession. But the mere mention of stimulus causes budget hawks to panic. Words like “national debt” and “handouts” are uttered, along with fearsome handwringing and anxiety for...
Read MoreNews About the News
“Trump spouts election falsehoods at Georgia rally.” President Donald Trump was in Georgia the first weekend of December for a rally in support of the state’s two Republican senators facing a runoff election to retain their seats. The headline above...
Read MoreHow Might This Turn Out?
As I write this, all signs point to a Joe Biden presidency beginning January 20, 2021. Popular and electoral college votes are in Biden’s favor, and challenges to the election are all but resolved. Preparation for a transition from Republican...
Read More“Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics”
Fifty years ago the New York Times Magazine published an essay by economist Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits.” Striving to increase profits was how businesses best served society. Businesses existed to produce profits for shareholders. Friedman’s...
Read MoreSocial Cohesion Lost
Analysis of the history and current status of liberal democracy in the United States often begins with the mid-20th century, a period of growth and prosperity. The following decades saw widening disparity in the distribution of wealth and income, a...
Read MoreThoughts on Morality and Freedom
What role does morality play in the life of a country? That question was raised by David Brooks in a recent New York Times opinion piece. The essay appeared three days after the...
Read MoreAnother Industry Disrupted
To the list of industries disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, add energy. As lockdowns spread across the world, businesses shuttered, and travel and transport contracted. Airline travel in the United States dropped by 90%....
Read MoreWhat did you do during the lockdown?
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, workers were kept from their workplaces in numbers never observed before. Workers not considered to be in “essential jobs,” or “essential employers” were directed to work from home or...
Read MorePandemic: Warning and Reality
By September 2020, worldwide cases of Covid-19 total 29 million, with over 900,000 deaths. The virus has dominated news, both about the pandemic itself and the economic crisis it has caused. Expectations for...
Read MoreVanishing Liberal Democracy
The history of Turkey’s slide from democracy to dictatorship was explored in a previous post to Fifty Year Perspective. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, AKP, came to power in the general elections of...
Read MoreAlternative Truths and Consequences
Inauguration day, January 20, 2017, the crowd was huge, stretching down the National Mall in Washington DC. Donald Trump’s inauguration drew a larger crowd to the mall than Barak Obama’s inauguration eight years before....
Read MoreLive Free and Die
I don’t know whether to be embarrassed or ashamed. How did my country come to equate wearing a face mask with losing freedom? Protesters at a county health department...
Read MoreThe Rise and Rise of the Nation State, by Nigel Holloway
(Nigel Holloway is a former senior editor at The Economist and now runs The Holloway Forum for the creation of reports primarily designed for...
The Idea of America
A November 2017 article in The Atlantic told the story of the founding of the magazine 160 years earlier. The founders were described as “among the leading literary elites of their day.” Their...
Read MoreRedistribution and Pre-Distribution
Does the process of stopping Covid-19 and restoring the economy offer opportunities to create a more peaceful and equitable society? Two recent blog posts (Here and Here) cited several such opportunities, including...
Read More“Build Back Better”
Stop the spread and eradicate Covid-19. Restore the health of the U.S. economy. That much is agreed upon, the “what.” Now for the “when and how.” Then there is “WHO.” Read More
After Covid-19: Opportunities and Threats
Although the threats of Covid-19 are widely communicated, a fair number of influencers express optimism for the future. Call the optimism a mixture of “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste” and “It’s...
Read MoreRoots of Populism
The populist and nationalist movements that seemed to coalesce following the collapse of the Soviet Union have been portrayed as continuation of long-growing discontent in response to rising inequality over the last fifty years....
Read MoreDemocracy, More or Less
The Brookings Institution report covered in the previous blog post reviewed proposals for improving the process used by political parties in the United States to nominate candidates for president. The authors observed the...
Read MoreDemocratizing Primary Elections
The 2016 Republican presidential nominating process featured 17 candidates. They included senators and governors as well as a cardiac surgeon, a tech executive and a businessman/reality TV star. In a Brookings Institution report...
Read MoreInfrastructure Is a Priority
The sad condition of much of the United States’ rural road system was the subject of a recent New York Times article. The article examined conditions in central-west Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County, population 29,000....
Read MoreInflation
I took my suit to the dry cleaners to be cleaned. The cost had gone up 17% from just a couple months ago. I expect prices to go up, but 17%? In two months?...
Read MoreA History of Sand
The late Washington University scientist and ecologist, Barry Commoner, was a leader of the modern environmental movement. His foundational law of ecology, “Everything is connected to everything else,” has been a benchmark on...
Read MoreFree College Tuition
Government-funded education in the United States was first made compulsory in 1852 in Massachusetts. The last state to require school attendance was Mississippi in 1917. Enforcement of these state requirements was reportedly ineffective...
Read MoreImmigration Imperative
Civil wars this century in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Venezuela and other countries generated huge refugee flows. According to an early 2016 BBC report, more than a million migrants and refugees crossed into...
Read MoreInequality and Tax Policy
Two recent blog posts reviewed the impact of government action on inequality and the medical, educational and life expectancy disadvantages experienced by people falling behind economically. While government policy over four decades...
Read MoreYold
Life expectancy nearly doubled in developed countries in the 20th century. (The age to which a given population can expect to live, on average, is called its life expectancy.) Thanks to improvements in...
Read MoreReunification
Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a Washington Post journalist observed a particular economic split between counties carried by Donald Trump and counties carried by Hillary Clinton. The 472 counties that Clinton won...
Read MoreConfronting Consumerism
Environmental activists in France and the United Kingdom are taking a different approach to tackling waste of resources. Just as the holiday shopping season is getting underway, a movement is targeting consumerism as an...
Read MoreThomas Piketty on Inequality
A previous blog post described the influence of economists over U.S. fiscal policy, as reported in a book titled The Economists’ Hour by Binyamin Appelbaum. The author described how four decades of applying...
Read MoreFifty Year Retrospective
Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger published a ranking of U.S. presidents in 1948 and again in 1962 based upon opinions of 75 historians. He used a scale of minus 2 to plus 4, then averaged...
Read MoreBlaming the Economists
A business and economics writer, Binyamin Appelbaum, was a Washington correspondent for the New York Times from 2010 to 2019, covering economic policy following the Great Recession. His book, The Economists’ Hour, refers to...
Read MoreDestroying Monsters
There is a new think tank in Washington, D.C. Like so many others, it is founded and funded by individuals to promote their ideals. However, in this case the new think tank received most...
Read MorePopulism Wins and Losses
If you have tired of seeing the words “populist” and “populism” in your daily news, relief may be coming. In a single day in the first week of September, articles were published with the...
Read MoreUsing Atmospheric CO2 to Produce Protein for Food
The previous blog post reported success in removing CO2 from the atmosphere as a step toward reducing global warming. Scientists and engineers have developed a process called Direct Air Capture and are using...
Read MoreCapturing and Using Atmospheric CO2
Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is one of the three most prominent greenhouse gases, along with methane and water vapor, that trap infrared radiation in the earth’s atmosphere. Concentration of greenhouse gases contribute to the...
Read MoreAllies and Adversaries, and Inconsistencies
Alliances are never forever, and peace has yet to be permanently established. That has been easy to forget since the Second World War ended. Journalist and political scientist Fareed Zakaria described recent history...
Read MoreCombating Authoritarianism
“The surge of authoritarian populists appears to be less inevitable than it did a year ago.” So began the 2018 World Report by Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental...
Read MoreFrom Democracy to Dictatorship
Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish journalist, writes in How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, that democracy’s decline is following a similar course in several countries. Her own country’s offensive...
Read MoreSeeking Center
When the Financial Times interviewed Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, prior to Putin leaving Moscow for the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Putin celebrated national populist movements in western countries. He saw opposition...
Read MoreInsurers Acknowledge Climate Change
While climate deniers are rejecting scientists’ consensus opinion, one group has no doubt that climate change has arrived. It’s a group that studies rain and heat, hailstorms, hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires, and there is...
Read MoreImmigration Policies Will Change
Could European and United States immigration policies, which close international borders to migrants from developing countries, be replaced by competition for immigrants from those developing countries? A report from the Hoover Institution foresees...
Read More“Who Will Buy Your Cars?”
An apocryphal story described in a past blog post told of the early introduction of robots in a plant manufacturing Ford cars. According to the story, Walter Reuther, president of United Auto Workers,...
Read MoreGood A. I.
If innovative technologies have historically brought increased productivity for workers, while increasing demand for labor in new sectors of the economy, why is artificial intelligence (AI) regarded with suspicion? “The Wrong Kind of AI?,”...
Read MoreNuclear Energy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have released a report titled the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). The authors of the study assert that unless nuclear energy...
April 1971 Earth Day Lecture by Ian McHarg
In April 1971, Ian McHarg, a famous landscape architect, gave the Earth Day lecture before the students and guests of Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. It was a speech that he...
Read MoreAfrica’s Outlook
Japan went from rapid growth following World War II to “lost decades,” and China somewhat later displayed similar characteristics, as described in the two previous blogs. Their post-war histories had much in...
Read MoreJapan and China
When Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke to the World Economic Forum on January 23, 2019, he addressed Japan’s shrinking population and workforce. Promoting what he called “womenomics,” he said, has raised the...
Read MoreMade in Japan
If you were a consumer living in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, you frequently observed the phrase “Made in Japan” stamped on your purchases. In the aftermath of massive destruction in the Second...
Read MoreRegulating Artificial Intelligence
The previous blog post describes what artificial intelligence (AI) is and how it is used in business applications. It touched on the expected disruption in employment and training that...
Read MoreArtificial Intelligence: Benefits and Stresses
The term General Purpose Technology (GPT) has been applied to a technology that becomes a platform for generating productivity gains in multiple sectors of the general economy. Prominent examples of...
Read MoreDemocracy in 2018
The notion that democracy may be on the wane as the preferred form of governance would have been inconceivable twenty years ago. Yet now, even some of the older western...
Read MoreA Populist Agenda
The two most recent blog posts dealt with concentration of power in corporations in the early 20th century and current concerns with growing corporate concentration in...
Read MoreToo Big (Part Two)
Too Big (Part One)
Criticism of the growing power and influence arising from corporate consolidation is heard from across the political spectrum. The trend is evident in industries as varied as communication media, airlines,...
Read MoreGoverning 1,417,332,945 People*
Mao Zedong founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, and defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist party in civil war. The KMT fled to Taiwan and the CCP declared the People’s Republic of...
Read MoreClimate Change Revisited
“Limiting global warming to 1.5℃ would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented...
Read MoreTourism
Discussions of international trade rarely dwell on a category that is among the most important for developing nations, namely tourism. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) issued...
Read MoreA Plan to Address Income Inequality
“The future is not what it used to be” may be an apt response to my previous two blog posts. Big changes are in store. In “Diverging Demographic...
Read MoreTechnology and the Work Force
“Automation, in my view, is coming along just in time to address this coming period of labor shortages.” That is Hal Varian speaking. He is the chief economist at Google, addressing a symposium hosted...
Read MoreDiverging Demographic Destinies: A Fifty Year Perspective
In one of my earliest posts to Fifty Year Perspective, I laid out the straightforward logic of forecasting population. Using historical data for births, longevity and migration, the demographer can extend past trends...
Read MoreMarket Trends Impacting Inequality
A premise of this blog, Fifty Year Perspective, is that the complexity of our world obscures relationships among many issues. The Global Issues Matrix found here displays over 50 such issues and gives an example at the bottom of...
Read MoreChina’s Marshall Plan
When Chinese President Xi Jinping introduced the idea in 2013 of a 21st century Silk Road, his expressed purpose was economic development along the routes. The land-and-sea route...
Read MoreAttacks in Cyberspace
Known secrets: Iran melted down computer systems at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas in response to anti-Iran comments by the Sands’ owner in 2014. China hacked U.S. computers to collect personal information on over 20 million federal employees in...
Read MoreUniversal Health Insurance
For anyone living in the United States of America in 2018 it is hard to imagine celebrating the birthday of your national health system. Yet that is exactly what occurred in the United Kingdom for the July 5, 2018, 70th...
Read MoreConfronting Political Discontent
In a blog post on June 16, 2018 titled “Considering Political Discontent,” comments on Steven Brill’s book Tailspin included Brill’s dividing the U.S. population into the “unprotected” and the “protected.” In the book he defines the two groups, respectively,...
Read MoreWho Will Lead?
Since WWII the world has been guided by formal and informal arrangements designed largely by western democracies. Institutions embodying values of democracy, free press, human rights, rule of law and free trade imparted an order on international relations that enabled...
Read MoreConsidering Political Discontent
“A Strong Economy Won’t Make You Popular These Days.” That is the title of an opinion piece in the April 24, 2018 New York Times by Ruchir Sharma, who is the chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Sharma...
Read MoreTime for Remedial Kindergarten
You probably remember this. Thirty years ago, Robert Fulghum published a book titled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It has sold 17 million copies in 103 countries and has been translated into 31 languages. Must...
Read MoreEarly Twentieth Century Progressivism
The litany of populist grievances is familiar: Wealthy classes are in control of Congress; Wall Street financiers are acting recklessly; giant corporations are engaging in monopolistic practices; workers and consumers...
Read MoreAfrican Continental Free Trade Agreement
Forty-four members of the African Union signed an agreement on March 21 to create the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The agreement was signed at a time of extensive activity in major international trade negotiations. The United Kingdom voted...
Read MoreTwo Authors on Authoritarianism
In 1941 Erich Fromm wrote a book titled Escape from Freedom. Fromm, who was born in Germany in 1900, was a psychologist and sociologist. He left Germany in 1933, arrived in New York in 1934, and taught in the United...
Read MoreRejection of Expertise
As the June 2016 vote on Brexit approached, UK Justice Secretary Michael Gove urged voters to oppose staying in the European Union, saying, “I think people in this country have had enough of experts,” when most economists were arguing against...
Read MoreGlobalization vs Sovereignty
The European Union is a unique experiment in international cooperation among 28 European states; it delegates some decision-making powers on matters of common interest to over-arching institutions created by the Union. Relinquishing some state authority to the broader Union has...
Read MoreDemocracy in Retreat
In the 10th edition, the 2017 Democracy Index of 167 countries records the worst decline in global democracy in years. Compared to their 2016 scores, 89 countries experienced a decline in their total scores, compared to 27 that recorded...
Read MoreTzfat, Israel
A recent visit to Tzfat in northern Israel provided a window into 2000 years of Middle East history, and a thriving city of culture, spirituality and life. Tzfat (also transliterated from Hebrew as Safed, Zefat, Zfat, Safad, Safes, Safet, and Tsfat),...
Read MoreGovernment Policy Impacts Inequality
An organization called the World Inequality Lab recently published The World Inequality Report 2018. Based upon data for income, wealth and fiscal data from taxes on income, the report determined that since 1980, income inequality has increased rapidly in...
Read MoreLiberalism in Retreat
More than a year has passed since elections in the United States and United Kingdom shocked the world with the thought that liberal democracy was waning. Later elections in France, Germany, Austria, Hungry, and Poland saw the rise of right-wing...
Read MoreEndless Conflicts in South Sudan by Guest Author Nhial Tutlam
I visited my homeland, South Sudan, just 4 months after independence in 2011. During that visit, I met many relatives for the first time in my life. One of them was Chur Bakual, a brilliant young engineer who inspired me...
Read MoreLatin American Elections 2017-2018
The closely-watched elections in Europe and the United States in 2016 and 2017 teased and befuddled commentators looking for a pattern in those democracies’ politics. Now attention turns to Latin America where nine Central and South American countries hold...
Read MoreSilicon Savannah
Countries of Africa are not known for their expertise in information technology, but dismissing them as IT backwaters would be a mistake. As reported in a previous Fifty Year Perspective blog post, an African company called Andela trains young...
Read MoreManufactured Beef and Other Delicacies
Here is the problem: There are now seven billion people in the world. They consume 259 million tons of meat a year. Meat production uses 70% of the world’s agricultural land, including land used for growing the grains to feed...
Read MoreDivisions within U.S. Political Parties
On October 24, 2017 the Pew Research Center reported results of surveys of more than 5,000 United States adults conducted over the summer of 2017. The report revealed that “even in a political landscape increasingly fractured by partisanship, the divisions within the...
Read MoreThe Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
North Korea’s hatred toward the West and toward the United States in particular, is not a creation out of the mind of its current dictator, Kim Jong Un. Its roots lie in the bloody war of 1950-1953. Wars dotted Korea’s...
Read More“Can We Agree on This?”
Political scientists and media commentators have devoted innumerable articles to analyzing popular perceptions of government as expressed through the past year’s voting and polling. An article by Harold James on June 8, 2017 in Financial Times portrayed the transformation: "In the...
Read MoreEurope and Israel 100 Years After Balfour
Europe’s victors in The Great War set the stage for establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. The events leading to the signing of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 are described in the previous blog post on...
Read MoreThe Balfour Declaration’s 100th Anniversary
This November marks 100 years since the signing of the Balfour Declaration. Born in secrecy, intrigue, spying and double dealing, the negotiations among supposed allies prior to the Declaration must be one of military history’s low points. Jews in Russian pogroms...
Read MoreChanging the Economics of Renewable Energy
While politicians debate the benefits of using coal to generate electricity, the economics of renewable energy may soon make the debate moot. In a July 2017 research report, Morgan Stanley stated, “Numerous key markets have reached an inflection point...
Read MoreIs Political Turmoil Bad for Business?
Conventional wisdom says that business dislikes uncertainty. That places politics in an important position. Political stability gives businesses a degree of confidence to plan and invest for their future. Political stability can come in various forms. While most developed economies tend...
Read MoreGlobal Leadership
The chronology of 2016-2017 elections in Western countries, appearing in a Fifty Year Perspective blog post, reviewed attitudes toward globalization, immigration, and the European Union. Subsequent blog posts examined the internal challenges facing the European Union, shortcomings of...
Read MoreNew Institutions: Where to Start
In the book by Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization and the Return of History, reviewed in the previous blog post on Fifty Year Perspective, the author asked, “For globalization to work, nation states need...
Read MoreNeeded: Improved International Institutions
If the institutions designed to maintain peace in Europe – and the world – are transformed or dissolved, what becomes of the peace? This question ended the previous blog post on Fifty Year Perspective. A new book by Stephen D. King,...
Read MoreThe European Union’s Challenges
Of the ten European elections described in the previous blog post, only one specifically referenced the European Union. The United Kingdom vote in June 2016, known as Brexit, determined that the UK would leave the EU. And yet, the...
Read MoreAnalyzing Twelve Months of Western Elections
Over the twelve months from June 2016, a series of elections in several Western countries tested their electorates’ approval of their governments’ performance. Moderate political parties surrendered followers to extremes of the right and left. Criticism of globalization and the...
Read MoreHighs and Lows of Commodity Dependence
Typically for developing countries, the export of commodities – fossil fuels, metals, chemicals, food stuffs – is the primary source of income and provides the revenue for the import of everything not produced at home. The price of their commodities...
Read MoreJob Security and Automation
The popular new movie La La Land opens with a hundred or so Hollywood hopefuls dancing and singing their dreams of becoming the next stars of stage and screen. Ignoring the competition for limited jobs, the poor average pay, and...
Read MorePublic Distrust of Science
On February 6, 1897, a bill was passed by the Indiana House of Representatives that would change the value of pi to 3.2. The bill died in the state senate when a senator observed that the legislative body lacked...
Read MoreFeast and Famine
A decade ago when droughts were severe in the United States and Russia, countries such as China, which had been a net importer of grain, began encouraging more domestic production. In stark contrast today, the U.S. is looking at its...
Read MoreThe Bear in the Room
Like the proverbial elephant in the room, the Russian bear is making its presence felt throughout Europe, the Middle East, northern Africa, and the United States. Most notably, Russia’s intervention in Syria has strengthened its status as a...
Read MoreA History of Inequality
“In recent decades, income and wealth have become more unevenly distributed in Europe and North America, in the former Soviet bloc, and in China, India, and elsewhere.” This introduction to a new book by Walter Scheidel, titled The Great Leveler:...
Read MorePopulism in Democracies
The course taken by populist movements that have arisen from democracies was reviewed in a December 5, 2016 article from Foreign Affairs. The article’s authors, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz, note that, whereas in the latter half of the...
Read MoreObit: The World’s Foremost Authority
“Professor” Irwin Corey, an actor and comedian known as “The World’s Greatest Authority,” died February 6, 2017 at the age of 102. Professor Corey’s career spanned eight decades. He was described by theater critic Kenneth Tynan as “a cultural clown,...
Read MoreBrexit and European Migration
When voters in the United Kingdom (UK) went to the polls on June 23, 2016 and voted to leave the European Union (EU), they created two major questions to be resolved: What policies will govern migration between the UK and...
Read More2500 Years of Globalization
In his recent book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Peter Frankopan writes a history of civilization from the perspective of trade, from ancient times to the present. As the western world debates the value of international...
Read MoreExperimenting with a Universal Basic Income
How should governments address the trend of jobs being eliminated by technological advancements? If close to half of current occupations are projected to be displaced by automation, as put forward in the last blog post, how will families secure the...
Read MoreTechnology Creates and Destroys Jobs
Populist themes examined in the previous two blog posts expressed opposition to immigration, globalization, and international trade in both the U.S and the U.K. Similar sentiments are heard in several European countries heading into elections in the coming months. A...
Read MoreDelivering on Promises
The previous blog post, Lessons of Brexit and Trump (http://fiftyyearperspective.com/lessons-of-brexit-and-trump/), noted similarities in voter behavior in the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union (EU) and the U.S. presidential election. Those favoring Brexit, the move to leave the...
Read MoreLessons of Brexit and Trump
Three days after the U.S. presidential election of November 8, 2016, the British Broadcasting Corporation published an article by John Curtice comparing the outcome of the election to the vote in the U.K. on remaining in the EU, the so-called...
Read MoreChina: Two Current Perspectives
Over the last quarter century China has raised hundreds of millions of its citizens from poverty or near-poverty to middle class status. The Communist Party of China (CPC) rewarded its citizens’ loyalty with a dramatic rise in household consumption. Increased...
Read MoreLiving With Water
When Hurricane Matthew struck Haiti in October 2016 it left a thousand people dead. Some areas suffered 80-90 percent demolished buildings as well as destruction of bridges, roads, and schools. Adding to the misery, sources of livelihood were lost as...
Read MoreUrbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa
Population estimates for 2016 and projections to 2050 by the Population Division of the United Nations display the phenomenal growth expected to occur on the African continent. Of the 2.3 billion increase in world population by 2050, 55% is expected...
Read MoreConverging Trends in Aging and Employment
The central theme of Fifty Year Perspective is understanding the linkages between trends, decisions, and actions. Even when trends in themselves are positive, together they may paint a future that must be confronted with extreme forethought and preparation. A number...
Read MoreThe Other European Migration Challenge
War in the Middle East has forced millions of people from their homes. Syria in particular has cities large and small devastated and practically abandoned. Refugees’ attempts to flee to Europe have led to division among potential host countries and...
Read MoreSeptember 11, 2001 – 2016
This, the 50th posting to Fifty Year Perspective, coincides with the 15th anniversary of the attack on United States targets in New York and Washington, DC. The nineteen attackers were Islamic terrorists belonging to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. Fifteen...
Read MoreNATO’s Adaptation
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, is a military alliance formed in 1949 when twelve countries (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom, and United States) signed the North Atlantic Treaty. Sixteen additional countries...
Read MoreZero Marginal Cost
Is it possible that the slow growth in GDP since the Great Recession could be attributed to something other than economic stagnation? Jeremy Rifkin thinks so. He wrote a book titled The Zero Marginal Cost Society in which he cites...
Read MoreArtificial Intelligence Summarized
International trade negotiations, mass migrations, and populist politicians feed fear of unemployment among lesser-skilled workers, despite the fact that technology is a greater threat to jobs. Artificial intelligence (AI) has destroyed both blue and white collar jobs, and is developing...
Read MoreSwiss Defeat Basic Income
The movement for a basic income was described in a blogpost on August 2, 2015 (http://fiftyyearperspective.com/a-basic-income-for-all/). The argument for a basic income arises from the prospect that technology will continue to eliminate jobs while replacing only a fraction of...
Read MoreBrexit from the Irish Perspective
Surely the ink that has already been spilled analyzing the aftermath of the June 23rd, 2016 United Kingdom vote on exiting the European Union could fill at least one of the U.S. Great Lakes. I was traveling in Ireland on...
Read MoreThe Promise of 3D Printing
3D printing will cause “the whole business dynamic that makes it a good idea for a lot of U.S. companies to manufacture overseas will go poof…. It is expected to have a mighty impact on jobs, geopolitics and the climate.” “3D...
Read MoreOil Exporters Adjust to Price Decline
Oil’s history in Arab states goes back to 1911 in Iran. Discoveries of commercial quantities occurred much later, in 1932 in Bahrain, 1938 in Saudi Arabia, and then following World War II in Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Until...
Read MoreLiberal Democracy and Illiberal Democracy
“Democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been reelected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms. From Peru to the Palestinian Authority, from Sierra Leone to...
Read MorePreparing for Industries of the Future
Readers of this blog are familiar with issues surrounding technology and the future of employment. Previous blogposts have dealt with loss of jobs to technology, raising standards of living, guaranteeing basic income, and “new economy” jobs. With technology contributing to the...
Read MoreInformation Technology’s Impacts on Politics
The internet has combined with other forms of information technology to alter most aspects of modern life. Smart phones, social media, and cloud computing facilitate communication and generate enormous amounts of data. A recent article in The Economist (http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21695198-ever-easier-communications-and-ever-growing-data-mountains-are-transforming-politics)...
Read MoreTurkey: At the Crossroads of Geography and History
“Few countries occupy a geopolitical space of such sensitivity as Turkey, or have played such a range of critical and overlapping international roles.” Turkey lies at the boundary between Europe and Asia; Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, is in both continents....
Read MoreMoney and Politics in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
The 2016 U.S. presidential election will likely set a new record for campaign expenditures. Fundraisers expect up to $5 billion will be spent, more than double the amount spent in 2012. Other estimates are higher still. The Koch brothers’ network...
Read MoreOne Strategy for Addressing Food Insecurity
The current world population of 7.4 billion is projected by the United Nations to increase over 30% by 2050 to 9.7 billion, and to 11.2 billion by 2100, over 50 % above the current figure. The UN estimates that about...
Read MorePopulist Movements
The characterization of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as “populist” candidates in the U.S. presidential race mirrors the populist movements that have been growing in Europe since the Great Recession. Populist movements arise from both the left and the right, sometimes...
Read MoreReducing Inequality Benefits Everyone
The 2016 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland declared inequality as the most significant trend of 2015, to be addressed by 2,500 of the world’s economic elite. Predictably, the skeptics have spoken, assuring us that this concern for the...
Read MoreThe Peace to End All Peace
What is generally referred to today as World War II was called the Great War in its aftermath. And for good reason. Ten million soldiers died in the war and twenty million were severely wounded. As a proportion of the...
Read MoreThe Changing Role of Corporations
As the Paris climate summit concluded in December 2015, nearly 200 nations came together on an agreement to reduce carbon emissions and arrest global warming. Significantly, public sector partners in the agreement were joined by business corporations in support of...
Read MoreHuman Intervention
In terms of geologic time, we are living in the Holocene Epoch, a name which comes from Greek words meaning “entirely new.” Eras and epochs of geologic time are organized according to changes in composition of earth strata which mark...
Read MoreTourists and Terrorists
Terrorists strike. Tourists change destinations. That was the story that unfolded following the October 31, 2015 downing of a Russian airplane carrying 224 tourists and crew after it left Sharm el-Sheikh Egypt. At the time of the downing, about 80,000 Russian...
Read MoreInternational Arms Trade
International trade, U.S. foreign policy, military power, technology, national security, governance, employment, and lobbying intersect at the nexus which is international arms trade. A 2014 report by the U.S. Department of State valued the arms delivered world-wide in 2011 at $177.8...
Read MoreMamluks in the Arab Spring
A French professor by the name of Jean-Pierre Filiu has written an extremely well-documented history of the rise of dictatorships in Arab countries following their independence from Western colonial powers, covering 1949 up to early 2015. His focus is on...
Read MoreGlobalization’s Defects
On the home page of this blog (http://fiftyyearperspective.com/) there is a description of what is known as the butterfly effect. It portrays how a harmless event in one location can lead to disastrous effects a great distance away. Ian...
Read MoreCompetition for Multinational Corporations
McKinsey & Company, a multinational management consulting firm, issued a report in September titled Playing to Win: The New Global Competition for Corporate Profits. The report reveals fascinating statistics and trends that globalization has brought for the world’s multinational corporations,...
Read MoreNew Economy Jobs
In their 2009 book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee wrote that great job-producing opportunities exist in potential combinations and re-combinations...
Read MoreSingapore at 50 Years
As former colonies achieved independence following World War II, Singapore became part of Malaysia. That was in 1963, but just two years later, Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian federation over ideological differences. With few natural resources and less than...
Read MoreVisualizing Policy Decisions
There are 51 topics on the “Global Issues” matrix in a format that has a box connecting every issue to every other issue. An interesting exercise is taking one of the global issues and placing Xs in each box where...
Read MoreOf Popes and Politics: “Everything Is Connected”
This Fifty Year Perspective blog site identified 51 “global issues” that are profoundly inter-related and challenging to policy-makers, both public and private. Prominent among the issues are climate change and the many topics related to it. Pope Francis made climate...
Read MoreReclaiming U.S. Leadership
A March 2011 cover story for Time magazine by Fareed Zakaria asked the question “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?” In the article, Zakaria asserted, “What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and...
Read MoreA Basic Income for All
Facing the possibility that technology could replace so many jobs that a majority of the work force would remain unemployed, the concept of a basic income has been discussed in various books and periodicals. The basic income is envisioned as...
Read More“Robots Are Us”
If smart machines replace humans, will “putting people out of work, or at least good work, also put the economy out of business?” That is a question posed by a paper published in February 2015 by the National Bureau of...
Read MoreInequality: Getting Better, Getting Worse
Income inequality is on the minds of everyone from Pope Francis and Ban Ki-moon, to Janet Yellen, Economist Thomas Picketty, the World Economic Forum, and alumni of the Harvard Business School, to name just a few. A slow-moving recovery from...
Read MoreSix Months until Paris Climate Conference
With six months to go until the climate change conference in Paris in December, how optimistic are the prospects for scoring real progress toward controlling global warming? (See blog posted October 28, 2014 at http://fiftyyearperspective.com/paris-2015-un-climate-change-conference/.) The expectations are largely...
Read MoreMoney and Influence
In an April issue of Christian Science Monitor, Robert Reich, a former secretary of the Department of Labor, wrote about his experiences when invited to speak to various groups. In one example he was asked to speak to a religious...
Read MoreDisappearing Youth: The World Population in 2050
Could the aging of the world’s population lead to the disappearance of some cultures? One author believes so and he cites the fall of Greek and Roman cultures to support his contention. David P. Goldman analyzed United Nations’ population projections...
Read MoreMoney and Morals
Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel published a book in 2012 titled What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Perhaps counterintuitively, Sandel’s pages describe the expanding range of goods and services that money can buy. And...
Read MoreExamining Inequality
Increasing disparity in household wealth has brought the controversial topic of inequality to the forefront. In its Global Wealth Report 2014 (https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=60931FDE-A2D2-F568-B041B58C5EA591A4), Credit Suisse Research records that the ratio of wealth to income has risen to a...
Read MoreGlobal Conflicts: Connecting the Dots
Consider the countries featured in daily news in 2015: Nigeria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, France, Libya, Afghanistan. Stories of poverty, disease, hunger, despotism, hatred, and injustice abound. Conflicts attributable to these global issues and others persist regardless of international efforts...
Read MoreRedefining State Sovereignty
Globalization is but one facet of how the geopolitical landscape is continuing to change. The Global Issues Matrix page of this Fifty Year Perspective Blog (http://fiftyyearperspective.com/global-issues-matrix/) is a view of the breadth of concerns facing the contemporary...
Read MoreTechnology Is Solving Some Energy Problems in Developing Countries
Sometimes there are benefits to being late to the modern world. Whereas developed countries have had telecommunications lines strung to serve nearly every inhabited location, Africa's land mass was too large and its population too dispersed for that to have...
Read MoreProgress in Use of Renewable Energy Sources
As over 190 countries debate alternatives for reaching the goal of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, success to date is noteworthy in some countries, even as the overall goal is distant. Local geography and climate weigh heavily on...
Read MoreReplacing Jobs Lost in Recession
The United States economy added 321,000 jobs in November 2014, pushing employment over 140 million for the first time. Since U.S. employment sank to its recession low in February 2010, a total of 10,390,000 jobs have been added. While these...
Read MoreClimate Change, Natural Resources, and Geopolitics in the Arctic
In August of 2007, a Russian mini-submarine dived through the ice to the ocean floor beneath the North Pole and planted a Russian flag, in support of its claim that the ocean off its northern coast was part of its...
Read MoreParis 2015 UN Climate Change Conference
For over two decades, United Nations members have held regular meetings to discuss the effects of pollution on the earth’s climate. Starting in Berlin in 1995, an international environmental treaty known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change...
Read MoreLabor Force Participation Trends
Writing in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes referred to “technological unemployment . . . unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses of labour.” Whereas...
Read MoreA Role for Business
Here is an agenda for an organization committed to achieving several sustainability goals.
- Reduce water use to level of 2008 or below
- Use only sustainably-sourced agricultural raw materials
- Improve livelihoods of small-scale producers and retailers
- Expand opportunities for women in management and communities
- Advance human... Read More
Investors Concerned Over Climate Change
Environmental activists and energy industry companies are usually not on the same page when it comes to climate change. Energy industry giants like Royal Dutch Shell or Exxon Mobil owe their allegiance to their shareholders, and that is who they...
Read MoreWhy are they growing tomatoes in Qatar?
Dr. Ali El Kharbotly, a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, is a consultant to the Biotechnology Center in Qatar. In June 2013 he spoke on food security and safety to the Ecosystem for Sustainable Growth Services Workshop in Dublin,...
Read MoreDemography As Destiny
There are few predictions that can be made with as much certainty as this: People born in 1950 will be 65 years old in 2015. Combined with life expectancy trends, the implications are enormous for housing, education, medical care, employment,...
Read MoreTechnology and the Future of Work
While globalization is often blamed for loss of jobs in the developed world, much of the blame must go to technological advances. Reaction against new technologies has occurred for over two hundred years, since the early stages of industrialization. The...
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