A Look at the 2030 Prophecies of the N.I.C.

In a world full of unknowns, it’s amazing we can pick out major trends and drivers, and come up with likely scenarios for our future. While reading the Global Trends 2030 report, I was immediately drawn to the “Alternative Worlds” section in which the National Intelligence Council detailed four potential scenarios for the future. As an engineer, my first reaction was to try to make sense of the scenarios by boiling them down to an equation - some f (megatrends, game-changers) = alternative world scenario. While that was mostly a futile exercise, it did push me to consider each scenario and which one seemed most likely, given my perspective and knowledge of the world. While I don’t completely agree with any one scenario, the “Gini Out-of-the-Bottle” and “Nonstate World” each have components that I would consider in my own 2030 vision.

In “Gini Out-of-the-Bottle,” some of the key drivers are the domination of inequalities, U.S. energy independence, and the U.S. reducing its “global policeman” tendencies. Economic inequality still runs rampant in our society, with little push from either end to fix it. These circles of “the rich get richer” and “the poor stay poor” are deeply entrenched in many cultures and economic policies, and will take longer than 2030 to fix, or even improve. As for U.S. energy independence, we are nearly there today. I worked in the Oil and Gas industry for three years, and the advancement of technology has pushed the U.S. to the forefront of exploration and production techniques. This independence will likely shift the U.S. foreign policies away from oil-bearing nations (i.e. the Middle East), and will retrain focus on domestic issues. This will overall reduce the need for the U.S. to play the “global policeman.”

In “Nonstate World,” the primary driver is the increasing power of nonstate actors. Even today, the income elite of the world and private companies have a great deal of influence over governmental entities and policies, although no official role. In the future, it is likely these individuals and companies could form the “hybrid coalitions” discussed in the report, and gain a more official role in government undertakings. While this could potentially facilitate greater international cooperation, there is the potential for it to drown out the voice of the middle and lower class, and further perpetuate the inequalities mentioned in “Gini Out-of-the-Bottle.”

Thinking about your own vision of the world, which of the four “Alternative Worlds” do you think we will end up with in 2030?