Exploring and Shaping International Futures

Barry B. Hughes, Evan E. Hillebrand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259855
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

"People who run cities like to play Simcity to find out how impossible their jobs are. Hughes gives everyone a chance to play a kind of Simplanet, with outcomes far more complex and uncertain. In the process, the book and the computer program provide a coherent path to understanding an anarchic world." --Ronald A. Francisco, University of Kansas "What will be the future of human demographic, economic, environmental, and political-social systems throughout the 21st century? Where do current changes appear to be taking us? What kind of future would we prefer? How much leverage do we have to bring about the future we prefer? Do YOU share these interests of the book? If yes, you should study the book and learn how to cope with the future with the International Futures approach (IFs) developed by the authors. This large-scale integrated global simulation modeling system is a user-friendly, professional tool for long-term policy analysis and an educational tool in universities. I had a pleasure to learn it personally by cooperating with Barry Hughes." --Pentti Malaska, Professor of MS, DrTech, futurist Honorary member of the Club of Rome What will be the long-term impact of AIDS in Africa or concentration of global oil production in the Middle East? Exploring and Shaping International Futures helps readers understand such global trends in demographic, economic, energy, food, environmental, and socio-political systems. It allows businesspeople, government officials, and others to think concretely about global futures in each of these areas. It is the only book on the market that allows readers to use a computer simulation to track global trends and to develop alternative scenarios around those trends. It is one of relatively few books that really brings computer technology into the classroom, boardroom, or policy planning commission. The International Futures (IFs) computer simulation, around which the book is built, is now widely used in policy analysis as well as education. It has been instrumental in projects undertaken by such groups as the European Commission, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and the United Nations. After three decades of development and refinement, the computer model is now easy to access and use. Readers can access the website with the IFs computer model at www.ifs.du.edu

Chapter One

Action in the Face of Uncertainty

 

 

In a remarkable period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans explored, and from their own point of view discovered, the rest of the world. They acted in the face of great uncertainty. Continuing to push outward, in 1522 one ship of five launched in Magellan’s expedition returned to Spain from the east with only eighteen men, completing the first voyage around the world. Magellan himself died in the Philippines attempting forcibly to convert locals to his religion. The actions of the explorers dramatically reshaped the human world.

The explorers attempted to reduce uncertainty by enhancing their maps of the world. Mapmakers of the period advanced global mapping from more or less the level of the ancient Romans to something much closer to contemporary standards (Shirley, 1984). Perhaps the greatest of all mapmakers, Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594), developed a navigation-enhancing projection of three dimensions onto two and also produced the first global atlas. His maps reshaped human understanding and facilitated successful exploration.

Our own era is again one of exploring and reshaping the world, of acting in the face of uncertainty, and of trying to develop the best maps possible to guide us. Today the economic product of the average human has attained levels surpassing any in history; yet billions of people suffer abject poverty, and income global disparities and malnutrition levels challenge the consciences of nearly all who live in relative comfort. We devote about 2.5 percent of total global economic output to the pursuit of military security; but we simultaneously have created an insecure world with thousands of nuclear weapons and untold numbers of potential suicide bombers.¹ The technological sophistication of our scientists and engineers has created new marvels in electronics, biology, and other fields; nonetheless, large portions of our shared environment have greatly deteriorated. Many dimensions of uncertainty frame our future.

Some of the choices that we contemporary humans make collectively on human development, economic, environmental, and security issues will likely have consequences as important as the decisions made by Magellan. We will never fully anticipate their consequences for ourselves or others, because, like Mercator, we are only mapping the world as we and others discover it.

What will be the future of human demographic, economic, environmental, and political-social systems throughout the twenty-first century? That is the central question of this volume. The easy and correct answer is that no one knows. If we were so fatalistic as to believe that we had no control over the future, we might simply accept that response and return our attention to daily life. Most of us believe, however, that our knowledge and our actions substantially shape our own future and the futures of our descendents. We fear that misguided action, whether it be environmental despoliation or nuclear war, could lead to catastrophe. We hope that thoughtful behavior can instead assure a peaceful and prosperous world. We therefore confront a very real challenge: We cannot know the future, but it is essential to act in the face of that uncertainty.

To reduce the challenge to manageable proportions, we can decompose our general question about the future into three more specific ones. First, where do current changes appear to be taking us? Second, what kind of future would we prefer? Third, how much leverage do we have to bring about the future we prefer? Each of these questions is more manageable than our central question (although hardly simple), and collectively they help us grapple with the necessity of choice in the face of incomplete knowledge. The task of this book is to assist in investigating these three questions and thereby in addressing the challenge. In the process we will organize and expand our own mental maps as guides to action.

The Three Questions Elaborated

Where do current changes appear to be taking us? One of the most common techniques for studying change is extrapolation. Extrapolation is trend projection. If global population is growing at 1.2 percent this year, a simple extrapolation of the future assumes that it will grow at 1.2 percent each year in the future. A more sophisticated extrapolation might recognize that annual population growth rate has declined from 2.0 percent each year in the late 1960s to about 1.2 percent now. Therefore, the rate of growth may decline further in the next few decades. Extrapolation is not the only technique for exploring where change is taking us, but it is a good starting point.

What kind of future would we like to see? There is a saying that “the only thing worse than not getting your heart’s desire is getting it.” We probably have all had the experience of wanting something and then finding that obtaining it did not make us happy. Often the problem is a failure to clarify our own values.

Let us consider three sets of values, corresponding to three complexes of issues on which this volume focuses: the development of individual potential for all humans, the achievement of security and fairness in human relationships, and the protection of the biological and physical environment. Almost all of us would agree that widespread and even universal human development, security and fairness in society, and environmental sustainability are desirable. We might, of course, place quite different emphases on these general values and goals, depending in part on our own positions within global society and the degree to which our own needs and wants are already satisfied. Yet it is critical to understand our values and the goals to which they give rise.

How much leverage do we have? Analysis of human leverage is complicated for two reasons. One is that our values do vary somewhat, and we therefore may choose to differentially focus our attention with respect to leverage. The other is that our understandings of the workings of the world tend to vary quite substantially and to be underdeveloped, so that we frequently identify different courses of action to accomplish even nearly identical goals. Our own explorations need to continuously shape and reshape our maps of the dynamics of human and other systems.

Expanding our mental models and exploring our potential leverage for action requires that we go beyond extrapolation to causal analysis. Extrapolation might allow its user to make a fortune on the stock market (“technical” analysts or “chartists” rely on it heavily) and might also provide some very good guesses about global futures. It has, however, significant limitations. There is an old story about a person falling from the top of the Empire State Building. As she passes the fifty-first floor, a friend at a window asks how it is going. The response is “so far, so good.” The reason that most of us see a little black humor in this is that we automatically supplement extrapolative reasoning with causal analysis, a consideration of cause-and-effect relations.

In theory, causal analysis is superior to extrapolation. In the stock market, for instance, “fundamentalists” direct their attention to the presence or absence of underlying strengths of companies that might eventually cause their earnings and stock prices to rise. Weather forecasting provides another example of how causal analysis differs from and might improve upon extrapolation. If it has been raining for three days, simple extrapolative analysis tells us to predict rain tomorrow. That might be a reasonably good forecast. In contrast, however, a meteorologist who knows that the low-pressure area over us now will likely give way to high pressure by midnight and that high-pressure areas generally provide (cause) clear skies, will predict sunshine. Similarly, extrapolative analysis might lead us to predict that the world will use ever-larger amounts of oil in supplying its energy needs. Causal analysis might consider estimates of the amount of oil in the earth’s crust and predict that the oil use will peak and then decline.

In practice, however, causal analysis is difficult and might not always be superior to extrapolation. The central problem is one of specification of the appropriate causal relationship(s). Students of international politics face this problem with respect to forecasting war. Extrapolations of the amount or intensity of warfare, even by those who attempt to look at cycles of war, provide a weak basis for forecasting, because past patterns of warfare exhibit substantial irregularity. Instead, most scholars search for the causes of war: changing power differentials among countries, incompatible interests, ethnic rivalries, economic difficulties, the nature of government decision-making mechanisms, miscalculations by leaders, human aggressiveness, and so on. The problem with causal analysis of war is, however, that a very large number of causes interact with one another in extremely complex ways.

In much causal analysis, the specification of the causal variables becomes rather complex. It can become difficult for analysts to calculate all of the relationships and to produce a forecast. An analyst therefore sometimes turns to a computer simulation of the relationships that allows making experimental changes in the independent variables, or causes, and recalculating quickly the implications for an interesting dependent variable, or effect. For instance, with the appropriate computer model our student of energy futures could change the value of unknown oil resources and compute possible changes in the transition to renewable energy futures. This book will analyze global change, using both extrapolation and causal analysis, two key foundations of mental maps.

How Should Our Study Proceed?

To repeat, our central challenge is that we cannot know the future, but we must act as if we did. A good place to begin our assault on that challenge is with an attempt to extrapolate trends and to investigate with fairly simple tools where the future may be taking us. Chapter 2 provides information concerning major global trends. In addition, it will provide a more extensive discussion of different extrapolative techniques. In short, the primary purpose of Chapter 2 is to make a preliminary effort at answering the first of our questions of decomposition, where does global change appear to be taking us?

Chapter 3 will turn our attention beyond the first question of the volume and begin introducing the next two: What future do we want? and What leverage do we have? The chapter will survey the extensive discussion that has begun to defne global goals. It will also provide a basic understanding of causal thinking to explore action with respect to them. Chapter 4 will build on that discussion and introduce the International Futures (IFs) model as a tool for more extensive investigation of trends and causal dynamics.

Chapters 5 through 11 will shift our attention to specific global issue areas and systems: demographics, economics, food and agriculture, energy, the environment, and sociopolitical systems. Each chapter will direct part of our attention to contemporary issues and trends. But they will heavily emphasize causal analysis and enhance our ability to address the questions of causal dynamics and potential human leverage.

As the causal discussion of global change deepens and broadens, the question of human leverage becomes quite complex. The issue of secondary and tertiary consequences of actions will become critical. There are, for instance, considerable disputes over the implications of giving food and other aid to less developed countries. Often those disputes do not center on the primary impact of aid on recipients, but instead on the secondary implications of the aid for changes in the economic and political systems of the recipients and the tertiary or third-order implications of those changes in turn upon the long-term well-being of the recipients.

Such secondary and tertiary consequences make it very difficult to study issues in isolation. Everything becomes connected to everything else, and tracing through consequences of action becomes messy for any analyst. One approach to overcoming that difficulty is to use computers. If we can represent these complex interactions in a computer simulation or model, we can then let the computer trace through the implications of our actions.

The International Futures (IFs) model will allow you to engage in your own experimentation with human intervention and to undertake your own assessment of the extent of human leverage (and of secondary and tertiary consequences). It is meant to be a modern atlas of mental maps and a tool for helping its users expand and refine their own maps. The IFs model is important to your use of this book. Please go to www.ifs.du.edu to find it online and downloadable versions of it.

As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr put it, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” (Watkins, 1990: 152). Although IFs will assist you in better addressing our three questions, it is no crystal ball. Even with the best of computer simulations, the future remains essentially unpredictable. Some bold predictions will inevitably be correct, whether based on astrology or on computer simulation. A few forecasts based on computer simulation might even be correct for the right reasons—they will reflect an accurate causal understanding or map of the way the world works. There is no alternative to choice and action, even if the choice is passive inaction. Let’s improve our maps and explore and shape the future as best we can.

Note

1. The good news is that as recently as 1990 we spent 4 percent of the global GDP on defense and had twice the global megatonage.

Chapter Two

Global Change

Where does change appear to be taking us? Chapter 1 proposed that we address that question before asking what futures we prefer and what leverage we have in shaping our future.

At what specific trends should we look? Figure 2.1 shows some of the key subsystems of human activity. Those subsystems not only help organize the discussion of trends in this chapter, but also help organize this volume and are the key building blocks of the International Futures (IFs) modeling system.

We begin with population and demographics, because it is fundamental to know how many of us there are and how fast our numbers are growing. Just as the demographic system aggregates us as individuals, our economic system aggregates us as producers and consumers, so we turn to that system next and ask how it might be changing. After considering the summary views that demographic and economic systems provide for us, we move next to more specialized systems. They might provide important clues as to whether trends in the aggregate population and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Action in the Face of Uncertainty
• Chapter 2 Global Change
• Chapter 3 Values and Understandings
• Chapter 4 Understanding and Using IFs
• Chapter 5 Population
• Chapter 6 Economics
• Chapter 7 Food and Agriculture
• Chapter 8 Energy
• Chapter 9 The Environment
• Chapter 10 Domestic Social and Political Systems
• Chapter 11 The Global Sociopolitical System
• Chapter 12 Preferred Futures
• Appendix 1: The Philosophical Approach to Modeling
• Appendix 2: History and Future of IFs
• Glossary
• References
• Index