After years of exponential growth, globalization has left big cracks in the form of inequality and a less secure society. The shock of these changes is perceived in the tension and mistrust with which they look to the future.
In Blade Runner, the Los Angeles police officer Rick Deckard goes on the hunt for “replicants” in a rainy and dark city due to pollution. Replicants are androids that are difficult to differentiate from humans, which they surpass in capabilities. They are dangerous because they have feelings and rebel. They work in distant places in the galaxy and are manufactured by a large corporation that rules the world. Ridley Scott released the film in 1982 and set that dark future in 2019. It was the dystopia that left the biggest mark on my generation.
A dystopia is an imaginary place in the future, where people live unhappy and scared, subject to tyrannical governments. It is a type of fiction that has been part of popular culture since the end of the 19th century. Technologies that fill us with anxiety appear in Blade Runner, such as artificial intelligence or bioengineering. But when it premiered, those disciplines seemed like distant fantasies. The 80s, despite the fear of nuclear conflict, were optimistic years. Today they are not so much.
A recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) classifies Europeans into five tribes according to their fears. There are those who lived through the financial crisis of 2008, distressed because they think their children will live worse. There are all the people worried about migrations. They are the most pessimistic and the ones who feel the most offended. They are the youngest, who have not yet recovered from the trauma of the climate crisis. His evil is the one that has the worst remedy. There are also those who were marked by covid, which made them feel vulnerable. And there is still room for those traumatized by the war in Ukraine and all that it means.
Behind these fears is inequality, a kind of aluminum that corrodes the system and causes all kinds of diseases to surface in the social building. The historian with a darker view of inequality is Walter Scheidel. For him, inequality tends to grow uncontrollably and only cataclysms know how to curb it.
In the book “The Great Leveler” (2017), Scheidel cites war, revolution, state collapse and natural disasters as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse through which humanity is periodically forced to pass in order to restore order. balance Two examples: the Black Death, which brutally ended a ruined Middle Ages. Or the Great War of 1914, which resoundingly broke the unsustainable inequality of society prior to the conflict.
Despite the reputation of having been vibrant years, the decade of the 20s of the 20th century was pessimistic. Humanity was emerging from a flu pandemic and had experienced a First World War that had been a carnage. But despite the bad omens, the collapse did not come. Nor did it do it in the 60s and 70s, when there was talk of a population bomb, or in the 80s, with nuclear proliferation at the end of the Cold War.
The combination of exceptional events in the first years of this decade (pandemic, war in Ukraine, climate crisis) has revived the feeling of living in dark times, in which it is difficult to know where we are heading.
In 2022, the buzzword at the Davos summit was polycrisis, a place where political, climate and geopolitical crises converge. This 2024, the risk report published by the Forum was full of threats. To those already mentioned was added the fear of a financial crisis due to excessive debt, the danger of democratic recession due to the growing hostility towards liberal democracy and the geopolitical vertigo due to the consolidation of a block of authoritarian countries.
Economists rarely talk about dystopias. But the economy serves to explain how we got here. This is what Josep Oliver, weekly contributor to La Vanguardia, does in the book “A dystopian world”. Specializing in the labor market and migration, Oliver is also well versed in the global economy, on which he always has his radar on.
The economist notes the current social tension and finds its origin in neoliberal globalization, which has been able to create a lot of wealth, but also strong inequality. Oliver focuses on the losers, on those harmed by the loss of industrial employment, the deterioration of working conditions, the compression of wages and the effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is fixed in those who have found that meritocracy has a limit and that the relationship between educational level and social advancement no longer works automatically.
The perception of grievance among these groups is greater if it is considered that the past has been relatively kind, especially between 1950 and 1975, a period of redistributive policies and State intervention. Today that social contract is broken and, if Oliver makes one thing clear, it is that there is no turning back. The economy today faces difficult dilemmas to resolve: between aging and migration, between growth and climate transition. Europe, which at the end of the 20th century seemed like a point of reference for the future, is not today the actor best prepared to navigate a fragmented globalization in which authoritarian governments are gaining ground.
The writer H. G. Wells, science fiction writer and novelist, was a hopeless pessimist who imagined nightmarish futures. He asked that his epitaph include the phrase “I told you so, damned idiots”. He died in despair in 1946, months after the US dropped the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities. However, the world that came after brought growth and prosperity.
Does Oliver leave a loophole for optimism? The truth is no. What remains ahead, he explains, is a narrow gorge to cross, in which we should be able to recover the growth prior to the years of globalization. “There is no real path to well-being. And today less than yesterday”, he says. The previous mission, however, will be to convince the ruling classes of the current malaise, which tend to deny a reality that unsettles them. The first task, therefore, will be to achieve a shared diagnosis of where we are.
