Gerry Hassan: World of 2050 won't be a better version of today

According to reports, the future is bright, but a look at the challenges we are set to face paints a very different picture, writes Gerry Hassan

The future is going to work out fine. Beyond the crash, uncertainties and "unknown unknowns". We have it from no less an authority than HSBC and their The World in 2050 report. It is going to be all right for the world, for the West and Britain, which is, despite all the problems and competition, still going to be a top nation in 2050.

Forty years on, world economic output will have tripled, food and water scarcity will be avoided and Malthusian predictions proved wrong again. China will be number one in economic power worth $24.6 trillion followed by the US in second place with $22.3tr, and India a distant third with $8.2tr. Next come Japan and Germany and following in sixth position the United Kingdom down a mere one place compared to 2010.

Britain will be aided by its relatively high birth rate (1.9 children per woman) compared to Germany (1.3) and Italy (1.4). Japan, whose population has been falling since 2005, is predicted to see its inhabitants fall by 37 per cent.

The Anglo-Saxon model in this seems remarkably resilient. HSBC concede that the future they paint is a "rather rosy scenario", and it is one not that different from a host of other surveys from the likes of Standard Chartered and PwC. We should note some of the concerns flagged up in HSBC's bright future. They acknowledge the pressures on food production, the rise from one-third to two-thirds of people living in areas experiencing severe water stress by 2025, and the energy crunch and "eco-deficit", meaning the world's depletion of non-renewable assets.

Then there is the limits of such global rankings and league tables measuring across nations, systems and cultures. And there is the problem that tiny changes in data can alter a nation's ranking. The issue of phoney precision sees such reports over-sold by their authors, over-interpreted by readers and used by companies and institutions to make huge investment and strategy decisions, all based on ratings.

The problem though with The World in 2050 isn't anything as obvious as that. It is much more integral to the whole exercise, the underlying philosophy behind the whole exercise. This can be seen as a progressive panglossian view of the world, of enlightenment globalisation, whereby the world becomes freer, wealthier and healthier. The world's many poor are slowly pulled out of hardship. Globalisation poses itself as a liberation movement spreading freedom, hope and opportunity.

This version of the future is of course a story of today and our recent backstory, of the last few decades since the end of the Cold War. It is a story that our future can only be another version of the present.

This is the world of linear optimism, that human history and development has evolved to a future based on more jobs, growth and the stuff which fills our lives now; a future which is nothing more edifying than a bigger, better version of today. It argues that the future is now closed, decided and not open for discussion, having been determined by the powers that be.

Elites of course have always had a big say shaping and controlling the future. It wasn't an accident that the concept of futurology came from the US military industrial complex at the start of the Cold War.

One of the fascinating things about The World in 2050 is that all of our UK mainstream political parties, along with the SNP, subscribe to this vision of the world, which can be summarised as progressive globalisation. The differences between the Cameroon Conservatives and the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, or currently of Ed Miliband, is a minuscule one. This is a treadmill world of conspicuous consumption, of trumpeting the myth of the power of the individual and choice while power and authority increasingly concentrates and creates new citadels of privilege whether state or private, and, in the UK's case, shopping and banking until we drop for the cause of UK plc.

What is the difference between the main political parties? That Labour want to emphasise social justice and the power of the state for good, while the Conservatives stress individual choice and enterprise. And the SNP wants a Scottish version of this which combines the best of all worlds and avoids making difficult choices. There is a sheer lack of imagination and boldness in all of this, but, at its heart, The World in 2050 is a false prospectus, the global story told by the powerful ignoring a host of factors. The inequality, anger and instability across large parts of the world; the risks inherent in much of modern life; the increasing shallowness of democracies in the West and elsewhere; and the rise of radical and fundamentalist groups from far right xenophobes fearful of immigration to the threat of terrorism.

Then there is the economic model. The disorganised capitalism of the past few decades is seen as marching on, oblivious to the imbalances and tensions it creates in the world, not just immediately in Portugal and Spain - the latter with huge consequences for the UK and eurozone - but what happens if the Chinese growth bubble bursts.

A world ago a previous group of experts produced The World in 2000 in 1967, and while the American-based boffins got lots right, including the rise of China and India, they missed the poison of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the continued influence of faith, the changing status of women, or the rise of the environment. And thus it will always be.

The World in 2050 will not be a simple projection of today. Even the Chinese and Indian stories will turn out to be very different from how we currently imagine them. And new factors will emerge, from nanotechnology to the role of artificial intelligence to environmental pressures.

Maybe Britain could even venture into a future which isn't just about consumption, shopping and banking, but that is probably hoping for too much if our political elites have anything to do with it!