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Is life better than ever for the human race?
Pinker shares his counterintuitive take on the state of the world. How does his optimism (as welcome as it might be) stack up against the undeniable sorry state of the world today? From war in Ukraine to a persistent pandemic to a resurgence of extreme global poverty, things feel...bad. And yet, Pinker remains relatively positive.
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State of the World: On the verge of fragmentation?
In Tokyo this morning, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer kicked off this year’s GZERO Summit with his annual “State of the World” keynote speech. As usual, he gave his audience plenty to think about and debate.
He opened with a recap of the past year in international politics, focusing on Russia’s war in Ukraine and its international fallout. The big takeaway: Vladimir Putin has accomplished virtually the opposite of everything he intended. He has boosted Ukraine’s national pride and its determination to cut the ties that have long bound it to Russia. Instead of “demilitarizing” Ukraine, he has brought its soldiers the most modern and powerful weapons they’ve ever had. He united Europeans and Americans in opposition to his invasion. He has strengthened and expanded arch-nemesis NATO and inflicted decades-long damage on Russia’s economic strength, military capabilities, and political cohesion.
But it’s Bremmer’s vision of the future that will generate the most discussion. With a global system crippled by US domestic political dysfunction, intensifying US-China animosities, and growing tensions between the wealthy and developing worlds as fallout from COVID and the war widens gaps between global haves and have-nots, the global system itself is on the verge of fragmentation. Perhaps most startling of all, Bremmer argues that this might become a good news story.
The “global security order,” he argues, will remain American-led, and will be bolstered by both Russian aggression and rising anxiety in Asia over the expansion of China’s international influence.
The “global economic order,” Bremmer predicts, will depend mainly on China’s trajectory. If China becomes the world’s largest economy over the next 10 years and then extends its economic lead, Chinese investment abroad and international demand for access to the Chinese market, he says, “will ensure a more multilateral trade order, with America’s push for strategic competition tempered by the hedging of European and Asian allies and a Chinese alignment for most of the developing world.” But, if mounting debt, poor demographics, and other factors force China to turn inward, “dominant regional powers will become the most important players on trade.”
The “global climate order” has already become multipolar and multi-stakeholder in ways that should give us more resilient confidence in our future,” Bremmer argues. Europeans have “set the pace on rulemaking and model-setting for how a post-carbon world of governance and society can function,” he notes, but it’s China, India, and the developing world that will play the largest role in determining the level of carbon emissions in coming decades.
Finally, there is the “global digital order.” The world’s largest and most dynamic technology companies are nearly all headquartered in America and China, but it’s the tech companies themselves that wield “sovereignty and rule-making power in the virtual world … for commerce, for security, and even for civil society.” Perhaps these companies will align with their governments, setting conditions for a lasting tech Cold War. But, he says, “if the digital space itself becomes the most important arena of great power competition, and the power of governments erodes relative to the power of tech companies,” then these technology giants will become “the central players in 21st-century geopolitics.”
The United States, China, Europe, India, or the tech giants? Who do you believe will become tomorrow’s great powerbroker? Or are you placing your bets on chaos?
Tell us what you think.This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
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Coming soon: Ian Bremmer gives his 2022 update on the State of the World
Watch live: Ian Bremmer shares his unique perspective on the latest geopolitical events around the globe that are reshaping elections, policy priorities, and economic trends.
Ian's State of the World speech examines:
- Are the US and China engaged in a cold war?
- How powerful have tech companies become on the global stage?
- Is there hope for the world to unite to fight climate change and other shared challenges?
Watch live here on Tuesday, September 27 at 9:00 pm ET.
Who's winning the global battle for tech primacy?
How is China able to control their tech giants without suppressing innovation?
For Ian Bremmer, one important reason is that there's a big difference between Jack Ma questioning Chinese regulators and Elon Musk doing the same to the SEC.
"In the United States you've got fanboys if you do that; in China, they cut you down," Bremmer told CNN anchor Julia Chatterley in an interview following his annual State of the World Speech.
Still, he says China knows it cannot kill its private sector because it needs to keep growing and competing with American tech firms.
So, who's winning the global battle for tech primacy?
Right now, Bremmer believes the US and China are at tech parity — thanks to their tech giants.
"When we're talking about tech supremacy, we can't just talk about governments anymore."
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The next great game: Politicians vs tech companies
Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, our parent company, has opened this year’s GZERO Summit with a provocative speech on the near future of international politics. Here are the highlights.
Are the United States and China now locked in a new form of Cold War? Their governments behave as if they are.
But Bremmer isn’t buying it. He’s not predicting that Washington and Beijing will become more cooperative with one another, but that both will be too preoccupied with historic challenges at home in coming years to wage a full-time international struggle.
In Washington, the main worry will be for America’s broken political system. US politics is becoming even more tribalized as TV and online media target politically like-minded consumers with hyperpartisan news coverage. Widening wealth inequality fuels the fire by separating white and non-white, urban and rural, and the more educated from the less educated. Deepening public mistrust of political institutions will fuel future fights over the legitimacy of US elections.
Beijing’s burden centers on how to extend decades of economic gains while moving away from a growth model that no longer works, as higher wages in China and more automation in factories elsewhere cut deeply into China’s manufacturing advantages. China is still a middle-income country. To reach the prosperity level of wealthy nations, it needs 6-7 percent growth for another 20 years.
But China must spend less in coming years to keep giant, deeply indebted companies afloat and more to care for the largest population of elderly people in history. And its leaders must accomplish this at a time when China’s people expect ever-rising levels of prosperity from their government.
The domestic distraction of US and Chinese leaders will create new opportunities for European, Japanese, Canadian, Indian and other political and business leaders to contribute toward international problem-solving. But other governments aren’t the only new players stepping into this power vacuum.
Technology companies are fast becoming important geopolitical actors. We’re entering a world in which economic winners and losers, election outcomes, and national security will depend on choices made by both governments and by the world’s big tech firms.
Bremmer calls this a “techno-polar moment.”
The idea is simple but transformative: Just as governments make the laws that determine what can happen in the physical world, tech companies have final authority in a digital world that’s becoming both more expansive and more immersive.
The biggest tech companies will establish sovereignty by defining the digital space and its boundaries, the algorithms that determine what happens within that space, and the “terms and conditions” that decide who gets to operate in this world.
For skeptics, Bremmer poses this question: Who will do more to influence the outcome of next year’s US midterm congressional elections: The president of the United States or the CEO of Meta? According to Bremmer, since the vote will be influenced by both real-world rules changes and the online flow of information, the answer isn’t obvious.
How will tech companies try to expand their power? Some will behave as “globalists” by trying to reach consumers and influence politics everywhere.
Others will act as “national champions” by aligning with individual governments and their goals.
Still, others will behave as “techno-utopians,” companies that expect historical forces and tech innovations to help them replace governments in important ways.
The relative success of these models over the next decade will decide how government and tech companies share power over the longer-term and whether democracy or autocracy will have the upper hand.
What’s to be done? “Think adaptation, not surrender,” says Bremmer. Steps can be taken to limit the sometimes negative influence of tech companies in the political lives of democracies. But just as climate change can be limited but not avoided, so we must understand and adapt to a world in which governments and tech companies compete for influence over our lives.
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Ian Bremmer on the State of the World: COVID-19, the great accelerator
Watch Ian Bremmer's full speech on "The State of the World." Today, this annual address has kicked off the 2020 GZERO Summit in Japan.
The coronavirus pandemic hasn't invented today's biggest challenges. For better and for worse, it simply accelerated important changes that were already well underway. It has exacerbated inequality of opportunity, both within and among countries. In fact, the most severe COVID-19 impacts in 2021 will be economic, particularly as debts soar in developing countries and international lenders have less to lend. The pandemic has also sped up the erosion of faith in democratic institutions and international cooperation. But the economic damage inflicted by this crisis has accelerated the transition from the 20th century brick-and-mortar model of commerce and growth toward a more dynamic 21st century economy that is powered more by the flow of information and less by fossil fuels. In short, thanks in part to the worst global health emergency in more than a century, the future will arrive sooner than we thought.