The innovation we need most for the 21st century isn’t technology. It’s social organization that can cope with our exploding population. The society that wins won’t focus on control – it’ll focus making every person count.
The unrest now roiling the Arab world has long been warned of, by population experts. But the whole subject of population is virtually radioactive in international circles – any diplomatic discussion of the repercussions of population increase on, say, energy use or climate, often degenerates into charges of genocide. As a result, population growth has just been there, ticking away since the world recovered from World War II. Now, those bombs are starting to go off.
Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, has 80 million people, a fertility rate of 3 children per woman, and has been growing at about 2% per year. For Tunisia, the numbers are 10.5 million, 1.7, and 1%. Unemployment, officially, is 10% in Egypt and 14% in Tunisia, but underemployment is a problem both places.
Both countries have literacy rates in the 70 percentile, markedly higher for men than for women. But the average education in Tunisia includes university study, and both countries have had long-term policies valuing higher education. Egypt used to guarantee a government job to university graduates, but had to give that up as the government ranks bloated.
And therein lies that population problem – lots of educated, ambitious, intelligent young people with no place to go and nothing to do. And these young people know there are alternatives – they’re tech savvy and can reach around the globe. Who is standing in the way of their dreams? The old autocrats, obviously.
Except it’s not that easy. Yes, these societies are in many ways static in their organization, and ill-prepared to manage a fundamental shift in their population’s size and ambitions. But the problems they face of usefully absorbing large numbers of educated new workers are not unique. They are also ours.
Look at the failure of U.S. society to figure out how to usefully employ 9-10% of our populace. In the last recession, it wasn’t just low-skilled workers who were affected. People in skilled, mid-life jobs found themselves on the bricks. Business is making a financial comeback, but the society is not – the disconnect between what’s good for Wall Street and what’s good for America is growing.
We can’t look to history for help. There isn’t much that’s new in the world, but 7 billion people definitely is new. And that’s how many we will have worldwide by 2020, barring some cataclysm. After World War II, we had just 4 billion. By 2000, it was 6 billion, with some 85% of the new population in less-developed countries – places like Egypt, places with the least resources if something goes wrong, places that had long supported their own populations but are now food importers. Places now vulnerable if flooding or drought or tsunamis damage world food supplies. The world population IEDs are buried everywhere.
The innovation we need most – if the U.S. is to survive as a leader in this century, but also if our interdependent world is to survive desperate struggles among populations – is innovation in social organization to cope with sheer numbers of humans and the increased complexity of survival. The raison d’etre for any society is organizing to thrive and ensure the survival of the next generation. Societies that prove unable to do this go extinct.
Using people in ways that make societies prosper – until our societies figure out how to do that better for more people, look for more IEDs ahead.