Guillen, Mauro F. ; Guillén, Mauro F. 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything . Flint: About the Author Mauro F. Guillén is Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow, Queens’ College, Cambridge. An expert on global market and social trends, he is a part Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer Award. His previous books include The Architecture of Collapse, Global Turning Points and Emerging Markets Rule. Some Facts and Figures Birthplace of the next industrial revolution: sub-Saharan Africa The reason: 500 million acres of fertile yet undeveloped agricultural land The size of Mexico: 500 million acres Percentage of the world’s wealth owned by women in 2000: 15 Percentage of the world’s wealth owned by women in 2030: 55 If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters: global financial crisis averted Worldwide, the number of people who went hungry in 2017: 821 million Worldwide, the number of people who will go hungry in 2030: 200 million Worldwide, the number of people who were obese in 2017: 650 million Worldwide, the number of people who will be obese in 2030: 1.1 billion Percentage of Americans projected to be obese in 2030: 50 Percentage of the world’s land occupied by cities in 2030: 1.1 Percentage of the world’s population living in cities in 2030: 60 Percentage of worldwide carbon emissions produced by cities in 2030: 87 Percentage of world’s urban population exposed to rising sea levels in 2030: 80 The largest middle-class consumer market today: United States and Western Europe The largest middle-class consumer market in 2030: China By 2030, the number of people entering the middle class in emerging markets: 1 billion The number of people currently in the middle class in the United States: 223 million. The number of people in the middle class in the United States in 2030: 209 million. The Indians demonstrated that they too have the “right stuff,” as Tom Wolfe once put it. They showed they are a world-class technological powerhouse and can get things done efficiently and on time. The Mars mission wasn’t a fluke. In fact, it was the second time that India had surged ahead of the world’s established superpowers. Back in 2009, its maiden mission to the Moon produced the first evidence of the existence of water, “apparently concentrated at the poles and possibly formed by the solar wind,” as The Guardian reported. It took NASA ten years to independently confirm India’s finding.
Once upon a time, not only was the world neatly divided into prosperous and backward economies, but babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees, and people yearned to own homes and cars. Companies didn’t need to see any farther than Europe and the United States to do well. Printed money was legal tender for all debts, public and private. In school they told us how we were supposed to “play the game,” and we grew up thinking that the rules would remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children leave the house, and went into retirement. That familiar world is rapidly vanishing as we encounter a bewildering new reality driven by a new set of rules. Before we know it there will be more grandparents than grandchildren in most countries; collectively, middle-class markets in Asia will be larger than those in the United States and Europe combined; women will own more wealth than men; and we will find ourselves in the midst of more industrial robots than manufacturing workers, more computers than human brains, more sensors than human eyes, and more currencies than countries. Nobody knows for sure what the future will bring. If you do, please let me know—together we can make truckloads of money. But while predictions are never fully accurate, we can certainly make a series of relatively safe assumptions about what might happen in the decade to come. For example, the majority of people impacted by the forecasts in this book have already been born. We can perhaps describe in general terms what we can expect of them as consumers, given their likely educational attainment or current patterns of social media activity. We can also calculate with reasonable accuracy how many people will live to be eighty or ninety years old. And we may even be in a position to predict with some acceptable degree of confidence that a certain percentage of seniors will need a care provider—whether it’s another human or a robot. When it comes to the latter, imagine that these robots speak different languages with a variety of accents, aren’t opinionated, don’t take days off, and don’t abuse their patients financially or otherwise. You’ll see that around 2030 Asian markets, even excluding Japan, will be so large that the center of gravity of global consumption will shift eastward. Companies will have no choice but to follow market trends in that part of the world, with most new products and services reflecting the preferences of Asian consumers. Pause for a moment and think about that. Then consider what it means as we add a few more intertwined trends. Fewer babies in most parts of the world means that we are steadily marching toward a rapidly aging population. Much of that demographic shift is driven by women, who more and more are remaining in school and pursuing careers (not merely jobs) outside of the home—and bearing fewer children. Before you realize it, there will be more female millionaires than male millionaires. Wealth is also becoming more urban: the population of cities is growing at a rate of 1.5 million per week. While cities occupy just 1 percent of the world’s land area, they are home to 55 percent of the population and account for 80 percent of energy consumption (and carbon emissions). That’s why cities are on the front lines of efforts to combat climate change. Within a decade, the largest generation will be the population above age sixty, which today owns 80 percent of the wealth in the United States and is giving rise to the “gray market”—the largest consumer bloc of all. Companies large and small should redirect some of their attention to senior citizens if they wish to remain relevant as time goes on.
Population aging is becoming the norm in America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, the younger generations are driving the ascendancy of the middle class in most emerging markets. They are a very different type of consumer from the one the world has seen so far; more aspirational in their habits, for example. As the middle classes expand, more and more women will accumulate wealth like never before, with both genders adopting urban lifestyles and driving the largest influx of migration we’ve ever witnessed to cities around the world. And cities create a critical mass of inventors and entrepreneurs intent on disrupting the status quo with innovation and technology. For their part, technologies alter old habits and lifestyles, bringing forth new ways to think about and engage with everything from homes and offices to cars and personal items. This, in turn, will lead to alternative conceptions of money that are more distributed, more decentralized, and easier to use. Some of these trends are already under way, but they will not reach critical mass until around 2030. Let me offer you an example. In addition to the electric lightbulb, the telephone, and the car, one of the great inventions of the late nineteenth century was the concept of retirement: a period dedicated to our hobbies and our families, and our chance to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished. We inherited from that century a concept of life as a progression of distinct stages—childhood, work, and retirement—that we, hopefully, enjoy along the way. With the decline in the number of babies and the new dynamics between generations, our future society may well have to rethink quite a few assumptions of how we have traditionally lived. Senior citizens are also consumers, with distinctive lifestyles, and they can be technological early adopters as much as millennials, if not more so. Think about virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or robotics and how these technologies will revolutionize the tail end of our lives. We may have to dispel the old order. Unlike in the past, we may re-enroll in school and develop new skills many times over before we’re done. Consider this headline that ran in the New York Times in 2019: “Running Out of Children, a South Korean School Enrolls Illiterate Grandmothers.” I urge that we avoid linear thinking, sometimes called “vertical” thinking. Indeed, lateral thinking can be further augmented through “peripheral vision,” a concept developed by my Wharton colleagues George Day and Paul Schoemaker. Very much as with human vision, companies and other types of organizations cannot be effective if they do not sense, interpret, and act on the weak signals coming from the periphery of their immediate area of focus. For example, Kodak, founded in 1888, made massive profits selling photographic film and other related products throughout the twentieth century. In the early 1990s, its engineers became aware of the possibilities of digital photography, but top management was more focused on the short term, believing that people would continue to prefer printed pictures. The result? In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. They were a victim of a phenomenon well expressed by Judge Taylor in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for”—they’re blind to the unexpected, the unusual, the periphery.
Here’s an example of lateral thinking in action. Airbnb competes for business with hotels, but it also seeks to steal customers away from banks. How? Many senior citizens realize at some point that their savings will not suffice to carry them through retirement. But they do possess a very valuable asset: their home. There are two conventional ways to monetize your house without selling it. The old-fashioned approach is to obtain a home equity loan from a bank, but that carries the stigma of debt and the stress of monthly payments. Another possibility is to obtain a reverse mortgage (relinquish equity), but then the children won’t inherit the family home. Enter Airbnb. Empty-nesters can rent the extra rooms they don’t use to travelers who will be in the area for a short while, an arrangement that gives both parties more flexibility. Or, if the empty-nesters travel or visit their children a lot and frequently aren’t home, they can choose to rent the whole house for short-term stays. Either way, they’re getting money and keeping their home. Airbnb wouldn’t be so successful if it weren’t for a number of converging trends: declining fertility, longer life expectancy, doubts about the future viability of public pensions, expanded use of smartphones and apps, and a growing interest in sharing rather than owning. I will guide you through these interrelated developments, showing how they unfold, and how they will all reach critical mass by 2030. This new world presents opportunities and threats; individuals, companies, and organizations will each have their own strengths and weaknesses in confronting them. Yet, as I show in the conclusion, all of us will need to approach this new world differently than we have approached things in the past. The closing pages offer principles and approaches we can use to make sense of this new reality—and prosper from the opportunities it creates. Remember, it’s all unfolding in our lifetime, and it’s right around the corner. Follow the Babies POPULATION DROUGHT, THE AFRICAN BABY BOOM, AND THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION A baby comes to the world not only with a mouth and a stomach, but also with a pair of hands. —EDWIN CANNAN, BRITISH ECONOMIST AND DEMOGRAPHER The pace of population growth seems terrifying. In 1820 there were a billion people on Earth. A century later, there were more than 2 billion. After a brief hiatus resulting from the Great Depression and World War II, the rate of growth gathered breathtaking speed: 3 billion by 1960, 4 billion by 1975, 5 billion by 1987, 6 billion by 2000, and 7 billion by 2010. “Population control or race to oblivion?” was a tagline on the cover of Stanford University professors Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s highly influential book The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Since then, governments around the world and large segments of the public have been seriously alarmed by what they think is inevitable: we’ll overrun the planet and destroy ourselves (and millions of plant and animal species) in the process. The reality is that by 2030 we will be facing a baby drought. Over the next few decades, the world’s population will grow less than half as swiftly as it did between 1960 and 1990. In some countries, the population will actually decrease in size (absent very high rates of immigration). For instance, since the early 1970s, American women have on average had fewer than two babies each over their reproductive lifetime—a rate insufficient to ensure generational replacement. The same is also true in many other places around the world. People in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, Sweden, China, and Japan are starting to wonder who will take care of the elderly and pay their pensions.
As birth rates decline in East Asia, Europe, and the Americas, combined with a much slower decline in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the global balance of economic and geopolitical power shifts. Consider: For every baby born nowadays in developed countries, more than nine are being born in the emerging markets and the developing world. Told another way, for every baby born in the United States, 4.4 are being born in China, 6.5 in India, and 10.2 in Africa. Moreover, improvements in nutrition and disease prevention in the poorest parts of the world have made it possible for an increasing number of babies to reach adulthood and become parents themselves. Half a century ago one in four children under the age of fourteen in African countries such as Kenya and Ghana died, whereas today it’s fewer than one in ten. These swift changes in the relative populations of various parts of the world are being driven not only by who’s having more babies but also by whose life expectancy is increasing more rapidly. For instance, back in the 1950s people born in the least developed parts of the world were expected to live an average of thirty fewer years than those born in the most developed. Nowadays the difference is seventeen years. Between 1950 and 2015, mortality rates dropped by just 3 percent in Europe but by a whopping 65 percent in Africa. The poorer countries are catching up in life expectancy thanks to lower mortality across all age groups. To assess the worldwide impact of these demographic shifts, It shows the percentage of the world’s total population in different regions between 1950 and 2017, with forecasts to the year 2100 as calculated by the United Nations. Focus your attention on 2030. By that year, South Asia (including India) will consolidate its position as the number-one region in terms of population size. Africa will become the second-largest region, while East Asia (including China) will be relegated to third place. Europe, which in 1950 was the second largest, will fall to sixth place, behind Southeast Asia (which includes Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, among other countries) and Latin America. International migration might partially mitigate these epochal changes by redistributing people from parts of the world with a surplus of babies toward others with a deficit. In fact, that has happened repeatedly throughout history, as when many Southern Europeans migrated to Northern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. This time around, however, migration won’t offset the population trends (see data in figure 3). I say this because too many governments seem intent on building walls, whether the old-fashioned way (with brick and mortar), by leveraging technology such as lasers and chemical detectors to monitor border crossings, or both. But even if the walls are never built or something renders them ineffective, my forecasts indicate that the impact of migration may not have a big impact on these population trends. Given present levels of migration and population growth, sub-Saharan Africa—the fifty African countries that do not border on the Mediterranean Sea—will become the second-most populous part of the globe by 2030. Let’s assume for a moment that migration doubles in volume over the next twenty years. But twice as much migration will merely delay that reckoning until the year 2033. It won’t derail the main population trends leading to the end of the world as we know it, but merely postpone them by approximately three years.
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Guillen, Mauro F. ; Guillén, Mauro F. 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything . Flint: About the Author Mauro F. Guillén is Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow, Queens’ College, Cambridge. An expert on global market and social trends, he is a part Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer Award. His previous books include The Architecture of Collapse, Global Turning Points and Emerging Markets Rule. Some Facts and Figures Birthplace of the next industrial revolution: sub-Saharan Africa The reason: 500 million acres of fertile yet undeveloped agricultural land The size of Mexico: 500 million acres Percentage of the world’s wealth owned by women in 2000: 15 Percentage of the world’s wealth owned by women in 2030: 55 If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters: global financial crisis averted Worldwide, the number of people who went hungry in 2017: 821 million Worldwide, the number of people who will go hungry in 2030: 200 million Worldwide, the number of people who were obese in 2017: 650 million Worldwide, the number of people who will be obese in 2030: 1.1 billion Percentage of Americans projected to be obese in 2030: 50 Percentage of the world’s land occupied by cities in 2030: 1.1 Percentage of the world’s population living in cities in 2030: 60 Percentage of worldwide carbon emissions produced by cities in 2030: 87 Percentage of world’s urban population exposed to rising sea levels in 2030: 80 The largest middle-class consumer market today: United States and Western Europe The largest middle-class consumer market in 2030: China By 2030, the number of people entering the middle class in emerging markets: 1 billion The number of people currently in the middle class in the United States: 223 million. The number of people in the middle class in the United States in 2030: 209 million. The Indians demonstrated that they too have the “right stuff,” as Tom Wolfe once put it. They showed they are a world-class technological powerhouse and can get things done efficiently and on time. The Mars mission wasn’t a fluke. In fact, it was the second time that India had surged ahead of the world’s established superpowers. Back in 2009, its maiden mission to the Moon produced the first evidence of the existence of water, “apparently concentrated at the poles and possibly formed by the solar wind,” as The Guardian reported. It took NASA ten years to independently confirm India’s finding.
Once upon a time, not only was the world neatly divided into prosperous and backward economies, but babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees, and people yearned to own homes and cars. Companies didn’t need to see any farther than Europe and the United States to do well. Printed money was legal tender for all debts, public and private. In school they told us how we were supposed to “play the game,” and we grew up thinking that the rules would remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children leave the house, and went into retirement. That familiar world is rapidly vanishing as we encounter a bewildering new reality driven by a new set of rules. Before we know it there will be more grandparents than grandchildren in most countries; collectively, middle-class markets in Asia will be larger than those in the United States and Europe combined; women will own more wealth than men; and we will find ourselves in the midst of more industrial robots than manufacturing workers, more computers than human brains, more sensors than human eyes, and more currencies than countries. Nobody knows for sure what the future will bring. If you do, please let me know—together we can make truckloads of money. But while predictions are never fully accurate, we can certainly make a series of relatively safe assumptions about what might happen in the decade to come. For example, the majority of people impacted by the forecasts in this book have already been born. We can perhaps describe in general terms what we can expect of them as consumers, given their likely educational attainment or current patterns of social media activity. We can also calculate with reasonable accuracy how many people will live to be eighty or ninety years old. And we may even be in a position to predict with some acceptable degree of confidence that a certain percentage of seniors will need a care provider—whether it’s another human or a robot. When it comes to the latter, imagine that these robots speak different languages with a variety of accents, aren’t opinionated, don’t take days off, and don’t abuse their patients financially or otherwise. You’ll see that around 2030 Asian markets, even excluding Japan, will be so large that the center of gravity of global consumption will shift eastward. Companies will have no choice but to follow market trends in that part of the world, with most new products and services reflecting the preferences of Asian consumers. Pause for a moment and think about that. Then consider what it means as we add a few more intertwined trends. Fewer babies in most parts of the world means that we are steadily marching toward a rapidly aging population. Much of that demographic shift is driven by women, who more and more are remaining in school and pursuing careers (not merely jobs) outside of the home—and bearing fewer children. Before you realize it, there will be more female millionaires than male millionaires. Wealth is also becoming more urban: the population of cities is growing at a rate of 1.5 million per week. While cities occupy just 1 percent of the world’s land area, they are home to 55 percent of the population and account for 80 percent of energy consumption (and carbon emissions). That’s why cities are on the front lines of efforts to combat climate change. Within a decade, the largest generation will be the population above age sixty, which today owns 80 percent of the wealth in the United States and is giving rise to the “gray market”—the largest consumer bloc of all. Companies large and small should redirect some of their attention to senior citizens if they wish to remain relevant as time goes on.
Population aging is becoming the norm in America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, the younger generations are driving the ascendancy of the middle class in most emerging markets. They are a very different type of consumer from the one the world has seen so far; more aspirational in their habits, for example. As the middle classes expand, more and more women will accumulate wealth like never before, with both genders adopting urban lifestyles and driving the largest influx of migration we’ve ever witnessed to cities around the world. And cities create a critical mass of inventors and entrepreneurs intent on disrupting the status quo with innovation and technology. For their part, technologies alter old habits and lifestyles, bringing forth new ways to think about and engage with everything from homes and offices to cars and personal items. This, in turn, will lead to alternative conceptions of money that are more distributed, more decentralized, and easier to use. Some of these trends are already under way, but they will not reach critical mass until around 2030. Let me offer you an example. In addition to the electric lightbulb, the telephone, and the car, one of the great inventions of the late nineteenth century was the concept of retirement: a period dedicated to our hobbies and our families, and our chance to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished. We inherited from that century a concept of life as a progression of distinct stages—childhood, work, and retirement—that we, hopefully, enjoy along the way. With the decline in the number of babies and the new dynamics between generations, our future society may well have to rethink quite a few assumptions of how we have traditionally lived. Senior citizens are also consumers, with distinctive lifestyles, and they can be technological early adopters as much as millennials, if not more so. Think about virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or robotics and how these technologies will revolutionize the tail end of our lives. We may have to dispel the old order. Unlike in the past, we may re-enroll in school and develop new skills many times over before we’re done. Consider this headline that ran in the New York Times in 2019: “Running Out of Children, a South Korean School Enrolls Illiterate Grandmothers.” I urge that we avoid linear thinking, sometimes called “vertical” thinking. Indeed, lateral thinking can be further augmented through “peripheral vision,” a concept developed by my Wharton colleagues George Day and Paul Schoemaker. Very much as with human vision, companies and other types of organizations cannot be effective if they do not sense, interpret, and act on the weak signals coming from the periphery of their immediate area of focus. For example, Kodak, founded in 1888, made massive profits selling photographic film and other related products throughout the twentieth century. In the early 1990s, its engineers became aware of the possibilities of digital photography, but top management was more focused on the short term, believing that people would continue to prefer printed pictures. The result? In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. They were a victim of a phenomenon well expressed by Judge Taylor in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for”—they’re blind to the unexpected, the unusual, the periphery.
Here’s an example of lateral thinking in action. Airbnb competes for business with hotels, but it also seeks to steal customers away from banks. How? Many senior citizens realize at some point that their savings will not suffice to carry them through retirement. But they do possess a very valuable asset: their home. There are two conventional ways to monetize your house without selling it. The old-fashioned approach is to obtain a home equity loan from a bank, but that carries the stigma of debt and the stress of monthly payments. Another possibility is to obtain a reverse mortgage (relinquish equity), but then the children won’t inherit the family home. Enter Airbnb. Empty-nesters can rent the extra rooms they don’t use to travelers who will be in the area for a short while, an arrangement that gives both parties more flexibility. Or, if the empty-nesters travel or visit their children a lot and frequently aren’t home, they can choose to rent the whole house for short-term stays. Either way, they’re getting money and keeping their home. Airbnb wouldn’t be so successful if it weren’t for a number of converging trends: declining fertility, longer life expectancy, doubts about the future viability of public pensions, expanded use of smartphones and apps, and a growing interest in sharing rather than owning. I will guide you through these interrelated developments, showing how they unfold, and how they will all reach critical mass by 2030. This new world presents opportunities and threats; individuals, companies, and organizations will each have their own strengths and weaknesses in confronting them. Yet, as I show in the conclusion, all of us will need to approach this new world differently than we have approached things in the past. The closing pages offer principles and approaches we can use to make sense of this new reality—and prosper from the opportunities it creates. Remember, it’s all unfolding in our lifetime, and it’s right around the corner. Follow the Babies POPULATION DROUGHT, THE AFRICAN BABY
BOOM, AND THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION A baby comes to the world not only with a mouth and a
stomach, but also with a pair of hands. —EDWIN CANNAN, BRITISH ECONOMIST AND DEMOGRAPHER The pace of population growth seems terrifying. In 1820 there were a billion people on Earth. A century later, there were more than 2 billion. After a brief hiatus resulting from the Great Depression and World War II, the rate of growth gathered breathtaking speed: 3 billion by 1960, 4 billion by 1975, 5 billion by 1987, 6 billion by 2000, and 7 billion by 2010. “Population control or race to oblivion?” was a tagline on the cover of Stanford University professors Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s highly influential book The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Since then, governments around the world and large segments of the public have been seriously alarmed by what they think is inevitable: we’ll overrun the planet and destroy ourselves (and millions of plant and animal species) in the process. The reality is that by 2030 we will be facing a baby drought. Over the next few decades, the world’s population will grow less than half as swiftly as it did between 1960 and 1990. In some countries, the population will actually decrease in size (absent very high rates of immigration). For instance, since the early 1970s, American women have on average had fewer than two babies each over their reproductive lifetime—a rate insufficient to ensure generational replacement. The same is also true in many other places around the world. People in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, Sweden, China, and Japan are starting to wonder who will take care of the elderly and pay their pensions.
As birth rates decline in East Asia, Europe, and the Americas, combined with a much slower decline in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the global balance of economic and geopolitical power shifts. Consider: For every baby born nowadays in developed countries, more than nine are being born in the emerging markets and the developing world. Told another way, for every baby born in the United States, 4.4 are being born in China, 6.5 in India, and 10.2 in Africa. Moreover, improvements in nutrition and disease prevention in the poorest parts of the world have made it possible for an increasing number of babies to reach adulthood and become parents themselves. Half a century ago one in four children under the age of fourteen in African countries such as Kenya and Ghana died, whereas today it’s fewer than one in ten. These swift changes in the relative populations of various parts of the world are being driven not only by who’s having more babies but also by whose life expectancy is increasing more rapidly. For instance, back in the 1950s people born in the least developed parts of the world were expected to live an average of thirty fewer years than those born in the most developed. Nowadays the difference is seventeen years. Between 1950 and 2015, mortality rates dropped by just 3 percent in Europe but by a whopping 65 percent in Africa. The poorer countries are catching up in life expectancy thanks to lower mortality across all age groups. To assess the worldwide impact of these demographic shifts, It shows the percentage of the world’s total population in different regions between 1950 and 2017, with forecasts to the year 2100 as calculated by the United Nations. Focus your attention on 2030. By that year, South Asia (including India) will consolidate its position as the number-one region in terms of population size. Africa will become the second-largest region, while East Asia (including China) will be relegated to third place. Europe, which in 1950 was the second largest, will fall to sixth place, behind Southeast Asia (which includes Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, among other countries) and Latin America. International migration might partially mitigate these epochal changes by redistributing people from parts of the world with a surplus of babies toward others with a deficit. In fact, that has happened repeatedly throughout history, as when many Southern Europeans migrated to Northern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. This time around, however, migration won’t offset the population trends (see data in figure 3). I say this because too many governments seem intent on building walls, whether the old-fashioned way (with brick and mortar), by leveraging technology such as lasers and chemical detectors to monitor border crossings, or both. But even if the walls are never built or something renders them ineffective, my forecasts indicate that the impact of migration may not have a big impact on these population trends. Given present levels of migration and population growth, sub-Saharan Africa—the fifty African countries that do not border on the Mediterranean Sea—will become the second-most populous part of the globe by 2030. Let’s assume for a moment that migration doubles in volume over the next twenty years. But twice as much migration will merely delay that reckoning until the year 2033. It won’t derail the main population trends leading to the end of the world as we know it, but merely postpone them by approximately three years.
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