Chapter 5
Genie Out of the Bottle
Major Socio-economic Shifts Ahead
The technological forces unleashed by the „digital revolution“ will fundamentally transform
our economy and society within a very short time. We need to prepare ourselves for this
transformation and the new era to come. In fact, we may just have 20 or 30 years to adapt.
Even though we may dislike such socio-economic change, we will probably not be able to
stop it. In order to be able to cope with surprises, we need to design our socio-economic
systems in a resilient way. Moreover, if we learn to understand the fundamentally new logic
of our digital future and harness the driving forces behind it for our purposes, we can benefit
tremendously and fix a number of long-standing problems that humanity has struggled with!
It seems the world is changing at a rapidly increasing pace and is getting ever more
complex. However, today’s democratic institutions are slow, and they are expensive,
too. In the meantime, most industrialized countries have piled up debt levels that can
hardly be dealt with. This calls for a new and more efficient approach to decisionmaking. Two concepts have been around: (1) the “China model”, as China has developed much faster than Western countries recently,
1 and (2) giving more control
to multi-national corporations, as they tend to be more efficient than government
institutions.
5.1 The China Model
Has the French Revolution been a tragic historical accident that is now making lives
in Western democracies more difficult? Are citizens and public institutions obstacles,
or have we not yet learned to use them as a valuable resource? Is democratic decisionmaking outdated and blocking our way into a better future? Would more top-down
control be better?
Given that countries such as Singapore and China are experiencing larger
economic growth rates, should other countries copy their model? Most likely, this
wouldn’t be a good idea. First, a political system must be culturally fitting. Second,
1 Bell [1].
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. Helbing, Next Civilization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62330-2_5
85
Genie Out of the Bottle
Major Socio-economic Shifts Ahead
The technological forces unleashed by the „digital revolution“ will fundamentally transform
our economy and society within a very short time. We need to prepare ourselves for this
transformation and the new era to come. In fact, we may just have 20 or 30 years to adapt.
Even though we may dislike such socio-economic change, we will probably not be able to
stop it. In order to be able to cope with surprises, we need to design our socio-economic
systems in a resilient way. Moreover, if we learn to understand the fundamentally new logic
of our digital future and harness the driving forces behind it for our purposes, we can benefit
tremendously and fix a number of long-standing problems that humanity has struggled with!
It seems the world is changing at a rapidly increasing pace and is getting ever more
complex. However, today’s democratic institutions are slow, and they are expensive,
too. In the meantime, most industrialized countries have piled up debt levels that can
hardly be dealt with. This calls for a new and more efficient approach to decisionmaking. Two concepts have been around: (1) the “China model”, as China has developed much faster than Western countries recently,
1 and (2) giving more control
to multi-national corporations, as they tend to be more efficient than government
institutions.
5.1 The China Model
Has the French Revolution been a tragic historical accident that is now making lives
in Western democracies more difficult? Are citizens and public institutions obstacles,
or have we not yet learned to use them as a valuable resource? Is democratic decisionmaking outdated and blocking our way into a better future? Would more top-down
control be better?
Given that countries such as Singapore and China are experiencing larger
economic growth rates, should other countries copy their model? Most likely, this
wouldn’t be a good idea. First, a political system must be culturally fitting. Second,
1 Bell [1].
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. Helbing, Next Civilization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62330-2_5
85