I’d like to get the opinion of fellow dopers on the future of America… How do you see America in 50 years?
Will increasing spending on military for a perpetual war on terror while running records deficits lead to bankrupty? Will turning the world into a giant Gaza strip take it’s toll? Will continued dependance on oil (and the lack of desire it seems to find alternatives) bankrupt the country when the price of oil shoots up because of rarity? Will it’s dominion over the world be replaced by China, or will America take down the world with itself when it crumbles? Will the financial system collapse?
Or are the presen time just a bump on the road of a cultural and military empire stretching from New York to Paris and finally Beijing with peace and democracy for all?
Or maybe Jesus will come back and take all the saved souls away and that is it?
How do you see the next 50 years unfolding to arrive to your vision of the future?
I don’t forsee the War on Terror being as great a financial burden as one might suppose.
I have a suspicion that within ten years, the War on Terror will be mostly forgotten. As it loses political impact, it will slowly fade into the background unless, of course, another attack occurs.
The situation in the Middle East will worsen. Within the next twenty years, we will be involved in another war with Iraq, possibly along with some of the other “rogue” nations. All of the ingredients for the rise of a dictator are in place there now: poverty, confusion, anger . . . Once Iraq truly has control of its political future, I fear that they will place a hard-liner in power-- someone who vows to put things right and points at the US as being the cause of all of their woes.
Our dependance on foreign oil will have some very negative consequences, especially as supplies begin to run low and those nations realize that they hold enormous power over us. Unless we begin to adapt our infrastructure, we could find ourselves in a very percarious position.
However, we’ll have a liberal backlash in five to ten years which may address some of these concerns. The nation seems to almost idealisticly “breathe”: an inhalation of conservatism and then an exhalation of liberalism. The harder the intake, the harder the expulsion. I’d say when the liberal backlash begins, some important changes may begin: more emphasis on alternative enegery forms, for one, and a less hard-line stance on foreign policy which may cool some tempers.
I’m not saying the future looks bleak, just that I feel we’re going to have some serious problems to contend with in the next half-century. My fear is that we’re not preparing to meet them.
Who can possibly know what the world will look like 50 years from now. Compare the world of 1954 to 2004. Back then, everyone though that we would have blown ourselves up ten times over. The USSR was the scariest empire on the planet and communism the greatest threat. Americans thought that wearing a suit and tie and living in identical Ward Cleaver houses was swell.
Maybe the American hedgemony will last another century. Maybe the spread of democracy throughout the world will make an Amero-centric world irrelevant. Maybe there will be the rise of a new Islamo-Chinese empire. Maybe scientists in Uganda will figure out a way to turn sand into limitless energy. Who knows?
Lissa has spoken for me. I particularly liked the metaphor of the nation “breathing” as political homeostasis.
When the Reagan deficits were pointing to “inevitable” financial ruin, I was on the high school debate circuit attempting to rationalize defaulting on our debt, and attempting to explain how declaring null and void all Government Bonds wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible thing (Hah!).
Bush senior and Clinton came along and righted the ship by pushing tax rates up to stave the ruinous hemorrhaging of national credit, and my whole argument was rendered moot.
I think the same situation will arise again. Some future President will have to fall upon his sword and jack the tax rates up again and it will be fixed. Maybe.
The only fly in the ointment is that now we see the very real probability that the era of cheap energy is over. The “Peak Oil” crowd (google that) makes a convincing case that we are over the hump–that energy costs will increase in excess of the rate of non-energy inflation and will fuck over any booms that the US or world economy may experience in the next 100 years.
I guess I concur with those that say the future is too hard to call, but that 200 billion dollars would be far better spent in subsidizing development of non-petroleum energy sources, rather than attempting to secure existing petroleum reserves in regions that flat out hate us.
Back then people worried about the national debt and there were all kinds of predictions of the horrors to come in the 90’s. Then came Vietnam and again we wondered how we could repay the debt it caused. I can’t remember when there weren’t figures about the trade imbalance and how we’d never pay off that debt. The Japanese bought the Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach and we thought they would end up owning the U.S. In the 70’s there were a couple of oil crisis’s, where people waited in long lines and could buy gas only according the last number in their license number (odd or even). I’m not saying that the problems today don’t need attention, only that the idea that these are extraordinary times isn’t true. The problem of oil dependency is probably one of those history lessons that we didn’t learn the first time around. China becoming stronger is probably not any worse than Japan developing the way it did. For that matter, India is also making great strides forward. Globalization will keep getting stronger and perhaps in 50 years nations won’t be what they are today, making this question obsolete. The one thing I can predict for sure is that there will be problems to solve 50 years from now, some will be new and some will be the same old thing.
Well, I wasn’t asking for an accurate prediction… I was asking for how YOU saw the future. Do you see it as rosy? Or do you see it as bad? Or do you not ever think about it on a global scale? What legacy do you see left for your children? Maybe 50 years is too much to ask. 20-30 years maybe? I’m curious to see if anyone believe strongly in an alternative future.
I find it very interesting that most of those in this thread have made their prediction based on some kind of cycle. Very attractive idea… What do you see as the driving force being it? Democracies? Maybe each generation being generally opposite in opinions to the last (one generation liberal, the next conservative)? The need for the military-industrial complex to use it’s shiny new weapons every few years?
However I wonder if the current conflict will make things different. It is not really localized and depends only on the will of a few individuals to create constant stress by their attacks. If I take the situation of Israel and extend it to the world, it seems that even violent, successful strikes against terrorists cells have not been successful in eliminating the violence. Or has their strategy been more successful then I think?
In a modern world where America has the ultimate destruction weapon (nuclear tipped missile), can any other power become a superpower and establish supremacy without nuclear holocaust? I’m guessing no. So since America is the “center of the world” right now, will the world change by America being extended (not necessarily by political borders) first to North America, then the Americas, then the Northern Emisphere? And then to the rest of the world?
Will the political borders themselves dissolves as a new generation live in constant instant communication will the rest of the world and as political and economic systems become uniform?
China will liberalise, this being caused by increasing consumer prosperity. India will have some sort of civil rights movement, in protest of the caste system. The Palestine conflict will still go about unabated, but this time, there will be more fighting against the tactics both sides employ.
The United States will have a reduced impact on world affairs with the strengthening and establishment of new political block powers, the EU Russia China Brazil India, will all come about and rise to be competing economic powers.
Hopefully, we’ll see a peak in Islamic terrorism, and hopefully after governments repeatedly do not bow to terrorist demands, they will see the futility of carrying out attacks leading to an eventual decline
This is almost the same thing as saying the Middle-east problem will go about unabated. China and India are as dependant on oil as we are, if not more so. Same for the EU. So if finding alternative energy resources is a must for the U.S., why not for the others? The truth is that oil should not be the prime reason to want a peaceful settlement of the Mideastern problem.
Much of the division in this country is caused by the fact that we are uncomfortable with the role we are now playing. So maybe this isn’t a dire prediction after all. Let’s just hope that when it happens, we can accept our new role better than some have (not a reference to the UK).
If asked which one doesn’t belong in that group; the answer obviously is the EU. The EU has many problems to overcome, but nothing like the others. With new prosperity are they going to be able to correctly handle problems like the environment, health care, the elderly, women’s rights, etc. I’m not saying that we have solved these problems; only pointing out that they are not immune from them. In the case of China and India they have less space and many more people, which would seem to magnify some of these problems.
All of the different countries being effected by hostage taking in Iraq, threatens this assumption. Some have given in and pulled out, which does not help. Also Putin seems to be more willing to give in on the school takeover than we’d expect. I can’t blame him on the one hand, but if he wavers and gives in the cat is out of the bag. It warrants watching, that’s for sure.
Another problem that has not been discussed is Africa. The fact that it has not been mentioned is a big part of the problem. Nobody gives a dern.
Depends on a lot of things- there’s different directions the US could go.
I don’t see the oil situation becoming critical (“Peak Oil”). When oil gets scarce enough, then the US will finally get serious about alternate energy and conservation. My guess, we’ll muddle through. If nothing else safe® fission power will make a comeback.
If biotechnology advances to the point that genetics and stem cells start providing major health and economic advantages, then America’s traditional conservatism is going to butt heads with the almighty Free Market. My guess is that Mammon will triumph. I wonder how many pro-life people would change their tune if you could live to be 150 by harvesting cells from human embryoes?
I do worry that the US is slowly sliding down the same path that the Roman Republic did. If as a historical analogy you compare the end of the Cold War to the end of the Punic Wars, then in the next fifty years we might see an imperial America. Especially if terrorists ever succeed in exploding a nuclear weapon in an American city. If that happens, it will probably become the overt policy of the US to forbid any unauthorized nation from possessing nuclear weapons, by preemptive attack if necessary.
A lot of other things depend on what will happen in other nations. How unified politically and strategically will the EU become? Will Russia reform it’s economy enough to become a major player in the the world again? How modernized can China become in the next fifty years? What will happen in the Middle East?
The problem is that a lot of terrorist attacks are not necessarily intended to induce political change. They’re expressions of anger and hate, or revenge. A firm stance will not discourage these types of terrorists, and might actually encourage some of them.
There really is no reasonable way to end terrorism. The more of them that you kill, the more martyrs you create. Efforts to crush movements often have the side effect of increasing membership. (The early Christians actually gained strength from persecution.) Also, some individuals do not draw a distinction between the more militant radical groups and the religion as a whole. They don’t see it as an attack on Islamic terrorists, they see it as an attack on Islam.
Terrorism is something we’re going to have to live with. It’s the price you pay for foreign involvement. Not to mention the fact that some of our overseas economic ventures, which some call “neo-colonialsm” leaves a lot of angry people in its wake.
My feeling is that that economic trend which is destroying the middle class and broadening the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” will persist, especially if Republicans of the Bushco ilk stay in power for long. It will be very, very hard to reverse the negative economic trends which are hurting the middle class. Job creation and wage increases have been seriously falling behind increases in the cost of living, particularly with regard to housing and health care. Decent living-wage, blue-collar jobs are being replaced with jobs at an increasingly pathetic minimum wage. More people are living in poverty, more people lack health insurance, and even with Bush’s tax cuts, in real world dollars–adjusted for increased living expenses–most people have to make do with with incomes that are smaller than they were. That is certainly true for me, and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon, especially if Bush is re-elected. The problem is likely to get worse regardless of the economic policies of any future presidents. People exploit short-term political gain with the cost of negative long-term consequences.
Basically, I see the economic situation in the U.S. in 50 years being scarcely different from present-day Mexico, with the added difficulty of an ever-increasing aged population. Lots and lots of poverty, more people taking on multiple jobs to attempt to scrape together a living, and a empowered, elite class of wealthy that is more and more indifferent to the needs of anyone but themselves. Combine that with a shrinking ratio of working citizens to retirees, and you have a serious problem. Add to that mix running out of oil, and embarking too late on developing technology to replace it, and things get grim indeed.
In general, I see the same for the future as the past 10,000 years - scientific and economic growth, wars, regional conflicts famine, natural disasters, economic booms, busts, generally the same ups and downs we have always experienced.
You would guess wrong. We are the only superpower now but that is only one more than there was twenty years ago. Empires fall from within as well as from without. Without the economic foundation to pay for those missles and aircraft carriers, a void can be created where some other nation can fill. Wars are not about anihilating each other. What good is being able to blow up the other guys cities if you can’t afford to pay the guys who push the button? (ie Russia).
My concern is that we are going to go furthur down the road of being a nation of isolated, stupid, overweight, ignorant hicks. I’m not sure if this is a cause or an effect of a shrinking middle class, but my concern is that national policy will be decided by a fearfull soccer-mom living in Nowheresville, USA who makes $40k a year, gets all her news from the TV and has never been more than 100 miles from her house for more than a week.
The middle east has been a mess for over a thousand years. If we stay there we will be in a/the mess. We will continue to be target of terrorist revenge acts like 9-11 and there will be no peace as long as our military is in the middle east.
We are a trillion dollars a year more in debt each year. 500 billion deficit in trade and another 500 billion dollars in government spending.
We are losing jobs and factories, while Japan and China and India are creating jobs and building factories. IF the trend continues, we will no longer be the arsenal of democracy.
Those three things alone will cause self-destruction, not much else really matters.
The Washington Post today has a feature article about methods large corporations are using to teach basic English to employees whose native language is something else, mostly Spanish. It also said that many retail corporations are “encouraging” English-speaking employees to learn Spanish. In a throw-away line, the article noted that the Hispanic population of the U.S. is growing at four times the rate of all other groups.
It doesn’t high-level mathematics to predict that the U.S. will be a province of Mexico before the end of this century. The first step, already being done in some jurisdictions, will be to print ballots in Spanish. The next step will be to change citizenship requirements so that basic familiarity with the English language will no longer be required. The third step will be to recognize Spanish as an official language of the United States equal to English in all respects, comparable to English and French in Canada (or English, Afrikaans and 10 tribal languages in South Africa). Next, with large numbers of citizens speaking only Spanish, distinctions between American citizens and non-citizen residents (legal and illegal) will begin to blur, and voting rights will be awarded to everyone who has lived here a specified time. At that point, Hispanics will be the largest block of voters in the U.S., they will decide who goes to Congress and the White House, and it’s hard to imagine that they would reject unification with Mexico if they had a chance to vote on it.
this thread is basically asking how the US–the world’s superpower today, will look in 50 years.So how about looking back at how 100 years ago, the world’s largest superpower looked–and what happend to it 50 years later.
I’m talking about England. In 1890-they ruled the world, the sun never set on the Union Jack, had the biggest fleet, the strongest economy, etc, etc. 50 years later, the British people were perfectly content to give up the Empire and live on their own island.
Americans will adapt to a changing world, more than the world will change to meet America’s ideals.
1 - Next decade or so will feature a big fat boom, with the Iraq war and the general mess in the ME continuing.
2 - After that, a big fat bust. The dollar is no longer the standard after a crisis of confidence in dollar assets. Some combination of currencies replaces it, possibly a dollar/yen/euro troika or something.
3 - China blows up somewhere in here. When the blowup is over, something replaces the current communist regime, and China continues its rapid development like nothing ever happened.
4 - Global warming is finally recognized as a true crisis, and alternate energy sources become all the rage. This exacerbates the ME situation, since it means these countries lose importance and income. Related to this, look out for Indonesia; problems don’t get any bigger than that country.
5 - India chugs along, facing periodic confrontations with Pakistan and, possibly, China, along the way.
When it’s all over, the US will still have the biggest economy, but relative to the rest of the world, it won’t be as dominant as it is now. New big players will be China, India, and Brazil, in that order, and the latter two may start agitating for things like a permanent seat on the Security Council, things like that. The big problem will still be the ME, which will actually be worse, because those countries will be poorer in the post-oil world that will be fashioned. Indonesia, the biggest Muslim country in the world and an oil exporter as well, may wind up as the biggest problem of all.
As for when Japan was going to take us over, best line I ever heard on that came from some Hollywood kumquat or other: “The Japanese aren’t taking over. They’re coming with money, and Hollywood is going to spend it.” Which is what happened, in that industry anyway.
It’s long past time to question the need for the U.S. to be the most powerful country on the planet. I know it’s practicly heresy to say so, but I think sheer military and polticial power is not a particularly convincing component to a country’s greatness.
The U.S. will be a major player on the world stage for a very long time, but do we need to continually force our way as being the most major player? I do not think America’s superpower status is doing us much good. Sure, we’re big enough to slap almost anybody down, but that also makes us the most potent target. In the end, it could be argued that this is not a good thing.
Another point: folks, don’t keep your heads in the sand. Oil is going to run out (but which I mean it will drop in availability enough to cause a supply crisis) probably within the lifetimes of most of us here, and we’re way behind the pace of having an acceptable alternative in time.
Not bloody likely. Why would anybody want to go back to a country they tried so hard to get out of?
The next 50 years will be like the last 50 years, only faster and harder. The US will eventually come to grips with overseas jobs, and stop trying to beat India and China at this game. We lead the world in too many areas to get stuck trying to keep jobs as they were. Adapt or die, and the US will adapt. It will be tough, and lots of people will be hurt by the shift, but it will happen, and we will be the better for it. The reason your job got outsourced is that you can no longer do it efficiently. Tough luck.
The US will either retreat into a neo-isolationism, or become Imperial. We can’t continue the way we are now on the world stage. Other posters have covered this well.
There will be a new scramble for Africa that will make the 1800s look like a child’s game. IMO, there is no way to stop the disintegration of Sub-Saharan nations. AIDS and corruption will suck them down. The population will drop by 90%, and the US will join in the scramble to pick up the pieces.
