We live in a time of contradiction: we marvel at the economic and social advances of recent decades while we look to the future with skepticism and fear.
The human being, after tens of thousands of years living practically at subsistence levels, has only spent ten generations enjoying an era of unprecedented prosperity.
A prosperity that has made it possible to sustain the lives of billions of people on the planet, with high levels of agricultural productivity, a technological development that would have been considered little less than witchcraft just two hundred years ago —a blink of an eye in the history of humanity— , the extension of a political regime —democracy— that was shelved in the history books as a little political experiment in ancient Greece,
and a system of rights and freedoms that is far from perfect, but that has codified the rights inherent in human nature with a political and social force that we did not know.
Our life expectancy has doubled, and infant mortality, one of the aspects that most punished our species, has been reduced to unprecedented levels.
The vast majority of the world's population has access to levels of education and training that would be a dream of the great sages of the past, and more than six out of ten people are connected to the world through the Internet.
One of the aspects that most punished our species has been reduced to unprecedented levels.
The vast majority of the world's population has access to levels of education and training that would be a dream of the great sages of the past, and more than six out of ten people are connected to the world through the Internet.
One of the aspects that most punished our species has been reduced to unprecedented levels.
The vast majority of the world's population has access to levels of education and training that would be a dream of the great sages of the past, and more than six out of ten people are connected to the world through the Internet.
Absolute poverty, which devastated about 40% of the world's population just half a century ago, is below 8%.
In little more than two centuries we have gone from admiring birds as masters of the sky to stepping on our satellite, to sending probes beyond our solar system, and to exploring, thanks to advances in robotics, other planets in our corner of the universe.
(...) All this in a few generations.
To put into perspective the amazing progress of the human species in the last two hundred years, let us remember that Carl Sagan cosmic calendar in which the Big Bang began in the first second of January 1.
In that calendar, each month would mean 1,200 million years, so that the Earth emerged in September, the photosynthesis that filled our planet with oxygen, in October, and the age of the dinosaurs,
just two days ago, on December 29.
On December 31 the human being emerged, around 9:25 p.m.
Columbus arrived in America at 11:59:58 p.m. on December 31, and in this way, practically all the progress that has led the human being to be the species that it is today occurred during the last second of this cosmic calendar.
Seen in perspective, the human explosion after millennia of a brief existence, impoverished and at the mercy of nature, has been just an instant in the history of our reality.
However, we are haunted by a feeling of anxiety about everything that human beings are achieving.
Negative messages about the future are multiplying: the ecological crisis lurks just around the corner, while the technological apocalypse, social bankruptcy or the collapse of democracies make their way into public opinion as possible futures.
The feeling of fear of the future is multiplied in practically all societies, which look to the past looking for an arcade that never existed, a place where everything was solid.
And although there are numerous authors who make an effort to make us see the dimensions of this unexpected progress, the perception of public opinion is resounding, at least in the West: the new generations will live worse than the previous ones.
Only in emerging countries do the population have a positive perception of the future.
This gloomy feeling contrasts with perceptions of just a couple of decades ago.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the planet began an era of optimism focused on the process of democracy, the extension of economic exchanges between countries, the technological development generated by the irruption of the Internet and the perception that the planet could enter a long era of prosperity.
At that time, the United Nations spoke of the peace dividend that would be achieved by stopping investing in weapons in order to do so in sustainable human development.
In that decade, not only were the democracies of Eastern Europe launched, but a peace agreement was reached between Israel and the Palestinians,
the civil wars in Central America came to an end, democratic regimes were established in Latin America, apartheid ended, several world summits were held (...) to build a global agenda for sustainable development and a series of goals were consolidated —the Development Goals of the Millennium—which were proclaimed as the necessary agenda to end world poverty.
Barely a couple of decades later, we find ourselves with a bleak picture, despite the remarkable achievements of recent decades.
The historian Yuval Harari said that, once the human being has "killed God", by the extension of humanism against traditional religions, he has been left without an interlocutor: if we no longer speak with God, who do we speak with?
Actually, we talk to ourselves;
with our future.
Events have not helped: without any doubt, the year 2020 will go down in the history of humanity as one of the most disastrous so far this century, thus culminating a decade marked by the double economic crisis, the uneven recovery and the brake on globalization that had been rampant throughout the last three decades.
It has been the decade of Brexit, the return of illiberal democracies, the rise of populism, the Trump decade and the decade in which inequality entered our political and social agenda.
(...) The decade that we began in 2021 started from a very particular situation, with a planet waiting to recover from the human, political and socioeconomic damage caused by the pandemic.
A decade that should lead us to adequately manage the digitization of the economy,
avoiding the excesses of a handful of companies that operate globally, accumulating economic and social power;
that should put us back on the path of sustainability, rapidly transforming our energy base towards a model that should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by the year 2030. (...)
The opportunity for a change of orientation is more open than ever and, if we are able to forge a new social contract capable of advancing without leaving anyone behind, we can experience one of the most brilliant decades in our history.
Unfortunately, it is not written anywhere that we are going to get it right, and any black swan can lead us back to a new stage of decadence and obscurantism.
It will not be a triumphal walk, but rather an arduous, arduous and risky task in which we are called to contribute knowing that we will not have many better opportunities.
José Moisés Martín Carretero
is an economist and specialist in international economics.
This excerpt is from his book
From Him The Future of Prosperity.
The birth of a new economy
, by Ariel, which is published this September 28.
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