2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything

by Mauro F. Guillén Narrated by Leon Nixon

Overview

"Bold, provocative...illuminates why we're having fewer babies, the middle class is stagnating, unemployment is shifting, and new powers are rising.”
-ADAM GRANT

The world is changing drastically before our eyes-will you be prepared for what comes next? A groundbreaking analysis from one of the world's foremost experts on global trends, including analysis on how COVID-19 will amplify and accelerate each of these changes.

Once upon a time, the world was neatly divided into prosperous and backward economies. Babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees, and people aspiring towards the middle class yearned to own homes and cars. Companies didn't need to see any further than Europe and the United States to do well. Printed money was legal tender for all debts, public and private. We grew up learning how to "play the game," and we expected the rules to remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children grow up, and went into retirement with our finances secure.

That world-and those rules-are over.

By 2030, a new reality will take hold, and before you know it:

- There will be more grandparents than grandchildren
- The middle-class in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the US and Europe combined
- The global economy will be driven by the non-Western consumer for the first time in modern history
- There will be more global wealth owned by women than men
- There will be more robots than workers
- There will be more computers than human brains
- There will be more currencies than countries

All these trends, currently underway, will converge in the year 2030 and change everything you know about culture, the economy, and the world.

According to Mauro F. Guillen, the only way to truly understand the global transformations underway-and their impacts-is to think laterally. That is, using “peripheral vision,” or approaching problems creatively and from unorthodox points of view. Rather than focusing on a single trend-climate-change or the rise of illiberal regimes, for example-Guillen encourages us to consider the dynamic inter-play between a range of forces that will converge on a single tipping point-2030-that will be, for better or worse, the point of no return.

2030 is both a remarkable guide to the coming changes and an exercise in the power of “lateral thinking,” thereby revolutionizing the way you think about cataclysmic change and its consequences.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

For too long, the public’s understanding of social science has been dominated by economists and psychologists. We know a lot about what’s going on with dollars and senses, but we’re surprisingly uninformed about how social structures are transforming the world around us. Mauro Guillen, a brilliant sociologist, is here to change that. His bold, provocative book illuminates why we’re having fewer babies, the middle class is stagnating, unemployment is shifting, and new powers are rising.”

—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

"We all 'feel' it – it registers itself in our excitement and anxiety of the massive disruption in technology, work, life and our world we are living through. These interconnected shifts in the way we live and work, our politics and culture, and on the earth add up to the most massive disruption and change in human history, Many smart people and many great books have grappled with discrete elements of these changes from automation and remote working, the rise and rebirth of cities, the new global middle class, and climate change. In 2030 AD, Mauro Guillen weaves all these threads and more together to provide a veritable guidebook for this brave new world we will leave to our children. Must reading for business and political leaders, city-builders and everyone concerned about what the future will bring."

—Richard Florida, author of the international bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

“Who better than Mauro Guillen – with his world view, engaging writing and multi-disciplinary approach – to open our eyes to transformational global changes that stare us in the face, and that we are yet to internalize. Using many powerful examples from around the world to nudge us out of our comforting but over-simplified view of the world., Mauro illustrates brilliantly why our “straightforward reality can no longer be taken for granted.” Supplementing this with a highly-accessible analysis of lateral thinking and peripheral vision, he helps us navigate what is “an inherently confusing but also profoundly unsettling” outlook that too many of us are happy to ignore – either consciously or inadvertently so.

Mauro’s book will be a must-read for those looking to understand the what, why and so what of transformational global change – that is, new trends that are emerging in a decisive, durable and impactful fashion; why they are doing so; and what this means not just for countries and companies, but also for households and communities.”

—Mohamed El-Erian, Chief Economic Adviser, Allianz, and bestselling author of When Markets Collide

Kirkus Reviews

2020-04-26
Wharton School professor Guillén examines demographic, economic, and climatic trends to project a vision of the world 10 years hence.

Forecasting the future is always a project fraught with peril, as the authors of The Limits to Growth might tell you. Yet some trends of the present seem bound for a harvest of ineluctable results. The number of hungry people will grow in the next decade, but so, too, will obesity; by the author’s projections, 50% of Americans will be obese in 2030. This speaks to another growing trend: inequality, a neat solution for which seems unlikely. Even so, Guillén prophesies that middle-class markets will grow in Asia at a much faster clip than in Europe and North America while Africa, which now has the world’s fastest-growing populations, will be on the brink of either disaster or a renaissance that will finally bring it wealth. “For better or worse,” he writes, “its fortunes will matter globally.” Regarding the issue of population, the world will be older almost everywhere. Interestingly, Guillén links the success of Airbnb and other aspects of the “sharing economy” to older persons who want to remain in their homes but find them large enough to offer rooms to rent. Bearing the financial weight of this increasingly older population will be millennials and Gen Z’ers, many of whom, ventures the author, will not be able to accumulate much wealth over their working lifetimes. Some of the seemingly intractable problems of today—immigration and climate change, foremost among them—will not be fixed until the conversations surrounding them become fact-based. As Guillén notes, immigration is a net benefit to society, and “there’s a great need for a calm debate about the best policies to determine the volume, timing, and composition of immigration so as to maximize the opportunities for both the origin and the destination countries and so that globalization does not leave millions of people behind as they lose jobs and their communities decline.”

Students of population biology, gerontology, and finance alike will find value in these pages.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177300252
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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