Publishers Weekly
05/11/2020
In this astute and optimistic debut, Guillén, a professor of international management at the Wharton School, examines recent economic shifts and technological advances in order to predict how the world might look a decade from now. Solving contemporary crises such as climate change and economic inequality, Guillén writes, will require “lateral thinking” that approaches a problem from multiple angles and tests numerous solutions. He explores, for example, how agricultural advances might curtail hunger in Africa, where a rising middle class will impact worldwide consumer trends. He also examines how cryptocurrencies might sabotage the banking industry, predicts an uptick in wealth for Asian countries, and offers a carefully reasoned discussion of both the positive and negative potential repercussions of increased automation. Environmentalists may disagree with Guillén’s assertion that “small, ordinary adjustments to our daily behavior” can stimulate the dramatic carbon reduction necessary to mitigate climate change, and his query about the gig economy (“will monopolistic digital platforms... end up exploiting workers and consumers alike?”) will strike many readers as already answered. Still, this sharp, well-informed analysis of present-day trends and future outcomes provides valuable insights to investors, business owners, and policy makers. (Aug.)
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.
