Ian Goldin: Navigating our global future

There are two Achilles’ heels of globalization. There is the Achilles’ heel of growing inequality. Those that are left out, those that feel angry, those that are not participating. Globalization has not been inclusive. The second Achilles’ heel is complexity. A growing fragility, a growing brittleness. What happens in one place very quickly affects everything else. This is a systemic risk, systemic shock. We’ve seen it to the financial crisis. We’ve seen it in the pandemic flu. It will become virulent and it’s something we have to build resilience against.

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An individual for the first time, in the history of humanity, will have the capacity, by 2030, to destroy the planet, to wreck everything, through the creation, for example, of a biopathogen. How do we begin to weave these tapestries together? How do we think about complex systems in new ways? That will be the challenge of the scholars, and of all of us engaged in thinking about the future. The rest of our lives will be in the future. We need to prepare for it now. We need to understand that the governance structure in the world is fossilized. It can not begin to cope with the challenges that this will bring. We have to develop a new way of managing the planet, collectively, through collective wisdom.