A Brief History of the Future
English cover
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| Author | Jacques Attali |
|---|---|
| Original title | Une brève histoire de l'avenir |
| Country | France |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Prospective history |
| Published | 11 March 2009 (Arcade Publishing) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 181603360 |
A Brief History of the Future is a speculative futurology book about the next 50 years by Jacques Attali. The original edition was published by Fayard in 2006.
The first third of the book retraces Human history from prehistory to today, with an emphasis on the rise of capitalism around 1200. It describes Dumézil's three Orders (religious, military and economic) as the "ritual order", the "imperial order" and the "merchant order", noting that the "merchant order" came to supersede the two others.
The book hypothesizes that "merchant order" went through nine successive geographical "cores" associated with a characteristic technology. The core cities were:
A city would then become a "core" when it able to transform a service into an industrial product. The close vicinity becomes the "environment", and the rest of the world becomes the "periphery".
The speculation as to how the future will unfold begins one third into the book, which predicts the fall of the US Empire before the end of the ninth form of capitalism, estimated to take place around 2035.
It would be followed by a polycentric world, with nine dominating nations on all continents: the United States, Brazil, Mexico, China, India, Russia, the European Union, Egypt and Nigeria. Some of them, notably China, India and Nigeria, as well as other countries artificially created after colonization, could undertake an explosion process similar to that of USSR in 1991, with as many as 100 new countries emerging. Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Australia, Canada and South Africa would also play important roles as major regional powers.
A process of "nomadisation" would stem from technological factors, like the Internet; from demographic factors, like aging of developed populations which would entail massive immigration from Southern countries to pay retirements; and from development of megapoles.
Increase of world population would entail a doubling of global farming production. Urbanisation would make forest disappear everywhere, except for Europe and Northern America where artificially maintained ones would subsist. This would cause further increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and accelerate global warming. Consecutive droughts would make water a rare resource, and greatly reduce biodiversity.
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