Hi Rick Fischer! Thanks for the reply.

I agree with parts of what you wrote, but disagree with other parts.

I agree that we reconstruct history in narrative-form, forcing events into literary tropes and thematic clusters which they do not naturally possess. I also agree that predicting the long-run effects of social events ex ante is difficult. I stated clearly that history is not a science; there are too many variables at play. Any claim about the future has to be tentative and fallible.

I disagree that we have no basis with which to predict the future. That is demonstrably untrue. If no-one could ever predict anything about the future, society would instantaneously collapse. Most of what we do with our lives relies on expectations about the future: that when I walk across a Zebra crossing, cars will decelerate and not accelerate; that when I finally die, society will keep going without me; or that when I wake up tomorrow morning, the sky will not fall in on itself.

You are right that if we break things down to the quantum level, there are an insurmountable number of factors to take account of. But that is the wrong level of analysis. We don’t need to study fundamental physical forces to grasp the social world. Instead, we can adopt political, cultural, technological, social and economic levels of analysis. If we can begin to understand these domains, we can start to get a sense of where is more and less likely to happen.

You write that:

“Your list of future consequences that you say will result from those conditions you name is nothing more than allowing your bias to influence your choices for the chain of future events that you believe will result in the final outcome you declare.”

First, I do not claim that certain consequences will axiomatically follow from certain conditions. What I say is that they are ‘possible events on the horizon which could seriously destabilise the status quo’ and that ‘some of these are more probable than others, but all have a certain apocalyptic plausibility’. In other words, I only say that they are possible, not that they are necessary. And I don’t attach a clear probability to each one, all I say is that some are more and some are less probable.

Second, what I claim is not biased in any interesting sense of the world. You cannot describe the world without using language, and language varies over space and time. There is no neutral standpoint from which to interpret the world. We always make assumptions. But that does not make all reasons equal. We can have better and worse reasons.

The seven risks which I set out depend on very basic matters of fact and inference.

1. The election of Donald Trump significantly increases the likelihood of a major power war. Well Trump has claimed that he wants Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, that he wants to tear up the Iranian nuclear deal, and consistently uses very bellicose rhetoric to talk about China. Clearly, if does those three things as President, then he is more likely than are his predecessors to trigger a major power war. That is hardly controversial.

2. The disintegration of the EU could fracture the main vehicle for post-war peace in Europe. The EU was originally founded to bind France and Germany together. Its main rationale since is the integration of the continent: to reach a level of interdependence that would make another war both unthinkable and self-lacerating. That has, obviously, been successful for 70 years (which is unprecedented in European history).

3. That climactic and demographic pressures will intensify migratory flows. If sea levels continue to rise, then entire countries will become uninhabitable, producing huge numbers of refugees (this will almost definitely happen to Bangladesh, which has a population of over 200m). If the current demographic trends in Africa continue, its population will double by 2050. That creates a huge increase in migrants crossing the Mediterranean for Europe.

4. The global economy is volatile and unequal. No one disagrees with these two statements.

5. The transition from U.S. hegemony could be dangerous. Most superpower transitions in history have witnessed a calamitous war. The U.S. is declining in relative terms on almost every single criteria of power: population, GDP, share of global trade, scientific output, etc. Accordingly, we should at least keep in mind that this is a danger.

6. Destructive power is both increasing and becoming more decentralised. This is a simple matter of fact: it has been the tendency since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is simply a fluke that nuclear weapons require extremely scarce fissile materials. Biological, chemical and cyber war are not so constrained. Nano-technological and general artificial intelligence (if you believe it’s possible) will not be either.

I don’t think any of these statements of risk are biased in the sense that I only believe them by virtue of my partiality to a particular worldview, or because I have ignored countervailing evidence.