DIGITAL TRENDSPOTTING 2019:1C — Social Context: Isn’t the World Getting Better?

Then it is time to understand what the 2018 meant, as part of the process of seriously identifying what the digital trends will be in 2019. To put it all in its context, we begin with the general trends. While the major trends of previous year were about population growth, automation, refugee waves and populism, this year has been mainly filled with geopolitical turbulence, economic slowdown, scientific development in general and digital revolution in particular.

As a first disclaimer, those who feel that they are knowledgeable enough about the social context of the tech year 2018, can go directly to the essence of the trendspotting in upcoming postings. All of us others can advantageously get the whole context of 2018 by continue reading the post below — because isn’t it for sure that whatever the world trends are it is still getting better? ;-)

Isn’t the world getting better?

All nostalgic who think that it was “better in the good old days” can only make sure to back off: if you look at facts it is with 100% certainty that man today has a far better life than we ever had before. For those who are insightful enough to turn their attention from the latest journals and tweeted horror propaganda, and instead are interested in a slightly larger perspective, professor Hans Rosling (RIP) shows in one of the year’s very best books, “Factfulness”, that a huge lot of good things happened lately.

Science, knowledge and learning

First science has made tremendous progress century after century, decade after decade, year after year — now with 2.6 million scientific articles worldwide. Science in turn is the foundation of all education, where, for example:

The proportion of girls who go to school has increased from 65% to over 90% since 1970.

But no chain is stronger than the weakest link, and here we have the prerequisites for learning with perhaps the three most important technological conditions, such as electricity which increased from 70% to 85% in just 25 years, access to the Internet increased to over 50% this year, while 2/3 of the world’s 7.6 billion people today have a mobile phone. The figures speak for itself, and few people would argue against that this in turn contributed to the perhaps most magical thing of them all:

Reading literacy increasing from under 50% in 1950 to wonderful 95% today.

Amazing things that have increased

All this is expected to have given rise to all the other wonderful things that happened in recent years. First all good things that have increased — such as people living 6 years longer than they did in the 1990s and that we have gone from survival in childhood cancer from 60% to 80% last 50 years. This year’s WEF study shows that the number of women in leading positions in the world has increased by 34% (although at current speeds it will take 108 years before reaching a global balance). We have had a tripling of the ROI on harvest from 1.4 to 4 tonnes/hectare last 50 years, and access to water has increased from 60 to 90% in 40 years.

And not only man has got better, but in the middle of everything we have also seen some successes for mother earth, where we have tripled the proportion of protected nature in the world, which has increased from 5% to 15% in 50 years. In line with this we received a ten-fold increase in species with protection status from 10,000 to 90,000 in 20 years — which has led to things like the number of mountain gorillas increasing significantly to 1000 this year, and the number of wild tigers in Nepal doubling in the past decade.

Horrible things that have diminished

Likewise, the scientific revolution, the dramatically increased education, and the drastically improved digital infrastructure for implementing learning, have also contributed to the reduction of a lot of horrors.

What comes first to speak is the poverty, and while the media this year focused more on the fact that 1% of the world now owns 46% of the wealth in the world, we also have another fact:

Extreme poverty decreased from 85% in 1800 to 20 years ago to go down to 20%.

And even though the rate has since declined — where stars like Melinda Gates show that investment is needed not only in health, but also education for women, in particular, to continue the positive trend — the extreme poverty has now halved to 9 % in ten years!

And if you are surprised then you are not alone, because this is a gigantic humanitarian revolution that no one seems to know about. Rosling, who tested it, shows how 90% guess that extreme poverty instead has been constant or grown.

But that is not all, the positive trends only accrue, such as slavery which in 50 years declined from 170 to 3 countries where it is conducted legally. The number of death sentences halved in 50 years, child labour was reduced by almost 2/3 during the same period, the number of nuclear weapons reduced by ¾ at the same time, hunger decreased by 2/3.

There are now 25 million fewer child marriages, mainly due to decreases in southern Asia and Africa. There is still death penalty for being an atheist in 13 countries, and In Saudi Arabia, women still must have a guardian, but women are from this year aloud to drive a car, and in Iran women are watching football for the first time. And for all us americans crying out loud about this, US is not even ranked top 50 in gender gap internationally, after countries like Albania, Burundi, Cuba, Mozambique and even Uganda and Bangladesh. As for mother earth, ozone-hazardous substances have decreased from 1,600 to 20 the last half-century, while the price of solar cells has fallen in price 100 times in 50 years.

The greatest humanitarian gain of all

And then we have what Rosling argues credibly for as the humanitarian KPI:s no. 1: a) the proportion of children who die before the age of five, which has been reduced 10 times (!) from 40% to 4% in the last hundred years, partly b) the number of childbirths halved from 5 to 2.5 last half-century.

While people previously had to get many children because so many died, for the first time in human history one has come into “balance”. Two hundred years ago, we needed many “bodies” to help with agriculture

Today we now through contraception can focus all love and resources on 2 “souls” rather than on 5–6 “bodies”.

But it was also the case that 5–6 children were born but led to a scary life where 4 of your children died before they became adults, and only 2 became parents to the next generation. Rosling shows how today, for the first time in world history, we have two parents who give birth to about two children who survive.

There can be no better sign of a society’s humanitarian development.

If we go from individual to society, then we through this also have been able to get past the time of rapid population growth (the population increase we have in the coming decades is instead a one-time effect of our children getting older and not dying as quickly), where — contrary to what people generally tend to believe — the abolition of extreme poverty saving poor children not increases the population.

Instead, the elimination of extreme poverty is one of the three only proven methods for stopping the population growth, i.e:

When you a) eradicate poverty, b) give people education and c) contraceptives, then d) parents all over the world choose to have fewer children.

But super, then it is just to settle down and enjoy that everything is going well?

All this sounds amazing, and it actually is. So, is there anything at all that has not improved in recent years in general and in the last year in particular?

Well, of course there are concerns — and we will briefly go through several the worse ones in the upcoming posts — but it is not possible to escape that, overall, all the above facts are fantastic, and the positive trends could and should (!) continue. At the same time, none of them will come “automatically”, like any kind of “extrapolation” from a mossy economist or politician. The two most important conditions for the positive trends to continue, is that one does not look nostalgic in the rear-view mirror and naively into the future, but consolidates these achievements at two levels.

1. First, that you identify and act on any threats already long before they happen.

2. Second that you identify and act on all wonderful opportunities in the same way long before they happen 😊

This digital trendspotting is a contribution in this direction, where both the threats and the opportunities in this moment, to an extremely large extent, are about digital technologies — and it is our job to identify the threats and opportunities of these technologies so far before possible, in order to minimize the former and maximize the latter.

In the next article we will assess one of these “threats” over the year, the Politics and its consequences. Bon Appetit 😊

• Published Sections So Far: Foreword, Section 1A, Section 1B, Section 1C, Section 1D, Section 1E, Section 1F
• Digital Trendspotting 2019: As an inverted Christmas calendar, the trendspotting will be published as goodies for several weeks at the dawn of the new year. It will be delivered both on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/onlinestrategy/), on Medium (https://medium.com/@blockchainboss), and some video abstracts in our blockchain journey at Insta (https://www.instagram.com/rufus.lidman.blockchainjourney/).
• Digital contact: As usual, I love commenting and hot debate, so for anyone who wants to discuss, is hunting for key note speeches, or wants to be part of backing up the world’s coolest digital venture, inbox me on here, call on WA +46733 90 18 80, or email at rufus.lidman@aiar.com ;)