What Will the World Look Like in 2030?
In its first few weeks, the new decade has already brought a number of big surprises. Events such as Qassem Soleimani’s assassination and Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a new Russian constitution, which few political observers would have predicted in the last days of 2019, are reshaping the world.
When people imagine the future, they tend to assume that most things will stay the same, or that the trends of the recent past will continue in a linear fashion. But the world today looks very different than people expected it to look in 2010. And one thing that is virtually certain about this coming decade is that the world by 2030 will look very different from what most expect today.
[Annie Lowrey: The decade in which everything was great but felt terrible]
This is a good reason to look ahead. Although making firm predictions is always a foolhardy endeavor for political scientists, raising plausible outcomes that, from the current vantage point, may seem inconceivable is often clarifying.
