A short list of trends the world will be facing

This is not a set of predictions, just notes on what we ought to be paying attention to.

The West made it through the New Year holiday without a bombing or an assault on a public monument. A most curious thing, and I do not know what to make of it. Western leaders (that is, Blair and Bush) twisted the arms of the Indian and Pakistani leaders so they might back off from the world's first nuclear exchange.

Okay then. In this somewhat pregnant interval, I'll offer a short list of the trends that the world will be facing in the new year. This is not a set of predictions, just notes on what we ought to be paying attention to.

-- A US economy in deep transition. The consumer sleepwalk may be over. I don't know about you, but we have a lifetime's worth of manufactured stuff in our household. We don't need another damn thing, not a keychain, not a corkscrew, not an electric pencil sharpener, certainly not another coffee machine. There is so much stuff in America that you could run an economy on yard sales for five years. And it may happen! Even poor people in the US have amazing amounts of stuff. What draws my attention especially is the potential for a tremendous unwinding of mis-investment in 2002, especially as the national retail chains move past the holiday frenzy into the likely wasteland of mid-winter. First they will practically give merhandise away. Then there will come a time when even drastic 70 % off sales will not draw the shoppers in. Then it's desperate retrenchment, closing of stores, bankruptcy, and finally the abandonment of suburban property. I think we'll see a lot of this in '02. The collapsing bond market is a harbinger of severe structural problems going as far as the loss of confidence in the US dollar and capital flight -- probably into Euro-denominated investments. And what kind of havoc awaits in the wreck of Enron and its Number One enabler JP Morgan? I could go on, but I'd prefer to just point to my conclusion for what it is worth: the destination of the American economic transition probably lies in the direction of re-localizing economic activity. The "global economy" was a set of temporary relationships based on special conditions, not a permanent institution, and it is unraveling fast. We are going to have to re-imagine and rebuild local economies in America, and it ain't gonna be easy because the inertia of the past fifty years is tremendous.

-- Global politics. Perhaps New Years went off without an explosion, but I doubt we've seen the end of political mischief, especially emanating out of our collision with Islam. Osama is on the loose and what happens when he pops up at Mecca in March? Afghanistan cost us at least $100 billion -- and they were hardly a nation in any meaningful military sense. The bottom line globally is that there are vast, swelling populations in the regions of the world least able to support them, and every day there are legions more young men with nothing to do and no hope. They will express themselves, even if that means merely expressing their hormones in senseless violence. America can't afford $100 billion a year in international policing. Something else to watch: the situation in Mexico. As the US economy melts down in a goo of "consumer" non-performance, Mexico's economy will slip into desperation and disorder, meaning possibly revolution. During the last Mexican revolution, 1915, almost a third of Mexico's population escaped the chaos to El Norte.

-- Global climate change. Weird weather may have more to do with politics and economics in '02 than all the turbaned maniacs between Algiers and Manilla. We've had very weird weather in the Northeast -- almost no rain since the springtime and now no snow on the ground (despite the localized "lake effect" blizzard in Buffalo). We got zilch over here by the Vermont border. Pretty soon these abnormalities will be experienced both here and around the world as water problems. Two days ago our housekeeper told me that her shallow well (called a "point" well hereabouts) is dangerously close to running dry. Her neighbor IS dry. The world bank has said many times that the wars of the future will be fought over water.

-- The march of disease. The New York Times ran a pretty startling piece Sunday about the rise of AIDS in China. Some people I respect tell me that AIDS will become the sole preoccupation of the world within the next ten years. Other news stories in the past 30 days detail the mutations occuring in US AIDS cases in which patients are no longer responding to the much-touted HIV drug cocktail. The virus is moving. We are also, incidentally, overdue for a major influenza event of the type that started on a Kansas pig farm in 1918 and ended up killing half a million people in the US alone before 1920.

-- Then there is our old friend, the oil problem. I have obviously detatched this from the global politics category, but it is part of that thread. We have done not a goddam thing in the past half year to clarify our social and economic future vis-a-vis our addiction to oil (and the fact that most of the oil left in the world belongs to people who hate us). We don't want to hear it. Anyway, gas at the pump has never been cheaper -- an anomoly that many Americans mistake for a permanent condition. The need to prepare for a less car-dependent living arrangement is simply not on the national radar screen. The price we pay for this wilfull ignorance may be political disorder so intense that the nation could dissolve into faction-driven regional conflict. And sooner rather than later. I hear blather every day about how we are going to be saved by cheap oil from the Russians or by new pipelines running out of Khazakstan. Forget it.