In Defense of High-Speed Passenger Rail

On July 23, two bullet trains collided in Wenzhou, China, killing at least 40 people. This tragedy prompted a rare apology from the governing Chinese Communist Party, and drew international criticism of high speed rail as a whole. For some observers, China’s high speed rail system symbolized the overreach of a nation in an unsustainable economic bubble, and the bureaucracy that has made the system both expensive and dangerous.

Others have questioned the economic feasibility of passenger rail in general, noting that in the United States, only the Amtrak line from Boston to Washington is profitable. According to this criticism, the United States – unlike Europe, Japan, and China – is very sparsely populated, which means that there will simply never be enough passengers to make the system profitable. In recent months, the prospect of a high speed rail network in the United States has been pilloried from the right and left alike. In California, the only serious high-speed rail project in the country has been criticized as wasteful spending by a state that is already in dire fiscal straits.

In a scathing review, The Economist claims that high-speed passenger rail could ruin America’s envy-of-the-world freight train system, with which it would most likely share its tracks. Having worked in logistics myself, I am sympathetic to The Economist’s concerns. But this isn’t a good argument against high-speed passenger rail; on the contrary, it is a reason to invest more, in order to build a separate network for passenger trains which can travel at much higher speeds.

What of the argument that the United States is too sparsely populated for passenger trains to ever be a profitable mode of transportation? After all, it’s undeniably true that large cities in the United States are much farther apart than large cities elsewhere, and therefore fewer people will want to use the trains. My response to these arguments is that the critics are using the wrong metric. Why must high-speed passenger rail systems be profitable in the first place? We have a terrific Interstate Highway System which, with the exception of a few toll roads, generates no revenue whatsoever. Yet almost no one suggests that the Interstate Highway System was a bad investment for the United States.

Fine, say the critics, but since we have such a great highway system why do we need trains? America is a nation that loves to drive. But a passenger rail system would not be in competition with highways, if it is designed correctly. Relatively few people choose to use highways for long-distance travel between major cities anyway, opting for air travel. Some critics point to the slow passenger lines that currently exist and how unpopular they are, suggesting that high-speed passenger lines would be an even bigger waste of money. But this criticism loses sight of what makes such a system appealing in the first place: Slow passenger rail systems are disliked by travelers precisely because they are slow; they offer neither the speed of air travel nor the independence of highways.

Finally we come to the standard libertarian criticism of public expenditures: Why should the government invest in a high-speed rail system at all? Airport congestion imposes economic costs on society: wasted time in airport terminals, delayed business meetings, and people choosing to drive instead of fly (which causes more highway congestion and traffic fatalities). Since the public is indirectly footing the bill for these problems anyway, why not redirect the money to high-speed rail, which would actually relieve some of the airport congestion by taking some of the customers?

The United States needs a high-speed passenger rail system. After years of neglect, America’s infrastructure is rated only the 16th best in the world. As air travel becomes evermore unpleasant and congested, high speed rail will become a necessity for traveling between cities. By the middle of this century, the United States can have an incredibly efficient three-tier travel system: For short-distance travel (less than 50 miles), we would have our Interstate Highway System complemented by a network of intelligent self-driving cars. For medium-distance travel (50-500 miles), we would have a network of high-speed rail, which would pick up and drop off passengers near the center of large cities. For long-distance travel (more than 500 miles), we would have our airports, which would be much more efficient due to the fact that there would be fewer passengers clogging the system with short-haul flights that would be better addressed by trains.

High-speed rail is not some trivial boondoggle to be mocked for its unprofitability; it is the central public transit challenge of the 21st century. If the United States begins the undertaking now with the same commitment which President Dwight Eisenhower brought to the Interstate Highway System 55 years ago, it can have a state of the art network of passenger trains by the middle of the century. Neither technology nor economics is an obstacle; only the political will stands in the way.

The Democratic Threshold

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, futurist and political economist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book in 1992 entitled The End of History and the Last Man, in which he theorized that nearly all nations would soon become liberal democracies. Since all competing global ideologies had been defeated, Fukuyama felt that it was only logical that the people of all nations would soon demand freedom from their leaders and live in peace happily ever after – the end of history. Since 9/11, Fukuyama’s predictions have frequently been derided and ridiculed for such a spectacularly inaccurate and overly-optimistic view of the future.

In light of the democratic revolts currently spreading across the Arab world, Fukuyama’s theory merits reexamination. Was he wrong, or just a few decades premature? Is liberal democracy the inevitable final stage of development, and if so, what kind of conditions are necessary for it to thrive? It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of the moment – the collapse of communism must have been just as exhilarating to democrats as the (possible) collapse of Arab autocracy is today – but we must bear in mind that the crystal ball is always murky. It is unclear how far the current wave of revolutions will spread, or what the ultimate outcome will be. Charting “the end of history” based on recent current events is never a good idea.

Fortunately, we need not make wide-eyed predictions based upon what we wish were true. There is plenty of statistical data to analyze. The relationship between the economic success of a nation and its level of democracy is very strong. Nearly all countries with a GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) of at least $10,000 are at least partially democratic, with the vast majority being full-fledged democracies, as measured by The Economist’s Democracy Index. However, the statistics don’t show us which is the cause and which the effect. Does an affluent society make people more willing to demand their democratic freedoms, or does democracy bring about affluence? There have been many autocracies which have grown their economies very quickly – South Korea in the 1970s, Chile in the 1980s, and China today – but they always seem to democratize around the same time they become wealthy. This suggests to me that an economically empowered people are more likely to demand democratic empowerment; and just as importantly, governments are likely to accede to their demands. In my view, a GDP per capita of $10,000 is a Democratic Threshold. No nation can economically develop past this level without transitioning to at least partial democracy.

But there is one group of countries that is a large exception to this rule. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and Thomas Friedman at Foreign Policy Magazine have both pointed out the toxic effect that oil has on democracy. Indeed, the statistics bear this out. With the exception of Norway and the Netherlands, every oil-rich country (where oil exports account for at least 5% of GDP) is much less democratic than other countries at the same level of development without oil. Qatar may have a higher GDP per capita than the United States, but it is far less democratic. Oil breeds corruption and autocracy.

Taking oil-rich countries out of the mix, I have charted the relationship between democracy and economic development:

A few autocracies are nearing the $10,000 GDP per capita Democratic Threshold. A few others including China are not there yet, but are growing so fast that they will most likely reach it within a decade. Some countries have not reached the Democratic Threshold, but score far lower on The Economist’s Democracy Index than one would expect, given their GDP per capita. Nations falling into these categories are the ones best primed for some serious progress toward democracy. What countries would those be?

Country	GDP per capita (PPP)	Democracy Index	Expected DI	Democracy Deficit
Tunisia	$9,500	2.79	6.15	-3.36
North Korea	$1,800	1.08	4.43	-3.35
Uzbekistan	$3,100	1.74	4.99	-3.25
China	$7,400	3.14	5.89	-2.75
Djibouti	$2,800	2.20	4.89	-2.69
Cuba	$9,900	3.52	6.19	-2.67
Egypt	$6,200	3.07	5.71	-2.64
Laos	$2,400	2.10	4.73	-2.63
Swaziland	$4,500	2.90	5.38	-2.48
Burma	$1,100	1.77	3.92	-2.15
Vietnam	$3,100	2.94	4.99	-2.05
Tajikistan	$2,000	2.51	4.54	-2.03
Guinea-Bissau	$1,100	1.99	3.92	-1.93
Jordan	$5,300	3.74	5.55	-1.81
Fiji	$4,300	3.62	5.33	-1.71

(Disclaimer: Obviously I’m not saying that these countries are all poised to become liberal democracies overnight, merely that there is the potential for substantial progress. North Korea, for example, has set the democratic bar so low that even modest efforts toward democracy would be a major step forward.)

The three Arab states on this list – Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan – are in the midst of serious challenges to their authority. It’s no coincidence that these three countries, and not other Arab states, are the epicenter of the protests. As I write this, Tunisians have successfully deposed their dictator in the Jasmine Revolution. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has declared he will not seek reelection this fall, although his prospects of remaining in power even that long look pretty bleak. Jordan’s enlightened King Abdullah has just dismissed his government and has wisely pledged to institute immediate democratic reforms.

The other countries on this list are an assortment of communist holdouts, rogue nations, and states dominated by a larger power. If China becomes democratic, for example, it could send shockwaves throughout the region and lead to the collapse of North Korea, Burma, and authoritarian regimes throughout Africa, which depend on China for their survival.

Fukuyama’s theory seems to be supported by the statistical evidence - liberal democracy is indeed the end of history. Once countries surpass the Democratic Threshold – approximately $10,000 GDP per capita – they almost invariably develop some form of democracy. Those that make a conscious decision to keep their people impoverished may be less likely to transition to democracy, but economic stagnation can lead to other forms of revolt due to public dissatisfaction. This leads to a paradox for authoritarian governments: They will quickly fall out of favor with the public if they can’t produce a strong economy, but prosperity will ultimately lead to their downfall in the longer term.

I can’t say that I agree with some of Fukuyama’s idealistic, neoconservative foreign policy recommendations for spreading democracy, but I do agree with his idea of “democratic determinism.” Countries without oil are ultimately destined to become democracies as they become wealthy. And even the petro-states have hope. As soon as the world transitions to alternative sources of energy, their economies will no longer be strangled by oil and it will no longer serve as a drag on their freedom. Democracy is coming to a country near you. It’s only a matter of time until we reach the end of history.

PREDICTIONS:

By 2013 – Cuba has made substantial progress toward democracy relative to where it stood at the beginning of 2011.

By 2016 – Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan have made substantial progress toward democracy relative to where they stood at the beginning of 2011.

By 2018 – China has made substantial progress toward democracy relative to where it stood at the beginning of 2011.

Giving Thanks

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” – Martin Luther King

With the constant barrage of stories in the media about war, recession, terrorism, swine flu, natural disasters, and various other tragedies, one could easily conclude that the world is a horrifying place. But instead of looking at the latest headlines, we should instead contemplate the broad trends of history. The world is a far better place to live today than it ever has been before, and all indications are that the quality of life will continue to improve. This is not just Panglossian optimism; the world is empirically a better place to live by almost any metric one chooses, compared to almost any other historical era one chooses. The arc of human development is long, but it bends towards a better quality of life. And for that, we should be thankful.

For most of human history, life was “nasty, brutish, and short” as Thomas Hobbes described it. The average life expectancy in most major civilizations – including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and medieval Britain – hovered around 30 years. And these were among the leading civilizations of their era. Today, even the least developed countries on earth typically have life expectancies far higher than that. The advent of the Germ Theory of Disease has revolutionized the way we think about infectious diseases, and has increased the global life expectancy to 69 years. In many developed countries, life expectancy at birth exceeds 80 years.

Education is now ubiquitous in a way that it never has been before in human history. Prior to the middle of the 19^th century, universal education was a completely unknown concept. Education was the province of the elite, designed solely to teach young people how to be the future leaders of the world. Although the American education system is rightly the target of much criticism today, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a crowning achievement of our history. Universal education has enabled people from all walks of life to apply their talents to make the world a better place in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. Chris Anderson, the curator of TED Talks, proposes this thought experiment: “Pick your favorite scientist, mathematician, or cultural hero. Now imagine that instead of being born when and where they were, they had instead been born with the same abilities in a typical poverty-stricken village in, say, the France of 1200 or the Ethiopia of 1980. Would they have made the same contribution they did make? Of course not.” The ubiquity of education in our society is something for which we should be truly thankful, since it has allowed many more people to solve societal problems than were previously able to do so.

But even many of those who readily acknowledge that life today is much better than in the distant past may wonder if we have run out of steam in recent decades. Stories about the decline of Western civilization are not hard to find in the media, nor are dire warnings about how abrupt climate change could cause widespread famines and wars. If only we could return to the good old days, they wish. But the fact is that the world is much better now than in recent decades as well. Although many people might like to turn back the clock to 2007, before the recession, in the grand scheme of things the recession will be a small blip on the radar screen. If you turn the clock back much farther than just a few years, it becomes obvious that the world is a much better place today than in the past. Over a billion people have been lifted out of grinding poverty in China and India in the last 20 years. The World Wide Web – a strong contender for the single greatest invention of mankind – is less than 20 years old. In the United States, women and minorities have had equal rights for less than 50 years. The Cold War no longer enslaves half the world, and no longer carries the credible threat of a nuclear apocalypse. The overall number of humans per capita killed in warfare is at its lowest level since at least World War II, and possibly all of human history. The “good old days” were never that good. The quality of life today is staggeringly better than even the recent past.

But the most important thing for which we should be thankful is the hope for an even better future. The 20^th century was by far the most disruptive century since the dawn of civilization, and there is no reason the 21^st century can’t be just as important for radically altering the way humans live. Some of the transformative technologies that are now on the horizon include self-driving vehicles, stem cell therapy, lab-grown meat, ubiquitous computing, genomics, 3D printing, solar energy, and mature nanotechnology. These all offer the potential to dramatically improve our quality of life for the better, just as sanitation and education did in the 19^th century, and as plumbing and electricity did in the 20^th.

Let us give thanks for the fact that we live in the best epoch of human history – relative to both the distant past and the recent past. Furthermore, let us be grateful that the technological revolution of the last 150 years shows no signs of slowing down, and will continue to unlock the true potential of human beings by freeing us from menial tasks and unpleasant maladies. We live in interesting times. Let’s treat that as a blessing, not a curse.

Political Issues on the Horizon, Part 2

In my last entry, I explored two political issues that I expect to grow in importance in the United States over the next decade: privacy and bioethics. Today the focus is on two issues which already have a firm hold on the political landscape, but will nevertheless continue to evolve and grow in importance.

Terrorism. Ever since 9/11, American political discussions about terrorism have tended to boil down to two main components: Airport security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that either component has actually done anything to prevent terrorism. Changes in airport security have been less about improving safety than creating the illusion of heightened security for travelers. And the grossly mismanaged wars have succeeded only in pushing terrorism across an arbitrary national border (in the case of Afghanistan) or actively creating terrorists where they were not previously a problem (in the case of Iraq). With these issues so completely dominating the discussion of how to fight terrorism, little attention has been given to important questions, such as how to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and how to quickly respond to a WMD terrorist attack to minimize the devastation.

In the future, the United States will not have the luxury of being able to ignore these questions. Today’s terrorists typically have access to only the crudest weapons: bombs capable of killing, at most, a few hundred people. Spectacular attacks like 9/11 are vanishingly rare, making the current level of funding, military commitment, and political capital spent on terrorism vastly disproportionate to the actual problem. But it remains to be seen how long that will be the case. Weapons of mass destruction may soon be available to terrorists, which could pose a much more serious danger than traditional terrorist attacks. The most worrying threat in the near future is nuclear proliferation, as a growing number of unstable regimes acquire nuclear weapons. In the slightly more distant future, biological weapons may pose an even greater danger to the world, as the necessary ingredients and know-how will be available to nearly any university student. Governments need to begin developing serious plans for how to minimize the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or failing that, rapid response plans after a massive terror attack. To date, the United States has done neither.

As a political issue, I worry that debates over terrorism will continue to be dominated by those seeking to eliminate "terrorism" as a concept, with conservatives favoring an aggressive foreign policy to combat known terrorist havens, and liberals preferring more targeted nation-building efforts to eliminate the conditions in which terrorists typically arise (e.g. poverty and lawlessness). While this debate is not entirely unproductive, it is of secondary importance since terrorist attacks are relatively rare anyway. My hope is that the debate will shift from how to prevent "terrorism" as a whole, to how to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This is a much more focused and achievable goal. But regardless of how the debate evolves, terrorism does not seem likely to disappear from the political landscape anytime soon.

Globalization. 20 years after the end of the Cold War and 15 years after the birth of e-commerce, it is almost a cliché to say that the world is becoming more interconnected. The nations of the world depend on one another more than ever. Wars between national governments are on a terminal decline, as the cost of waging these wars (in terms of being cut off from neighboring markets) continues to grow relative to the benefits. Many developing countries have found that globalization is the quickest path to economic development, with many hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese escaping poverty in the last 20 years.

Many nations are seeing strong political backlashes against globalization. In the United States, this has manifested itself in debates over immigration and outsourcing. There does not seem to be any clear-cut ideological division on globalization. Traditionally, the Democratic Party has been friendlier toward immigration, and the Republican Party has been more receptive toward free trade, despite the fact that these policies are two sides of the same coin, pitting globalists against nationalists. However, even within these policies, the partisan lines are blurry: some Democratic politicians have been staunch supporters of free trade (including President Bill Clinton) and some Republican politicians have been ardent defenders of open immigration (including President George W. Bush).

As developing countries open up their markets and continue to grow richer, and rich countries become more dependent on economic rivals like China, the debate over globalization will continue to grow louder. The specific objections will vary depending on the specific policy: In some cases the opposition will be fueled by concerns over environmentalism, and other times by fears of rising income inequality. In some cases, nations may not like the fact that their economic well-being is so dependent upon their trading partners' policies, with economic problems in one nation spilling over to others. In 1999, labor activists in Seattle successfully disrupted a meeting of the World Trade Organization, largely motivated by fears that their jobs would be outsourced.

As globalization grows in importance as a political issue, it is likely that the advocates and opponents of globalization will firmly drag the political parties toward opposing viewpoints. One party will probably come to represent open immigration and trade, while the other becomes more nationalistic and inward-looking. At the present time, it is difficult to determine which party will be which.

In my next entry, I will look at two political issues which I think will fade in importance over the next decade.

The Future of Energy: Solar Power Is Coming

The amount of energy the earth receives from the sun each year is more than 10,000 times the total energy needs of all humans on earth. We cannot effectively harness even such a paltry fraction of the sun’s energy yet. In 2008, less than 0.02% of the global energy supply came from solar energy. In most parts of the world, solar energy is simply too expensive. Carbon-based energy such as oil and coal still provide a cheaper alternative, even while harming our environment. Solar energy currently costs about 38 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with only 5 cents per kWh for oil and less than 1 cent per kWh for coal. Government taxes and subsidies typically reduce this cost disparity slightly, but not enough to make solar energy viable for most people.

Fortunately, this will soon change. Photovoltaic solar cells are typically made of silicon: the same material in computer chips. Engineers cannot shrink the solar panels in the same way that they can shrink transistors, because solar panels need to have a large surface area to absorb as much sunlight as possible. However, they can make the panels themselves more efficient and shrink the thickness of the panels. As a result, solar energy appears to be on a Moore’s Law-like trajectory of its own. Approximately every 18 months, the total solar capacity doubles and the cost falls by 20%. Up until now, this hasn’t been noticeable because it is such a small portion of our overall energy supply. Doubling a small number is still a small number.

However, if this trend continues, solar energy will be able to supply virtually 100% of the earth’s energy needs by 2035. Some observers are even more optimistic, predicting that solar energy will cost about the same as carbon-based energy by 2015. They theorize that after 2015, the capacity of solar energy could increase much more quickly, as consumer demand for solar energy makes it very lucrative and the industry explodes. Other observers are more skeptical; some question whether solar energy is really on Moore’s Law-like pattern of exponential growth at all, suggesting that this recent trend could be caused by other factors.

I think it’s quite clear that solar power will continue to grow at an exponential rate, since manufacturing solar panels requires many of the same techniques that drive the reduction in cost of computer chips. But I wouldn’t count on the industry suddenly exploding in popularity as soon as solar energy becomes slightly cheaper than oil and coal. It’s important to remember that solar energy is not a commodity like oil that can be traded globally. The costs will be much lower in deserts and other sunny areas. By the end of this decade, we may see the American Southwest and Southern Europe starting to switch to solar power, while other regions lag behind, using oil and coal for much longer.

Moving away from fossil fuels will be the single most important step we can take to stop making climate change worse (although much of the damage will already be done, and will continue to accumulate for decades after the switch). An international economy that was not reliant on oil would be much more stable for global security. Many of the biggest potential threats to international stability come from oil-rich regimes, where money from oil exports often funds extremist groups or large militaries that destabilize the region. Furthermore, solar energy prices would be much more predictable than oil. Unlike oil, there would be no maximum amount of energy available; new solar panels could always be added and older panels could be improved, ensuring that the price continued to drop. They would drop at a roughly consistent rate, rather than fluctuating wildly from one year to the next as oil does. Eventually, the energy cost in nearly all products will be virtually eliminated, as solar energy becomes cheaper and cheaper.

Most people look back over recent history and find it difficult to imagine that energy prices will ever go down - just look at gas prices today compared to a decade ago! But in reality, the past decade is an exception, caused by the rapid development of China and India just as we reached peak oil production. In the long term, the broad trend has been for energy costs to decline. Solar energy will ensure that that trend continues for decades to come.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2025 – In the United States, solar energy is cheaper than oil on average, on a per kilowatt-hour basis.
By 2035 – The global oil trade is less than 25% the size that it is in 2010 (approximately $2.1 trillion), adjusted for inflation.

The Economics of Happiness

The underlying assumption of modern economics has always been the notion that having more things makes people better off. Economists of all ideologies - from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman - have implicitly accepted this assumption, even while arguing with one another over the best way to optimize the production or distribution of things. In the last few years, an emerging field of economic theory, Happiness Economics, is finally challenging that assumption. By asking people in many different nations, economic conditions, and social groups if they are happy with their lives, economists are yielding some very interesting results.

Can money buy happiness? It turns out that it can, but only up to a point. In the United States, the poor are far less happy than everyone else, but there is no significant difference in self-reported happiness between the middle-class and the wealthy. Although the American economy is vastly larger today than it was immediately after World War II, self-reported happiness levels have remained stagnant. This pattern is observed on a global scale as well. The least happy places on earth are typically impoverished, war-torn nations, but the wealthiest nations are not necessarily any happier than middle-income nations. Once a nation is economically developed enough to meet the basic needs of its citizens, the relationship between national income and national happiness ceases to exist. (EDIT: Some researchers disagree, claiming that more income does indeed tend to result in more happiness.)

The happiest nation in the world is Costa Rica, which has a GDP per capita that is less than one-fourth that of the United States, and an average life expectancy that is roughly the same as the United States’. This pattern is widespread in Latin America. Although most Latin American nations are middle-income nations, the region as a whole is extremely happy. The opposite pattern manifests itself in Eastern Europe and Russia. These nations are upper-middle income, but report extremely low levels of subjective happiness.

So if money can’t buy happiness, what causes people to be happy or unhappy? Research indicates that married people are happier than single people, religious people are happier than non-religious people, and those with more leisure time are happier than workaholics. People who donate their time and money to charity are happier than those who don’t.

On the national level, there does not appear to be any relationship between political freedom and happiness, once income is controlled for. Some of the happiest nations – such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia – are hardly poster children for democracy and human rights. National happiness seems to be driven primarily by the same factors that drive individual happiness: Happy marriages, active religions, workers who have leisure time, a culture of charity, and enough income to avoid poverty.

In 1972, the King of Bhutan coined the term “Gross National Happiness” as his preferred metric for judging his nation’s progress. Although it was ridiculed at the time, tiny Bhutan is now one of the happiest nations on earth: an enclave of happiness nestled between much less happy nations like China, India, and Bangladesh. Many other nations are now investigating “Gross National Happiness” metrics of their own, including Brazil, Italy, and Canada. Maybe the economics of happiness is an idea whose time has finally come. Perhaps future economists can focus less on what maximizes our wealth, and more on what maximizes our well-being.

The Satisfaction with Life Index. Blue countries are the happiest, red countries are the least happy.

The Future of Privacy - Radical Openness

Generally, my visions of tomorrow are quite optimistic. But there is one area where I am decidedly a pessimist. The future of privacy seems bleak. Many of us who are relatively tech-savvy have already given up much of our privacy voluntarily for the sake of convenience, fun, or money. I am a member of a social network which tracks my every movement by allowing me to check in with my smartphone to nearly every location I visit. Another of my social networks allows me to publish my every thought in real time, as long as it doesn’t exceed 140 characters. A popular financial website requires that users turn over the passwords to their bank accounts, then analyzes the users’ financial habits. Nearly all young people belong to a social network which makes no secret of its desire to collect our personal information to mine the data.

Ten years ago, most people would have been shocked by these technologies. Who would have thought that the biggest threat to our privacy would come from us voluntarily giving up our information? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rightly received a lot of criticism by forcing Facebook users to publicly reveal their personal information by default, then claiming that Facebook was merely adapting to users’ declining expectations of privacy. Zuckerberg’s claim was certainly untrue – Facebook is one of the driving forces behind declining expectations of privacy, rather than merely a response to it – but his instinct is probably correct that users will tolerate more intrusions on their privacy once they are accustomed to it.

My fellow futurist blogger David Houle notes, “As technology advances, privacy declines.” I think this is unfortunately correct, and very little can be done to change it. Tech-savvy young people in developed countries certainly have less privacy than they did a decade ago, and are mostly OK with that. In the coming decades, society will have to radically redefine its notions of privacy. I imagine that there may come a time when it is no longer practical to expect to be able to travel anywhere without your visit ending up in an online database, perhaps publicly available to anyone who cares. In the not too distant future, there may be vast government or corporate databases of genomes and other biometric indicators from nearly everyone in the nation.

Does this mean that an Orwellian dictatorship is likely? I don’t think so. Chances are, people will be willing to adjust their privacy expectations downward for the sake of convenience, just as they do now for Facebook. It remains to be seen if lowered expectations of privacy will actually help dictatorships thrive. Repressive states are increasingly blocking the very same tools that are responsible for the declining expectations of privacy – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Foursquare. It seems that these governments view them more as tools for subversion than as useful ways to snoop on political opponents.

This past week, the US Senate voted to confirm Elena Kagan as the next Supreme Court Justice. Much of her testimony dealt with her constitutional views on the right to privacy. In the United States at the present time, this is mostly just a code phrase for a nominee’s views on abortion, but I think that the right to privacy will become a more important issue in its own right for future confirmation hearings. The Supreme Court will probably eventually need to define what the right to privacy entails, who it protects, and from whom it protects them.

In the legislature, stronger safeguards for privacy can help prevent the emergence of corporate Big Brothers. Google recently decided to withdraw from China instead of obeying China’s censorship laws or facilitating its eavesdropping on its citizens. As commendable as this is, most large corporations are not as civic-minded. Yahoo! has been known to turn over personal emails from political dissidents to dictatorships. A law modeled on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prevents US companies from infringing on their users’ privacy, wherever in the world they are located, would be a major step toward keeping Big Brother at bay. American companies would no longer have the excuse that they will be singled out for persecution if they refuse to participate in invasions of privacy by the governments of the countries in which they operate. Very few nations could feasibly ban every American company merely for obeying US laws.

Ultimately, government action and corporate good deeds can only slow the inevitable shift toward less privacy, and perhaps prevent some of its worst excesses. In the future, governments, corporations, and individuals can and will gain access to far more information about us than is currently available in the public domain. The totalitarianism of Big Brother probably isn’t going to happen…but hundreds of Little Brothers may be watching you soon, if they aren’t already.

Black Swans

When predictions about the future are incorrect, it is often because the predictor assumed that history wouldn’t provide us with any surprises, which it almost invariably does. Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to these events as black swans. It is extremely difficult to predict them in advance, but they have a drastic impact on world history. Examples include 9/11, the AIDS pandemic, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the invention of nuclear weapons, the stock market crash of 1929, the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, or the outbreak of World War I.

You may notice that most of the events on this list are widely considered to be disasters. As Warren Buffett has said, “Surprises are nearly always bad.” However, this isn’t universally true. There are, on rare occasions, examples of positive black swan events.

For example, in 1968 Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which predicted a nightmarish future of overpopulation and mass famine. Ehrlich looked at the global population trends from recent decades and saw that people were reproducing at an alarmingly fast rate. Yet within just a few years of the book’s publication, global birth rates began to decline and the global food supply increased exponentially. Ehrlich completely missed two very important “positive” black swans: The widespread adoption of the birth control pill and the Green Revolution in India.

The purpose of thinking about potential black swan events is to plan for events that are individually unlikely to occur, but would have a profound impact on the world if they do. I’ve thought of a few black swan events to think about for the next decade:

• A nuclear war between India and Pakistan
• The democratization or fragmentation of China
• Ecological collapse, followed or preceded by abrupt climate change
• Bioterror or bioerror releases a manmade super-plague
• The invention of effective anti-aging medicine offers indefinite lifespans
• The assassination of a major world leader
• An especially nasty strain of avian or swine flu results in a global pandemic
• An American state votes to secede from the union
• A global financial collapse

Depressing, huh? I tend to agree with Buffett that surprises tend to be bad (with some exceptions). Positive events tend to be much more incremental and predictable than negative events. You may believe the events on my list are all unlikely to occur in the next decade, as I do, but that’s the whole point. We must anticipate unlikely events and make contingency plans in case they occur. Life's surprises can be just as important as its long-term trends.

What do you think are some other black swan events that could conceivably occur in the next decade?