A Historian as Prophet

...On the main point, however, he is right: Automation, contrary to a long-standing illusion, is eliminating many more jobs than it creates...

...Contemporary manufacturing automation, by contrast, has spread quickly since the 1980s...

...Malthus, for instance, knew about what we now call the Industrial Revolution and its potential for creating wealth...

...The book's short third pan—on "the most important question...

...how can a society best 'prepare' itself...

...Today it is impossible to predict, or perhaps even to imagine, the response to the world of the 21st century...

...A second effect will be massive emigration...

...Although the Northern Hemisphere has had to cope with a great many poor newcomers in the past two decades, in the period that lies just ahead, Kennedy argues, the flood tide of humanity streaming out of Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe into Western Europe, and out of Latin America into the United States, will make what we have seen to date appear to be "relatively limited...

...The earth had 1 billion people in 1825, and twice that number a hundred years later...

...The dismal parson, you may remember, foretold "a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," plenty and famine—mainly on the ground that human beings reproduce more quickly than their food, even in the prosperous countries of the West...

...Current production technologies, by contrast, serve to maintain existing output with a smaller work force, and they are linked to broader corporate information networks that have much additional job destruction potential...

...Though fully aware of the importance of manufacturing automation, Kennedy mistakenly views it purely in the light of robotics...

...Similar questions might be asked about the fate of most unskilled and semiskilled industrial workers in Europe and America...

...They owe their escape from the Malthusian predicament mainly to the wealth generated by the agricultural and industrial revolutions...

...Today, as in the lifetime of Malthus, the most significant international trend is overpopulation...

...After all, a large-scale exodus from Europe helped falsify the predictions of Malthus, and some maintain that Europe and the United States, with their stagnant demographics, will stagnate economically unless they receive new blood...

...Japan, of course, seems to have the best chance of reaping the advantages of new technologies while keeping mass migration at bay...

...It may be distasteful to say so, but in a sense we are lucky that the Third World is going nowhere, for as Kennedy warns, a global environmental collapse would result if it started to imitate Euro-American "patterns and levels of consumption...

...The contours of the demographic explosion" of the next 30 years "are already reasonably clear," warns Kennedy...

...In reality, improved organization and product design, computer-driven machine tools, and the development of increasingly sophisticated machine controls have had a greater impact...

...If they "are so large as to induce despair," wonders Kennedy, shouldn't the West "try policies of reaction and adaptation—including...

...Moreover, the early industrial economy, as it expanded outward from cotton, mobilized larger and larger pools of workers to producea hugely expanded output...

...It now has upward of 5.3 billion...

...Kennedy, a history professor at Yale, says he was inspired to make the attempt when someone asked him why his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers had focused on the destiny of nations instead of on "much more important and interesting issues—those forces for global change like population growth, the impact of technology, environmental damage, and migration, which were transnational in nature...

...Nevertheless, new conditions evoke new kinds of behavior that cannot be anticipated...

...is the least satisfactory...

...He failed to realize that the mass of individuals in a rich society would not behave like rich individuals in the poor one he himself knew...

...Nothing like this happened in the Industrial Revolution, which began in an exemplary industry, cotton spinning, in the 1760s and did not really affect the British economy in general until about 1850...

...Yet in our age, observes Kennedy, it has emerged "not in the developed societies of Northwestern Europe but [solely] in the poverty-stricken" areas of the Southern Hemisphere...

...And if they could, how would their farmers support themselves...

...This, however, is beyond the West's power to impose, and on present trends it would seem that in the celebrated race between education and disaster, disaster is winning easily...

...The author, who, as he curiously fails to note, is himself a British immigrant, doesn't think so...

...Kennedy understandably isn't sure...

...Since 1847, the year of the last dearth in Western Europe, no such events have troubled the rich countries...

...The rest of the East Asian trading states, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland will be among the winners, and possibly the entire European Community...

...the cruel if necessary policy of blocking the rising migratory floods from overpopulated, impoverished lands...

...Will modern technology avert the coming disaster—or contribute to it by eliminating the livelihoods of many individuals and the single advantage, cheap labor, of many societies...

...His assertion that the supply of foodstuffs could at best go up arithmetically was similarly deduced from recent evidence...

...By 2025 it will have 7.6 billion to 9.4 billion...

...More than nine-tenths of the upsurge will occur in the developing countries, particularly in Africa and the Middle East...

...At a cost, the office economy may finally be realizing genuine productivity improvements...

...No large middle class is emerging in the Third World, where birthrates are disastrously high and wealth is advancing very much more slowly, if it is advancing at all...

...By 1875 the birthrate in Britain had begun to fall steeply, and it is still falling...

...He did not prove his famous theorem that population must go up geometrically...

...and impose additional demands upon the poorest parts of the American administrative structure.'' Whatever one's view, the issue is already political dynamite...

...The bettereducated and more independent women of the new bourgeoisie got married later than their mothers, and had considerably fewer off spring...

...The second part of Kennedy's book, on the adaptation of specific polities and regions to the global forces described in the first, too often becomes a conventional nation-by-nation analysis...

...In the United States, says Kennedy, the class of "symbolic analysts"—engineers, lawyers, rock musicians, and perhaps, God knows, even writers—will benefit greatly from "transnational demand for their services, while the lower four-fifths of society is increasingly at the mercy of multinational companies moving production in and out of regions for the sake of comparative advantage...

...Malthus' error, suggests Paul Kennedy in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (Random House, 428 pp., $25), was to see the conditions of his own time as normal...

...he merely showed it had done so recently...

...Actually, those countries have faced agricultural gluts and low birthrates for many generations now...

...Can we really hope to control overpopulation, migration and other trends...

...In the poor countries, the abundance of new mouths to feed is responsible for the threats that have already emerged: overgrazing and deforestation...

...Kennedy largely ignores information processing...

...Biotechnology promises to raise food stocks, yet the new science, like so much else, is distributed poorly: The lands that most need it are those least able to develop it...

...In the impoverished cultures experiencing the explosion directly, the low average age of the populace will go down further, as it did in Malthus' time...

...A lot of the symbolic analysts are in trouble, too, in my opinion...

...Still, there is much evidence that temperature levels have fluctuated in historical times, and some that the vicissitudes of climate affect economic and political events: The unusually cold weather of the first half of the 17th century, for example, was probably the ultimate cause of the revolutions convulsing Western Europe in that era of plummeting farm output, widespread starvation, and lower incomes for landowners...

...It would have been impossible to make such a prediction in 1798...

...During the next generation, nations "having difficulty in absorbing increasing numbers of energetic young men" will be attracted to audacious political experiments or to wars of foreign conquest—or to both...

...Nonetheless, these networks—linking supplies, orders and shipments—are giving top managers closer control over their companies than they have ever had and thus helping to cut levels of managerial employment, as well as eliminating data-processing and programming operations...

...But in his experience, the wealthy had much larger families than the poor, and he assumed that the cornucopia generated by industrialization would induce the people to breed beyond its ability to sustain them...

...Can we do better...

...In the rich countries, it is overconsumption—augmenting the carbon dioxide in the inner atmosphere—that is the main problem...

...The author is reluctant to speculate about the seriousness of the greenhouse effect—a caution I intend to respect...

...Kennedy, notwithstanding his preference for open borders, admits that "recent immigrants to America have relatively low educational and skill levels, congregate in the inner cities...

...The first of his new book's three parts does precisely that...

...As Kennedy notes again and again, the most effective way of helping the Third World would be to raise the status of its women, because educated women marry later and have smaller families...

...Unfortunately, inhabitants there are proliferating because of Western medical technology rather than for homegrown reasons, such as the rising income levels that in late 18th-century Britain enlarged both the population as a whole and the middle class...