The Present
Today, at the end of the 20th century, there is a worldwide economic system, called Global Economy, which is based and supported, by a political system, called the New World Order. The basic assumption of this book was that the development of two inter-communicating systems was not a random historical act. It was assumed that the systems were the logical continuation of a set of historical events, that were the results of an unprecedented population explosion, that first affected the western world, causing its expansion, and the continuation of that population explosion in the poor world. It caused the cessation of the expansion of the western world. The graphic expression of this thesis is shown on Chart 3. The present political and economic systems are not only logical continuations of events and processes of the last three hundred years; they are a retrenchment of the rich world, in view of the catastrophic population explosion that cannot be stopped or controlled in any way.
The concept of the New World Order and its accompanying economic counterpart was born about ten years ago when George Bush, the President of the United States at that time, declared that there is a New World Order. The declaration was connected to the Gulf War that was waged by the United States and his allies, to release Kuwait from the Iraqi occupation. The war, not incidentally, ensured the continuing oil supply to the western world. The aim of this book is to investigate that phenomenon, called the New World Order, or Global Economy, and find answers to the following questions:
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What are the principles and the mechanism of the New World Order and the Global Economy?
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Are the principles and mechanism of the New World Order identical now to what they were ten years ago and if they are not, what caused the changes? |
Before answering the questions, there are two points that need to receive definite answers. Chart 2 presents two sets of numbers, and the relation between the two sets. The two sets are titled the Poor World and the Rich World. They could have been called the world that is outside the Global Economy, that is the Poor World, and those territories that participate in it, and they are the Rich World.
The two points that need to be clarified are whether the classification of Chart 2 fits the geographical structure of the Global Economy, and what is the mechanism to define whether a territory or a state is a participant in the Global Economy or is it not.
According to Chart 2, the Rich World is the continent of Europe, North America and Oceania. That chart shows the populations of the Poor and the Rich Worlds from 1750 to the estimate of the year 2050 and the relation between the two sets of figures. It was only after the Second World War, after 1950, that countries of the Pacific Rim joined the Rich World. The Pacific Rim, means in this connection, Japan and Taiwan. The populations of these two countries are not included in the figures for the years 2000 and 2050.
However, the figures for the Rich World include the countries of Eastern Europe, who do not altogether belong to that category, so the overall figure for the Rich World seems to be accurate enough to reach judgments and conclusions. Accordingly, at the turn of the millennium, the population of the Rich World is about 1000 – 1100 million people. As for the rest of the population, we have to define its categorization after the definition of the mechanism of the Global Economy and the New World Order.
The actual figures on Chart 2 are important, but the real importance is that of the relation between the two sets of figures. According to that chart, the share of the rich world in the world's population was 30 % in 1900, up from 21 % in 1750. In a century, between 1900 and 2000, it went down to 18 %. It explains, among others, the process of decolonization. It is estimated that it will be even lower by the year 2050, and it will drop to 12 %. The possible consequences of that drop are analyzed in the chapter: Tomorrow.Before answering the questions, there are two points that need to receive definite answers. Chart 2 presents two sets of numbers, and the relation between the two sets. The two sets are titled the Poor World and the Rich World. They could have been called the world that is outside the Global Economy, that is the Poor World, and those territories that participate in it, and they are the Rich World.
The mechanism of the Global Economy is probably the most democratic political and economic system ever devised, if one considers only the population of the Rich World, and if one does not think of democracy in terms of participatory democracy. Global Economy is a system that regulates interactions, trade and investments between all parts of the world. It has a supportive political system that is called the New World Order. It is partly based upon regional associations. It also has a few supportive international regulatory institutions that sets the rules and supervises them. They are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. These three are independent organizations, loosely connected to the United Nations, and controlled by an executive body, called the G8, the council of the main industrial nations of the world. This is the body that really controls the Global Economy, but this body represents about 90 % of the population of the Rich World.
There is a kind of common wisdom that there is a worldwide conspiracy of some group, the Council of Foreign Relations or the nebulous Bilderberg group, to influence the direction of the Global Economy. Here, some distinction should be introduced. It is possible that in the political relations of the Rich World with parts of the Poor World there might be outside influences to direct the actions to a desired direction. However, it is highly unlikely that the direction of the Global Economy could be influenced. It will hardly reassure the fans of the conspiracy theories but the Global Economy is such a huge edifice and is based on such simple economic laws, that it is doubtful that it can be directed at all. But as it was said, there is a New World Order and there is a Global Economy. The two are intimately interconnected but they are not identical.
The existence of a worldwide political and economic system without hegemony of any of the major powers is an uncommon phenomenon and it is probably the most important element in the Global Economy. It is obvious that countries that are deeply involved in international trade and investment have more to say than those countries that are outside the leaders, but it does not mean that there is a hegemony of any of them. If there is anything resembling hegemony then it is that of the G8, the council of the major industrialized nations, but it is meaningless, as the population of the G8 is a large percentage of the total population of the rich nations.
As there is no regional or any other hegemony, there can be no individuals with excessive power. The advocates of conspiracy theories loved to point out George Soros, the well-known manager of mutual funds, as the Grey Eminence behind the Global Economy. However, it seems that even Grey Eminencies can miscalculate, and the conspiracy theories changed direction after a hedge fund in his ownership lost a few milliard dollars. We remember the roles the very rich played in the United States at the end of the 19th century, the Morgans, Carnegies, Harrisons and Rockefellers, but there are no similar roles in the Global Economy. There are rich people, there are even very rich people, but the scope of the Global Economy is so huge that it is inconceivable that a single individual would be able to fill the roles of the Rockefeller or Morgan at the beginning of the 20th century.
The money that fuels the Global Economy comes not only from the rich, but primarily from the Middle Class, in the form of savings for old age, retirement funds, superannuation funds, insurance companies, social security investments, and general mutual funds. These are the sources of the monies that fuel the Global Economy, and that is the reason why the Global Economy was defined as a democratic system. This explains also why individual millionaires cannot have a major role. The yearly saving that flows into the various retirement funds, insurance companies and mutual funds from a medium sized European or American city creates greater funds for investment that any millionaire could accumulate, and there are thousands of them.
It was stated that the economic system, called the Global Economy; is the most democratic system possible in a capitalist world. This statement is based on a number of factors:
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The same health measures that started the demographic explosion from the middle of the 18th century onwards, continued and caused, among others, that life in the rich part of the world is healthier than ever before and people are living longer lives than ever before. There is a law in demography that states than in order to maintain the population at a constant level, each woman in childbearing age should have 2.1 children. The 2 children are the replacements for the father and the mother, the .1 children should account for barren or unmarried women, or for children who die before their reproductive age.
In most of the countries of the rich part of the world, especially in Europe, the rate of birth does not reach the replacement value. That this fact is not shown on Chart 3, which shows an unchanged population of the rich world between 2000 and 2050, is caused by the fact that there are countries whose birthrate is over the limit, and that there is a constant immigration into the Rich World. The next chapter, Tomorrow, analyses this phenomenon.
Longer span of life and unchanged demographic picture means that the number of old people is growing in the population. It is not yet in a critical stage, but it is already seen and felt. One of the results of that fact is that there must be a higher saving to take care of the old age of the still-working population. When Bismarck introduced the concept of the Social Security, the situation was exactly the opposite. The population was constantly growing and the health service were on a much lower level than today, so the number of people paying their dues was incomparably bigger than the number of people receiving the benefits.
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The savings of the population might be kept in the form of Social Security, Retirement Funds, Insurance Companies, Bank Accounts, Mutual Funds, etc. These are all long-term, secure form of saving. The demographic picture of the rich world at the present time still ensures that the periodic deposits are bigger than the periodic withdrawals. Eventually, it will change and the two figures will even out, if the world is lucky, or that the withdrawals will be greater than the deposits, which might cause a worldwide catastrophe.
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The retirement funds, in whatever forms are they kept, in Social Security, Retirement Funds, Mutual Funds, Bank Accounts, Insurance Companies or private investments, are managed by professionals whose responsibility is to invest the funds in the most secure way, and at the same time to receive the highest possible yield. They are professionals and they well know that they themselves are personally measured by their performance. No one will kindly look upon someone who poured down the drain the retirement dreams of many people. Mistakes will affect their bonuses, their salaries or even their professional future. It can be even worse. A few years ago, there was a young professional, employed by a British investment bank in their branch in Singapore. He made a few bad investments, causing his employees to fold and earning for himself a few years incarceration in a Singapore jail. So, the professionals who manage the funds, that are the lifeblood of the Global Economy, are cautious and circumspect people, and rightly so.
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There are tens of thousand of funds kept in various institutions and there are millions of money managers who are ultimately responsible to the people whose money they manage. It simply means that there is little chance to influence their judgment, except by the figures on the bottom line. That theory did Thomas Friedman expose in his book: The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In a world marked by the values of the balance sheet, which is the Lexus, parochialism and traditions do not have much weight.
There are exceptions to that rule and those exceptions are determined at the level of the G8. It is possible that there are parts of the world, which the money managers, the high priesthood of the Global Economy, wouldn't even touch with the proverbial barge pole, but they have some indispensable natural resource, like oil for example. They are high-risk countries that the money managers would avoid in normal circumstances, but in cases like that political considerations might prevail. However, in cases like that the risk is spread to the national governments, so the rule of the bottom line remains here too.
The Global Economy, as its name implies, is spread all over the globe. There are no untouched territories. If we would use the old cartography method of coloring the map according their belonging, then the map of the Global Economy would be colored by three distinct colors. It was shown in the previous paragraphs, the belonging to any of the colors is done by the money managers, with occasional political involvement by the High Council of the New World Order, The belonging to the categories is dynamic; it might change from time to time, although it is difficult to see how a country can abandon its position among the leaders. These are the categories:
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The first category is the territory of the Global Economy proper. They are the countries that provide the great bulk of the capital for investment, that are mainly the Retirement Funds. They also have the most benefit. As they control international trade, and the goods traded in the network of Global Economy, are either originate in those countries, or they are involved in their design, production and financing, or they are the recipients. The great bulk of the accrued profits flows in their direction. The United States is one of the major participants in the network of Global Economy, not the least because of its size and wealth. It is also the biggest exporter of agricultural products, as well as being the home country of a big slice of the hi-tech industry.
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The second category is the most difficult to define. They are the countries that have some special product, like oil, or they have cheap manpower and sufficient public safety to interest money managers wishing to relocate production facilities to low-wage countries. Good examples for countries in this category are Mexico, India and Malaysia.
Mexico is a host to thousands of factories, spread out along its northern border, near the United States. In those factories, mostly American or Canadian products are manufactured, assembled and packaged. The factories are usually transplants from the home countries. India and Malaysia provide similar services, but they have low-salaried professionals as well. Both countries, but especially India, have droves of university
graduates who can work in hi-tech projects at the fraction of the salaries it would cost in the home countries.
It was shown that the Global Economy is constantly nourished by new money supply for investments. The sources of those monies are mainly the periodic deposits in the various retirement funds or savings in general. It was already shown that the Global Economy is reasonably democratic and color-blind. Japan is part of the G8 and both Japan and Taiwan are important participants in the first tier of the Global Economy. They are not Caucasians, but it is doubtful that it has any importance whatsoever.
Mexico, India and Malaysia, and many other countries, have an importance as countries having a reasonably safe environment, trained manpower and low wages. This combination makes them attractive for locating labor-intensive factories. Low wages, however, mean that there is no accumulated saving and no addition to the investment base. It is a paradox but true nevertheless. If these countries would reach a level of saving that would let them enter the club of the rich countries, they would lose their attractions as countries to transfer labor-intensive factories to. There are no signs that it will happen so.
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The third category contains those countries that have neither funds for investments, as in the first tier, nor suppliers of labor or raw materials, as those in the second category. This category contains a growing number of countries that are unsafe for investments in any form, or they have nothing to offer or both of them together.
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As far as connection between the countries of the first category and those outside the system altogether, one has to go back at least 250 years to find similar conditions. That was the time when most of the world was still outside the interest of the western world. Connections were maintained by occasional visits to selected ports and trading posts, to exchange goods and trade in low-volume commodities.
What is happening now in some ports of Africa and Asia is similar to what was then. No one can rely on trade with countries that exist only in name. It is doubtful that a chocolate factory in Europe would rely on coca produced and shipped from Sierra Leone or Liberia. However, a trading expedition to buy diamonds or a load of hardwood in Freetown or Monrovia is a possibility. That was the pattern of connection in the 18th century.
It should be added here that between the second and the third category there is a kind of mobility. Unfortunately, it is usually in the wrong direction. There are countries that ten years ago would have been counted as one of the second category, next to India and Malaysia, Now, those countries are wracked by internal dissension, civil unrest and lack of public control. It is doubtful that the money managers of the Global Economy would consider investing in those countries.
This is the picture of the world as created by the considerations of the bottom line. There are two more questions that need to have answers:
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The concepts of the New World Order and the Global Economy were born about ten years ago. Are the concepts still the same or were there changes, and if yes, why and in what direction?
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Each meeting of one of the regulatory institutions seems to be accompanied by violent protests by groups, whose political views are often contradictory. What unites those groups against the Global Economy?
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When President George Bush announced the New World Order, he meant that the old bi-polar world has ended, there was no more cold war and acts that were previously committed under the protection of one of the superpowers were not permissible any more. The occupation of Kuwait by Iraq could have been done in the old days only by the permission of the Communist Block that would not have been forthcoming, as it would have led to World War III. As the Eastern Block has imploded, President Bush announced that there is a new policeman on the block, and that is the New World Order. True to the announcement, Kuwait was liberated, the oil continued to flow westward and Iraq was quarantined. That was about ten years ago.
A short while after announcing the beginning of the New World Order, the sole remaining superpower discovered that among the duties of the global policeman, there is indeed the returning of stolen property as in the case of Iraq and Kuwait, but there are other jobs too. So, the remaining superpower got involved in humanitarian missions in Somalia that cost him the killing of 17 Rangers. It was all too similar to the fate of the Belgian paratroopers in Rwanda. They also had only good intentions to stop the massacre of a minority by the majority. They learned very fast, as the United States has learned in Somalia that in the present world no good intentions go unpunished.
After ten years the policy has changed. The main actors of the New World Order intervened only in conflicts where they had direct interests or where the conflict was uncomfortable close to their borders. It seems that at the present, interventions are made, if they are made at all, to prevent the spreading of fire over the border to the home countries. Thus, the European Community and Nato intervened in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia and Kosovo, but they did nothing in other conflicts that were farther away. Similarly, the peacekeeping forces of the United Nations intervened in East Timor that is near the Australian shores, but they overlooked the other flashpoints in Indonesia, like the civil war between Christians and Muslims in the Moluccas, or in other civil wars in the area. There were also no further interventions on the African continent, although there were, and still are, plenty of civil wars, massacres and starvation. What caused the change?
Is it possible that the loss of 17 American soldiers in Somalia and 8 Belgian paratroopers in Rwanda was such a shock to the West that they pulled their hand from the duty of policing the Third World? It seems that it is not so, but there are additional factors and they were instrumental in the retrenchment. In fact, what has happened in the last ten years is a direct continuation to the process of decolonization, and because of the same reasons.
According to Chart 2, in 1950 there were 1789 million people in the Third World. That number has grown to 4996 millions in the year 2000, a growth of 179 %. If we take the increase in a linear way, then each year added 64 million people to the population of the Third World. Between 2000 and 2050 the rate of increase will slow down, from 179 % to 57 %, but it is still a great increase. If we take the increase after 2000 in a linear way, then each year will add 57 million new people to the already swollen population of the Third World.
In 2000 AD there were 6060 million people living on our globe. If we want to separate that population according to the categories as they were defined in this chapter, then:
1060 millions belong to the first category
2000 millions belong to the second category
3000 millions, half of the world's population, belong to the third category.
This separation is a rough estimate only, but it seems accurate enough. Of course, there are countries that belong to more than one categories. A good example for it is India, where there is a relatively prosperous middle class, but the great majority of the population, at least 95 % is desperately poor. In addition, the continuing demographic explosion still increases the third category, which in money terms means an income of $ 1 –2 per day.
According to the 1998 World Population Overview and Outlook 1999, released by the United Nations on December 30, 1998, there were 78 countries where more than 40 % of the population was under the age of 15 and in three-quarters of those countries the rate of birth by women in childbearing age was 5 child or more. Of the 78 countries, there were 45 in Africa, 20 in Asia, seven in Latin America and six in Oceania.
These figures show a simple and sorry fact. Between 1990, when the New World Order was born, and the year of 2000, when these lines are written, 640 million people were added to the world's population. This figure is about equal to the total population of the world in 1750, which was the beginning of this analysis. In addition to the 640 millions added in the last ten years, each year after 2000 will add 57 million people more. Most of the 640 millions and the yearly 57 millions are added to the third category of countries.
In simple terms it means that there is an infinite expansion of people who have to live on a finite base of resources, arable land, water, etc. The constant wars in Africa and the dissolution of countries in Asia, apart of those in the moderate zone, show that they are indeed fights for survival. It is possible that there was hatred between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda-Burundi, but the genocide was fueled mainly by one single question: There is a limited living space; who will remain in that space? My people or yours? They are not alone; there are other conflicts that are fights over limited resources of land and water. They are conflicts of survival.
The growing numbers placed the affluent West in an impossible moral quandary. They still have the biggest base of resources at their disposal, and they are constant because they reached a demographic equilibrium. The number of the people in the Rich Word is estimated to increase to 1066 in 2050 from 1064 millions in 2000. At the same time the numbers in the Poor World will increase by 57 %, which means that everyone in those areas will have less of everything.
Since the end of the decolonization, the humane aid of the Rich World did increase constantly and there were countless NGO's, like Oxfam, CARE, Medicine sans Frontiers, etc. that attempted to help and in many cases they succeeded. That effort is diminishing lately and the reasons for it are in the numbers.
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has designated 86 countries as low-income, food-deficit countries. 43 of those countries are in Africa, 24 in Asia, 9 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 7 in Oceania and 3 in Europe. Ten of these are among the most populous countries, including India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria. In all, 45 of those 86 countries are on a course to double their populations in 30 years or less.
The figures are frightening but they eloquently explain the effort of the Rich World to save itself. It is no more a question of humanitarian help. Even with the best of intentions there is no possibility to make up the shortfall in arable land, water and other resources. This is the real meaning of the New World Order and the Global Economy. In nautical terms, it is called "battening down the hatches". Whether it can be successful is examined in the next chapter.
This discursion about the real meaning of the present political and economic systems of the Western World explains also the violent demonstrations against the meetings of the regulatory institutions. In the last year alone, there were violent demonstrations in Seattle, Montreal, Geneve and in Prague. The protests of the demonstrators were directed against the policies of the system and were in two points:
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The Global Economy brings with it a cultural conformity, which obliterates the local cultures. This is the subject of the Lexus and the Olive Tree.
The money managers and the figures on the bottom line govern the Global Economy. The philosophy of the fast-food chains, the MacDonalds and others, fits those principles, the corner bistro does not. Still the philosophy of the Global Economy is an artificial manipulation superimposed upon a much deeper stratum. People want to see themselves different. The fact that they want to see themselves different from the people in the next valley, or the next village, gives them their identity and the meaning in their life. If it were not so, there would be fewer nations, tribes, religions, political parties and sport clubs.
Regional cooking is one of those elements that separate people from different regions. The protesters against the restaurants of MacDonalds, which is rightly seen is an embodiment of comformity, demand their right to be different. They see in MacDonald and in other fast-food restaurants an attack by the American way of life on their traditions. In that point they are mistaken. The United States , just as any of the other rich countries, have a tradition of regional cooking, not less than any of the prosperous countries. The MacDonalds, the KFC's, the Burger Ranches and all the chains of fast foods do not represent American culinary traditions. They represent a corporate effort to adapt a type of cooking and serving for mass production.
The selection of the MacDonalds and other fast food outlets as targets are only symbolic for the American domination of the culinary and the popular culture. It is not only the question of MacDonalds but also the question of Hollywood and the industry of music and the media. It is called the takeover of the world's popular culture by the Americans, but similarly to the fast food, they are American only because America had a market big enough to allow the introduction of outlets of corporate food and corporate cultural production. If that culture is spreading now all over the world, it is not American culture but a corporate culture.
There is a cultural war within the countries of the Global Economy, between local, parochial, cultures and between commercialized cultures that are directed by the bottom line. The questions of food and the protests against MacDonald are highly visible but they are much less important than the other questions. In addition, worrying about the quality and the variation of food is the privilege of rich people. People in poor countries have fewer problems with the quality of food; their problem is more with the quantity.
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The policies of the Global Economy discriminate against the poor and the working class of the rich countries and against the Third World in general.
Here the protesters complained more about the treatment of the poor and the working class in the developed countries than about the treatment of the poor countries in general. Most of the protesting groups cared about the poor in the developed countries and not about the people in the Third World. There were a few exceptions, like the musician from one the famous rock group who demanded the cancellation of the debts of the poor countries, but most of the protesters were involved in what they saw as an invasion of American culture and the treatment of the working class by the mandarins of the Global Economy.
It was explained that the Global Economy has only one discrimination and that is of the balance sheet. If profit can be maximized by closing a factory in a high-wage country and transplant it to a low-wage area, then the decision will hinge on the safety of the new location or other similar questions, but not on humanitarian considerations. The same process governs the decisions on the existence of manufacturing plants in the numbers of second and third tier nations.
The protestors do not really object of selective investing in countries with questionable safety record. No one wants to see an investment in Somalia or in Sierra Leone. However, they do object strongly to the transfer of manufacturing plants from high-wage countries to the Third World.
It is true that one of the main tools of Global Economy has in keeping down costs of labor, is transplanting whole factories from high-cost areas to countries with low wages, and even lower safety legislation. The Public Relation experts are well aware that it is a very unpopular policy, so they try to cover it up with ingenious methods. Indeed, the biggest single item in the vocabulary of the protesters is their hatred of the media that smoothes factory closures with platitudes, and the governments that provide the tools to the media and the Public Relation experts.
The biggest lie that Public Relation experts use is statistics; and the provision of national statistics is the prerogative of governments. The manipulation of statistics is done in a breathtakingly simple way.
When a factory is closed down somewhere in the heartland of the Global Economy and that factory is transplanted to a low-wage country, a great number of people loose their jobs. Wages in manufacturing plants are high, and they also provide considerable social benefits: paid holidays, medical insurance, etc. It is the result of nearly two centuries of strikes and negotiations that brought the working conditions from the satanic mills of two centuries ago, where people worked for a pittance, seven days a week and 12 hours a day, to today's roomy and clean factories where they work 40 hours a week,
When such a factory closes down and there is no substitute, then there are the low-paid jobs in the service industry, the so-called MacJobs. They pay about 40 % of the hourly rate in manufacturing jobs and give no social benefits. Most people usually have fixed expenses; rent, mortgage, school fees, etc. that remain to be paid. 40 % of their previous salary is insufficient to cover those costs, so if there is a family, both members of the family take a low-paying job. Even that is insufficient, but better than nothing. The result is that people go down the social scale and previously well off middle-class people become jobless, homeless, and very often familyless.
The media, however, has a field day in announcing that thanks to the wise policy of the government the rate of unemployment dropped. It is true that where there was one job, now there are two. The story behind that victory is not publicized; the new unemployment rates deserve banner headlines. This is what the demonstrators shout on the streets of Seattle and Prague, and that is what the good citizens cannot accept, as they read in their morning paper that the economy is wonderful and unemployment rate was never so low. What the protesters are really against is the fact, that the media instead being a watchdog of society turned into a lapdog of the corporations.
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The historical events, listed in this book, were created by necessity and not by choice. It was true for the Industrial Revolution, just as it is true for the Global Economy. Both are direct and logical reactions to a demographic explosion that started in the middle of the 18th century. Both processes caused the disruptions of all previous traditions.
The Industrial Revolution broke apart the society that has previously lived in small groups; families, clans and villages. It depersonalized the people and the huge upheavals of the 19th – 20th centuries were direct results of that depersonalization. Eventually, after about 150 years, a new social equilibrium was found. The surest sign of the equilibrium was that the huge differences in wealth that signified the early period of the Industrial Revolution have all but disappeared. There was a distinct narrowing of the gap between the rich and the great bulk of the population. It is possible that the narrowing was really illusory, but since the standard of living of the population reached a comfortable level, the gap became unimportant.
Now, there is a new revolution, comparable in intensity to the Industrial Revolution. That is the Global Economy. It is also a result of a global demographic explosion. The Industrial revolution was a reply to the challenge of the demographic explosion in the West, and the Global Economy is the reply to the challenge of a demographic explosion in the poor part of the world. As a surest sign to the revolutionary condition of the present, is the widening of the gap between the elite and the rest of the population, as it happened in the Industrial Revolution.
At the last time, western civilization paid a huge price in finding a social equilibrium: two suicidal world wars and a century of murderous ideologies: Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Difficult as it was, there was a breathing space for the west to find a solution, and eventually it was found. If there will be a breathing space, there will be a solution for the present upheaval too. The next chapter discusses the possibility whether it will be possible to have a breathing space or not.
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