Using the projection of trends
The difficulty of making projections has already been stressed. However in History Overview - The recent past, I proposed "the pattern of our time" as a representation that captures some of the characteristics of recent history. We know that continued exponential growth is unlikely.
We know with reasonable certainty that population itself will peak. People have less children as the survival chances of the ones born increase - Hans Rosling makes this case crystal clear in the video I linked to in Political Challenges. However it still adds as many as half again to the people now on the planet.
However exponential growth also stops for other reasons and in maths we have, at least two areas which illustrate it well. The wave form eventually collapses, and in some systems we get chaos Glick and Stewart . What happens eventually is that a new equilibrium is reached. So we can expect the steep upward trend to be interrupted, this is entirely consistent with the ways of thinking about the future I have described above;
- If the singularity happens (radical change, good or bad) it stops abruptly and something else emerges - this is the only future which can ignore the problems of population , resource competition and its political consequences Note: Technology Optimists
- If there is a radical change, which is bad, that could be collapse Diamond, Collapse
- If there is more of the same we can have better or worse futures - in a world with unlimited resources these curves represent the natural slowdown of population - in other scenarios involving power bloc conflicts, resource exhaustion and global warming the line on the graph is the same but it includes crashes in living standards as well before a new equilibrium is reached
Represented pictorially it looks like this.
Contingency and action
The point is that not all of the future is pre-determined; we can either leave it to chance and other people (because you still believe that our culture and society is just the by product of our brawling and rapacious natures) or you can let those with money and power fight it out (because we accept hierarchy).
Alternatively we can take control of our political processes, start managing things for ourselves and bring things back under control - we are social primates who have evolved by cooperating as well as fighting, we have grown our numbers to the point where running away is not an option, we have used our inventiveness to devise ways of killing that make war a loosing option; the only sensible (self interested) strategy is more cooperation and collaboration.
But, and this is just as big a challenge, we need to do it fast. In this picture my birth is at the time shown as "my mother was born"
The argument so far has addressed the realism of holistic political economy in terms of human behaviour and the need for it in the context of our history and possible futures. The next set of questions to be addressed are what exactly is it, what does it look like and how we set about bringing it about from where we are now?