2030

Since a couple of days ago, we are closer to 2030 than to 2000. To me, that is a sobering thought. As we sleepwalk deeper into the future, our nightmares are no less haunting than they were a decade ago, yet the vacuum of positive visions has become ever more pressing. The stronghold that a combination of Malthusian and Marxist thinking holds over academia remains essentially unchallenged (with the exception of a few millenarian neoliberals and a tiny stream of ecomodernists). Every year, hundreds of thousands of new students worldwide are educated to believe that capitalism is only possible through exploitation, and that the global poor do not want to live like you and me but instead wish to continue subsistence farming in “flourishing local communities”. At home, xenophobia and anti-feminism are once again on the rise. While none of this prevents ecological elites from indulging in the most blatant forms of hedonism (I will never forget the sumptuous wine tasting I took part in together with some of the leading academics who preach the need for material sacrifice and frugality), the general public remains just as sceptical of calls for degrowth as it does of accelerated forms of globalization.

The EU project has left many uncertain about the benefits of political and economic integration, even as it has merely underscored what was always true in politics: namely, that at some point the chickens come home to roost. If you organize your society along rigid conservative principles, suppress young people and women, fail to make adequate social investments, and continue to support ailing but ultimately doomed sunset industries, then sooner or later the market will tell you that your social model is unsustainable. It is no more complicated than that. If anything, membership in the Eurozone has delayed what was in any case necessary, while enabling temporary construction sprees (such as in Spain) at the expense of lasting social investments.

Looking forward, I have come to believe that the single most important political objective is to break the gloom of secular stagnation and put mature economies back on a high-growth trajectory. The key to achieving this is surprisingly simple: to stop seeing the unemployed and the marginalized as the “problem” and instead recognize that lasting growth can only come about by lifting the poor and unlocking their creative potential. Instead of trickle-down economics, we need bottom-up growth through broad education, rapidly rising (minimum) wages, and accelerated global market integration.

As hundreds of millions of people across the OECD have become wedded to the idea of spending the last decades of their lives as a “leisure class”, failure to deliver such strong growth would ensure that the financing of retirement schemes overshadows all other political questions in the decades to come. Only if the financial sustainability of retirement systems can be guaranteed will it be possible to build the political momentum necessary to invest in breakthrough technologies and to avoid destructive political blame games (for instance, it does not take a political genius to realize that xenophobic parties will blame any future breakdown of pension systems on “immigrants”). Strong growth driven by rising wages – rather than, as today, low interest rates and speculation – will also help restore the sense of shared opportunity and optimism that is necessary to overcome the (irrational yet real) fears many harbour in the face of an ever more globalized world.

With economic growth in place, we will have the political space necessary to make the kinds of risky mistakes we must make in order to survive as a species. We need to return to the spirit of the Apollo Project: to believe in the transformative capacity of our dreams and to overcome our current risk-averse obsession with “safety”. We cannot allow Malthusian fears to trump the rights of billions to finally taste the fruits of modernity. Looking towards the deep future, this will of course not be possible on a single finite planet – nor should it be. Ultimately, H. G. Wells got it absolutely right: our only real choice “is the universe or nothing”. Long-term human survival hinges on our becoming a multi-planetary species and on learning how to protect ourselves from asteroids and other cosmic risks.

In the words of Bruno Latour: “it appears totally implausible to ask the heirs of the emancipatory tradition to convert suddenly to an attitude of abstinence, caution, and asceticism – especially when billions of other people still aspire to a minimum of decent existence and comfort”. Yet to move forward, it is not enough simply not to go backwards. We need to supercharge the Enlightenment project: to capture political momentum and simultaneously challenge both the passivity of neoliberalism and the misanthropism of Malthusianism.