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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

25. “The Future’s Not What It Used to Be”—Ogden Nash

Author : Stephen Hill

Published in: The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

Currently, the ‘Harmony of Humanity’, the quest of Chapter 21, is deeply disturbed, most evocatively, by the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States of Donald Trump, a signal of deep concern spreading across the experience of globalization from its negative consequences. Chapter 25 starts with an exploration of the ‘meaning’ of the “Trump Phenomenon” which basically represents an emerging broad-ranging desire to erect boundaries against globalization, and to return to past securities. The most fundamental problem with the ‘return to the past’ in Trump’s philosophies however, is that it is no longer realistic. Productive enterprise, in particular, has moved on, so employment rich industries of the past simply do not compete any more, and the assumption of unlimited resources requiring no need for conservation and care, is demonstrably wrong. This Chapter starts with this analysis and parallel resistance to globalization elsewhere, but moves on to explore what we can expect in terms of our immediate technology-driven and robotic-inspired future. One key finding is that world society is likely to have to make major adjustments to a future of non-work which some describe as a society of ‘unemployment’ rather than ‘employment’. It is not just jobs which are at stake, but the whole social and meaning fabric which is associated. The Chapter finishes with an assessment of new experiments on the role of ‘universal basic income’ in the society of our future.

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Footnotes
1
Iraq was subsequently removed from this banned list as the US’s defense engagement in Iraq required continuing exchange of personnel across borders.
 
2
A side-note of relevance, given that refugees tend often to be targeted for exclusion is that the CATO Institute calculates that the chance of being killed by a refugee is 1/3.64 billion, compared with 1/3.9 million killings by people entering the United States on a Tourist B visa, the normal mode of entry. Many individual crimes by Islamic immigrants were against the murderer’s spouse and completely unrelated to terrorism (Nowrasteh 2016).
 
3
After ‘inventing’ this title, I discovered that Tim Dunlop had also come up with the same epithet. However, whilst I am talking of the ‘Trump Phenomenon’ and its reflection of an attempt to recreate a previous industrial age, Dunlop is talking about return to community as it existed in pre-industrial times. Dunlop speaks disparagingly of this social reversion, whereas I argue for its necessity in the context of building a society-base for our future economy. See, Dunlop (2016, Loc 2121).
 
4
Juichi Yamagiwa, Personal Conversation, Yase Rikyu Hotel, Kyoto, June 5th, 2016.
 
5
Tadashi Yagi, Personal Note, January 2017.
 
Literature
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Metadata
Title
“The Future’s Not What It Used to Be”—Ogden Nash
Author
Stephen Hill
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Singapore
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6478-4_25