There are many ways in which the world we inhabit is different than the world we think we inhabit. I assume that most people, at best, think of the world as the unchanging "background" to the antics of their own lives. We need something to be stable to measure ourselves against, after all.
Of course that is absurd. The world is always changing, and the changes are accelerating, even, and while that may not be the case forever, it is certainly the case now. When I was born and in my elementary school days, we were told that there were four billion people on the planet. Now, when I hear there are almost eight billion, I still sort of revert back to four. Then again, Pluto's still a planet for me, and you kids gotta stay off my lawn.
I'll think about this idea of the "Anthropocene" at some point in the future, and what others have called "the great acceleration," which is the enormous expansion of humanity's presence in the world from about 1800 to about now (we're sort of decelating, in a way). We're really bad at predicting these changes, by the way, which goes for what I say below--caveat lector.
But for today, I just wanted to notice that some people at Brookings have argued that we have reached a couple of interesting "tipping points"--where the world has become "largely old" and "mostly rich":
From now on, the world will have ever fewer poor people, about the same number of youth and young adults, and many more old and rich people. Over the next decade, we project that the world will add 800 million people above the age of 30, and there will be 100 million less people under the age of 30. In 2030, there will be 1.8 billion more people who will have at least $11 per day in spending power, while the number of poor and vulnerable with less than $11 per day will shrink by 1.1 billion.
They mean that now and for the future there will be more people over the age of 30 in the world than under it, and more people have incomes above US $11/day than below it--which they judge to mean, more people are middle-class than not. (The shape of what "middle-class" should mean is a big deal, and especially in the US context, it's complicated, as this piece helpfully charts--a topic for another tjme.)
Here is the upshot:This is what Joe Biden would call a big, um, deal. What does it mean for a world to be mostly "middle class"? What does it mean for it to be mostly "middle age"? These are huge questions. We know that the presence of many young people in a society leads to social unrest and turbulence--higher crime, more disruption, anarchy. Chaos!! (Anyone who has lived with a teen knows whereof I speak.) But what does it mean when the young are, in some sense, too few? And what does it mean when more and more of the human race doesn't need to worry about whether it will have adequate food and shelter, and can worry about status purchases and longer-term investments?
One of the great contrasts in world literature is between the Illiad and the Odyssey. The hero of the Illiad is of course Achilles, and he's the classic young man--live loud, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. The emotions are immediate, the responses unguarded, everything is in your face. In the Odyssey, on the other hand, the hero is kind of an anti-hero, wily Odysseus, the andra polutropon, a "man of many ways" or "many turnings", a man who fights only when necessary, who sneaks and cheats and lies, who you can never really trust. The difference between youth and middle age runs differently for men and women, in many ways, and the rise of cross-gender egalitarianism will amplify this change as well, but only I think by making it moreso: it is interesting to imagine that we are moving, in the coming century, from a world more fully visible in the Illiad to a world more fully visible in the Odyssey. What will that be like?