Imagine how the global economy would have been if the world was still one large land mass - Pangea (Name given to the single supercontinent believed to have disintegrated over billions of years to for the present day continents).One can look back at the geological history of the planet and find answers to the way the global economy and society may evolve in the coming years. This idea may sound repulsive or absurd on the onset, but a little bit of imagination will help you see the light.
While there are experts around the world trying to predict the fate of the modern civilization and socio-economic evolution, I feel the answer lies in re-sketching the global map the way it may have been a couple of billion years ago (obviously there was no map back then, screw maps ! there was no concept of time then).
As technology has shrunk the planet and the virtual world starts taking precedence over the real world; in- effect what we are witnessing is the movement of the continents back towards formation of one supercontinent (or shall we call it one world). This phenomenon has been unfolding over centuries of human activity but has never been so evident before. A stock market crash in New York could mean Mr. Wang in China will lose his job, A bunch of un-organized pirates from Somalia can give sleepless nights to traders in the whole of Europe and Asia, A detection of a flu virus in South America could result in huge decline in tourism revenues in Asia-Pacific. These are signs of human un-doing of a dis-connection devised by nature billions of years back, whether we like it or not we are forming our own supercontinent. If we take a look around it’s not very difficult for us to notice the striking similarities between two geographically, culturally and politically different countries. As the globe evolves into a smaller virtual world, people are slowly but surely coming together in every way. Peoples tastes, preferences, choices are constantly evolving and is increasingly getting influenced by the global common knowledge of best in-class. The interdependency for resources has created a need for greater co-operation and this in turn has led to the formation of a much stronger global community.
As time passes lessons will be learnt and wisdom will prevail. Gaps between the developed and the developing countries will get narrower. The world will start understanding and speaking a common language (I mean literally). Newer generations will get more tolerant towards the dis-similarities in religious and regional beliefs. These changes and many other changes in the socio-economic-cultural spheres will give rise to a new world order. As the world will see its interests and issues merge, organizations such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund etc. will get more powerful as governance and legislative bodies. The need for several fragmented financial and monetary governance will gradually diminish and multiple currencies will be viewed as an inhibiter in the global trade; we may see entities like the World Bank acting as the issuer of the one global currency.
I think if the world were to remain a giant continent as it was billions of years ago, with its entire land dwelling species sharing a common land mass; we would have achieved the above stated commonality a few million years ago, or may not ?
