Word: powers
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Orphans such as Israel, India and Pakistan live in dangerous neighborhoods and have legitimate security concerns. They will probably behave just as the original nuclear powers did, which is to say they will use the weapons primarily for deterrence. The ultimate effect of their joining the club should be to extend the cold war's great power stability--and harrowing crises--to a few regional hot spots. The chief problem with the orphans is getting them to understand the importance of proper safety measures, secure command and control procedures, and other cold war lessons...
...which the government controls a large part of the economy and redistributes wealth to produce social equality, then I think it is safe to say the likelihood of its making a comeback anytime in the next generation is close to zero. But the egalitarian political impulse to constrain the power of the wealthy in the interests of the weak and marginal remains strong and is already making a comeback. There are good reasons for thinking this impulse will not lead to new radical groups' achieving political power and implementing a coherent political agenda. Though, in the process of trying...
...giving voice to the deprived and the vulnerable. The fact that famines occur only under authoritarian rule and military dominance, and that no major famine has ever occurred in an open, democratic country (even when the country is very poor), merely illustrates the most elementary aspect of the protective power of political liberty. Though Indian democracy has many imperfections, the political incentives generated by it have nevertheless been adequate to eliminate major famines right from the time of independence in 1947 (the last famine was four years before that, in 1943, which I witnessed as a child...
...fact, the protective power of democracy in providing security is much more extensive than famine prevention. The poor in booming South Korea or Indonesia may not have given much thought to democracy when the economic fortunes of all seemed to go up and up together. But when the economic crises came (and divided they fell), political and civil rights were desperately missed by those whose economic means and lives were unusually battered. Democracy has become a central issue in these countries now: in South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and elsewhere...
Each of these five forces is fact, not supposition. Each influences the others multiplicatively. Therefore my unwillingness to back off my predictions about the power of the white-collar tsunami bearing down on us. Unsettling madness is afoot. Especially if I'm a 48-year-old white-collar staff member or middle manager entombed in a corporate tower in Manhattan or Miami or Milan...