How to Build a Future, 2015

[Gareth3]

In 1990, John Barnes had an article in Analog where he described using computer modelling to construct a future history for his "Springer" series of books. He was clear that he wasn't predicting the future, just generating a reasonable outline that he could use to inspire stories. And, of course, none of the "predictions" have come true - he had the USSR last until WWIII in the 2050s. So I thought it would be fun to use his model again, but start with 2015 and see what results it gives. I'm particularly interested in generating a setting like 2300 AD, or Infinity, where different Earth nations compete in space. The former was partly generated by gaming - France is powerful in 2300AD because the guy playing France was awesome. The Infinity future seems to be uh, freeform - I never understood why the Japanese joined up with the Chinese. Although the origins of PanOceania do seem suspiciously close to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Anyway, Barne's model is detailed enough that you can track the rise and fall of great powers through economic growth and war, which makes it ideal for this. Would anyone be interested if I wrote up the process of using the model? It would also be a kind of "Let's Read" for the original article.

[KathTheDragon]

Yeah, I'd like to give that a read.

[Gareth3]

The article is "How to Build a Future" by John Barnes, Analog March 1990 and Apocalypses and Apostrophes, 1998.
OK, so Barnes wanted to write about interstellar colonies settled by STL and suddenly introduced to FTL travel. I don't have anything specific in mind for the space part of the setting, so I can skip most of his beginning, where he tries to estimate when the first STL starship is built. I was interested to see that his calculations assume that the public sector grows much faster than the private sector. That's backed up with hard data in 1988 when he wrote it, but it might not be valid now.

For the purposes of this exercise, I'm just trying to generate the state of the Earth in 2300. That year is about where he extrapolates to, and it's also when uh, 2300AD is set, so why not? I'll have five categories: economic growth, technology, warfare, great powers, and population. One post per category should do it.

[Gareth3]

Economics
Barnes starts with the growth of the Gross World Product, GWP. He models the growth rate with four sine waves added together with periods of 54, 18.3, 8.3, and 3.5 years, amplitudes shrinking with period. The longest period wave has a trough in 1795, and the other three bottom out in serious recessions. So I've decided to pick 1933 as a trough for the three short-period waves. The actual growth rate goes between 1 and 6 percent. Add all the waves together and adjust for he range we want, and you get this:

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This is actually quite different from the graph in Barnes' article. It's not clear exactly what parameters he was working from. If you extrapolate it back it probably wouldn't match actual growth rates either. For one thing, the GWP growth in 2009 was zero, much worse than he allowed for. But this is about extrapolating a reasonably plausible future, not matching real data.
There's not much direct story potential here, since we've decided that in three hundred years there won't be anything as bad in terms of GWP as the Great Financial Crisis, let alone the Great Depression. At first this sounds ridiculous, but bear in mind that the planet will be much more widely developed so it'll be harder to have a world-wide impact. Individual countries with hundreds of millions of people might have terrible depressions, but that just won't push the GWP down low enough.
If it still sounds ridiculous, Barnes gives a wider range of -3 to 9 percent growth as an alternative. That's not quite as bad as the Great Depression at the low end. Reply to this post if you'd prefer that.
Although he doesn't get story inspiration directly from these growth rates, they do influence other categories like technology and the rise of great powers. Some indication of how subtle the changes are is shown below, in a graph of GWP itself.

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There are a few flat patches, but it's pretty much exponential growth all the way. By 2300 the world economy is 1700 times bigger than it is now. Next post: Warfare.

[Gareth3]

Let me know if those big graphs are annoying, I can shrink them.

[KathTheDragon]

Just throw them inside

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tags.

[Salmoneus]

...so is this meant to be just random numbers, or is there any particular reason for it?

Is this real GWP, or nominal GWP? If it's nominal, then it doesn't matter, does it? If it's real, then I don't really see how it is possible for the economy to be 26 times bigger in real terms than it is now, given current trends.

For context, the UK GDP per capita in real terms has grown from 1,700 in 1820 to 26,000 today. If population, as projected, stabilises in the mid-21st century at only slightly more than today, you're essentially predicting that the next 300 years will be the equivalent of the entire industrialisation and globalisation and computerisation of Britain. That's bold! The changes we've gone through can't be repeated. Perhaps we'll have another set of changes - but how can we be sure we will?
Even now, when things are going great... you have growth between -1% and 6%, but in the UK in the last 25 years growth has been between -5% and 3.8%. In the last 45 years, there have been only 7 years where we have had growth of more than 4% (to go along with 7 years with growth of less than 0% - 6 of which were below your -1% threshold!).
[Similarly for the USA, though it's been more volatile: last 25 years growth has been between -3.6 and +3.5. In the last 45 years they've had 9 years over 4%, but also 9 years at or below 0%]

[In fact, from 2001 onward, the USA has never topped 3%. Nor has France. The UK has passed 3% in one year; Germany has passed 3% in three different years.]

Looking at it another way: what are people actually doing in 2300 to have such a huge economy? It can't be "making useful stuff" - there are only so many cars you can drive in a day, and only so many kitchen gadgets that will fit into your kitchen. The big one might be "lifted the world out of poverty". But actually, giving everyone in the world the per capita GDP of an American would only require the economy to grow fourfold. So you'll need everyone to be more than six times as economically active as Americans are now. What will they be doing? There are only so many hours in the day to consume product!

I'm not saying this is impossible. We could, for instance, be spending all of our time creating films and computer games, so many that we never watch/play any of them more than once (although we're almost at that point already, so...). Or maybe we'll just have a population boom. Hard to see how that can happen, though, given the prevailing economic conditions, which penalise childbirth. But... it seems a really optimistic projection, let's put it that way.

[KathTheDragon]

Or maybe all those third world countries will develop...

[Salmoneus]

Or maybe all those third world countries will develop...

...I mentioned that. But if everywhere in the world today were, economically, America, the economy would only be four times larger than it is now. So you'd have to make everybody Totally Developed, AND then multiply everyone's economy by more than six. Which would mean another leap equivalent to that between the 1880s and 2000 for the developed world. Which, again, isn't completely beyond the realms of imagining, but is certainly a very gung-ho, super-optimistic outlook.


...actually, I've just been running some numbers. One the one hand, I'm not sure I can understand how Gareth gets his numbers in the end. Because I can only get two quadrillion after 300 years by assuming an average annual growth rate of under 2%, which is actually right at the bottom of his allowable range. So am I just doing something stupid here?

There other thing is that my stupid-numbers say that if American production grows at an average of 1% per annum for 300 years, then by 2300 each american would have an income (assuming income was split equally, and that there was no investment or expenditure outside the country) of a bit over a million dollars a year. In real terms. So everyone will be buying four average US homes a year, or nipping into space five times a year (assuming space doesn't get cheaper), or buying a new supercar every year. People would only have to work for four years of their lives, and then could spend the rest just living on interest. [Although of course certain rare goods would inflate to match income, rather than in line with everything else]

Then again... earning a million dollars a year would still only just put people into the top 1% of current US households. Soo.... on the one hand, maybe that's more believable than you might think, while on the other hand I think the wealth of the US ruling class is kind of more fantastical than I thought...

[Gareth3]

Sorry, there is a silly error in the compounding, so the economy is actually 17,000 times bigger than it is in 2015. I'll revise the graphs. That's real growth, not inflation. There's no economic logic behind this, just taking a reasonable range of growth rates and applying it to GWP over a few centuries. If you assume constant growth of 3.5%, you get an economy about 18,000 times bigger. The results are reminding me that Barnes says he does these projections to make up for a lack of imagination. Just thinking about the implications of 3.5% growth over 300 years makes you consider things you might have skipped in a more freeform worldbuilding exercise, even if you don't end up using it.
So, an economy 17,000 times bigger sounds absurd. There are three possibilities to fix it:

1) Exponential economic growth isn't any more sustainable than exponential biological growth, and the curve flattens out in the same way. You'd have to decide what a reasonable maximum size for the economy is, bearing in mind population won't get that much bigger. You'd also have to deal with the implications of people being absolutely certain that their grandchildren won't have a better standard of living than they do. Unless they make someone else poorer.

2) There are worse depressions and disasters over the 300 years, so the overall economic growth rate is lower. Just using Barnes' wide range of +9 to -3 percent probably isn't enough, the higher highs would cancel out the lower lows. There will be terrible wars over this period and you could easily build the economic destruction into the model. Barnes himself turns the whole of Japan to asphalt, that has to shrink the GWP.

3) Most radically, the economy really is 17,000 times bigger. This isn't necessarily ridiculous. I often get in a car and drive 72 kilometres to buy second-hand books. You could imagine an equivalent that's 17,000 times "better" - flying to the asteroid belt to buy full-sensory VR entertainment, say. Barnes' characters are often growing their own martial arts studios overnight, or sending their laundry to the cleaners via FTL teleportation. Alternatively, the wealth probably isn't equally distributed. In the extreme case, the 99% could have the same living standard as today, and the 1% could be 1,700,000 times richer. In global income terms the "1%" is pretty modest - $32,400 dollars a year. So they end up getting $55 billion a year, about the tax revenues of present-day Chile. More realistically, it's a combination of both. Everyone's rich by our standards, and some people have resources that only governments have now.

[Salmoneus]

I think the first option is by far the more sensible.

The second option would require something utterly titanic. Things like the Great Depression and WWII have had virtually no economic effect - they've only delayed growth by a year or two. A Terrible Event would have to be decades long - something with the intensity of WWII but lasting ten times as long, perhaps - to have any noticeable impact.

[Gareth3]

OK, let's assume the limiting factor is human capital. No combination of genetic engineering, education, or automation can push individual productivity past $US200,000 per year, on average. That's on the high side for a US physician, and about twice the GDP per capita of Luxembourg. So rich, but not insane. Barnes has population peak at 15 billion, which means a GWP of $US3X10¹⁵, about 38 times the size of the current GWP. Every country twice as developed as Luxembourg, and every person as productive as a good hospital internist, give or take. So we run a population simulation alongside the economic, and cap per capita GWP at 200,000.

[Gareth3]

Going into more detail with this, there's a UN population projection out to 2300 which has world population quickly reaching 9 billion and stabilising for centuries. So we can set the maximum GWP at $200,000 times 9 billion, $1.8X10¹⁵. That's 23 times the size of the present-day world economy. We can always tweak this figure when we get into the actual population modelling. For each year I calculate how close the GWP is to maximum. The next year's economic growth is reduced by a factor relating to that. So economic growth slowly goes to zero, and GWP approaches the maximum. Here's the growth rates:

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Two things stand out: 2036 will be seen as a golden era of progress, with a growth rate unmatched for centuries. Whatever happens in 2145 will be seen as a terrible omen, it's all downhill from there in terms of growth.

GWP itself shows a nice sigmoid curve:

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Next post: warfare.

[Gareth3]

Barnes uses similar cycles for warfare as for economic growth. The cycle periods are 142, 57, 22, and 11, and the amplitudes are 3,2,2, and 1. What's cycling are "battle days per year", the number of separable clashes between armed groups in a single year. He has it go between 400 to 4000, between a minimum of one battle every day of the year to a maximum equivalent to the more intense years of WW2. He doesn't actually give a peak year. I tried 1944 and 1864, but they give funny-looking results later on. So I staggered the peaks of each cycle across years during WW2: 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945 respectively. This gives me a graph of warfare to 2300:

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What's more interesting is war deaths, as a percentage of world population. He treats this as an exponential function of battle days per year. One implication of this treatment is that WW2 was actually under the trend for deaths, despite being the peak for battles. With the staggered peaks, this what I get:

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Actual numbers of deaths will have to wait until the population modelling. With 1944 as a single peak, the spike in 2230 is even bigger, and the four other spikes are smaller and identical. Everything over 0.5% per year I've labelled as a World War, that's about the death rate of WW2 over the world population. Barnes uses 1%, but his "WW3" peaks are worse. The significance of the World War label is that all the great powers are involved, and can lose their great power status if things go wrong. Barnes uses Kennedy's definition of a great power:

A great power is, first, a nation that can, if it has the will, militarily enforce its wishes on any other nation not classified as a great power, and on credible alliances of non-great powers; and second, a nation that is able to make conquest by any other great power too painful for the aggressor to contemplate.

More detail on great powers in the next post, but here's a couple of questions. If you don't have the article, which countries do you think Barnes classified as great powers in 1988? And for everyone, what are the great powers in 2015?

[Salmoneus]

This method clearly gives pretty graphs, but I don't see its utility otherwise. For instance, the idea of 'WWIV' seems very optimistic - what, the worst global catastrophe in the history of mankind, other than the black death and maybe genghis khan, and nobody even thinks to use nuclear weapons, or biological weapons, or whatever worse things they have by then? Technically this is possible - the non-use of gas in the european theatre of wwi, and in particular the absence of gas bombing, would be the precedent - but rather optimistic. [How do I know that they don't use WMDs? Because a global war of that magnitude where people start using WMDs is not going to kill so few people...]

I think it's much more likely that future war will be based on guerilla tactics, terrorism, and cyberattacks. These methods - in the modern era of communications and mobility - would seem to be a much, much cheaper way of accomplishing one's goals than traditional waves-of-tanks warfare. Either that or, you know, The Big One.

[Regarding GWP: I don't like to argue both ways, but I can't really see a reason for limiting GWP arbitrarily like that either. Is there a limit on human productivity? Not theoretically, since each human could be operating an entire planet of robots.]

[Gareth3]

That is an obvious question about the war projections. These numbers come out of studying previous wars, so they obviously won't incorporate WMDs. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't really approach what we can do now. OTOH, it seems that "countervalue" nuclear strikes - blowing up whole cities and killing billions - were an artefact of primitive weapons guidance. If you wanted a second strike from untouchable submarines, they weren't accurate enough to hit specific military targets so you had to target cities in general. Now the missiles are accurate enough to hit military targets from submarines, so you don't need to kill billions unless you want to. The question becomes why you want to destroy a country, rather just render it militarily impotent, especially since "military target" can include the White House. Even a total psychopath would appreciate having more subjects to rule over. Chemical and biological weapons are even less useful for targeted strikes. The US has even explored non-nuclear ballistic missiles - dropping tungsten rods instead of nuclear bombs for precise effects with the speed of missiles. The main objection was that everyone would think they were nukes. All in all, I think you can justify the death numbers.
As for GWP, I considered using total amount of sunlight falling on Earth, perfect conversion to electricity, and then a electrical demand to GDP conversion.
Any comment on the great power questions?

[Salmoneus]

There seems to be a conceptual contradiction. On the one hand, if this is just looking at extrapolating the past, what use could it be for predicting a future that we know will be different from the past in many ways? On the other hand, if this is just extrapolating the past, assuming that things continue as in the past, how can it produce results like your WWIV, an order of magnitude bigger than any war in history? [Well, I guess you could argue that the 30 years war killed almost as large a percentage of europe as your wwiv would kill of the world as a whole, but still...]

On power: I calculated this a while back (in a loose sense of 'calculated') and i think i concluded that solar power covering all the land could sustain a population of several trillion at the high end of today's energy use.


On great powers: well, I guess that today's great powers are probably:
- the USA
- Russia
Let's be honest here, the USA could crush any other country or alliance of countries at will. Their armed forces are large and more powerful than all the other armies of the world put together. Only Russia's nuclear arsenal could be an effective deterrent. And I guess Russia could probably conquer anyone else fairly easily if they wanted, thanks to that nuclear arsenal again.

Some context here: Russia has 7,700 nukes, America as 7,100 nukes, the EU has 525 nukes. China have 260, India and Pakistan each have 120, Israel has 80, and North Korea have 8. Each of the two great powers have more nukes actively deployed than the rest of the world has stockpiled in total. No other country could militarily defeat these countries, and these countries could militarily defeat any other country (and by 'militarily defeat' I mean up to and including obliterating every microbe living in the victim country).

If you lower the standards of "too painful to contemplate", and have less confidance in the ability of the Great Powers to eliminate a target nation's nuclear capacity in a first strike, then you can probably define a Lesser Powers category of the EU (or France and Britain separately if you prefer), China, India and Pakistan. Their huge populations, huge land areas, combined with nuclear weapons and large conventional forces mean that they could not be defeated militarily without the moral pain of nuclear assault, and without the risk of nuclear counterattack. Israel could also be in this category, but their smaller arsenal, much much smaller land area (making first strike easier - they have fewer places to hide) and smaller conventional forces, and their greater economic dependency (making a siege possible) mean they probably don't count. [though there's ambiguity over their arsenal - they may have up to 200]

I would instead put Israel at the head of a third category, 'Minor World Powers', who can project power across the world so long neither the Great nor Lesser Powers interfere. Israel would be joined by Japan in that tier, and probably North Korea, though the latter two would need to realign their policies and military structures (toward violence in the case of japan, toward non-isolationism in the case of NK). Maybe South Korea too. And if we're taking the EU as individual countries, Germany would belong here. Brazil don't belong in this tier at the moment, but a more military-minded Brazilian regime could take them into this sphere.

Then under that there would be a set of Regional Powers: countries that can exert considerable power on their regions, but not around the world. Examples would be Brazil, maybe Mexico (if not hamstrung by civil war), South Africa, Australia, Canada (not in practice because of who their neighbour is, but they're at that level in absolute terms I think), Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, maybe Egypt. And EU countries like Italy and Spain.

[Buran]

I would recommend reading The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, which purports to give a rough prediction of, as you can probably guess, the next 100 years (actually, it only goes up to the year 2100). It may or may not be a complete crock, but it contains some ideas that are at least worth considering (e.g. how technology will change the paradigm for warfare, which countries that don't have nukes will get them, which countries will unexpectedly become great powers).

[Gareth3]

That's a fair point on the limits of extrapolation. I should note that Barnes actually does use WMDs in his future wars, even new and even more indiscriminate WMDs. It gets so bad that even centuries after the war, birds don't migrate to Japan. But he bases all the effects on his model from previous wars. I suppose at some point you have to treat it as just a convenient inspiration for stories, one step up from the I Ching.
One refinement of the sunlight model would be to just use the sunlight falling on farmland. All food will be synthesized anyway, and farmland already has some infrastructure connected to it.
On great powers, the second requirement is easiest. The US, Russia, the UK, China, France, India, and Israel all have submarine-launched nuclear missiles which would be extremely difficult to destroy in a first strike, and could cause massive destruction to whoever struck first. The first is tricky, you have to weigh up actual capabilities versus political motivation. I'd drop Israel as not having either the means or the motivation to project power outside the Middle East, and keep the other six. The UK and France aren't integrated enough to combine in a single EU nation.
Barnes' great powers in 1988 were the US, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, and "the EEC". He was probably anticipating more European integration than actually happened.
You also need a reserve bench of second-tier powers, with the potential to become great powers over the course of the simulation. They don't need to have the military capability, just the potential to develop it. If you base that on GDP, the second-tiers are Japan, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Canada, and Australia. Some interesting possibilities there, although given enough time you run into problems with demographics. If you assume any nation can get enough economic growth to become a great power, and select countries on population, the second-tiers are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh , and Japan again.

[Gareth3]

I would recommend reading The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, which purports to give a rough prediction of, as you can probably guess, the next 100 years (actually, it only goes up to the year 2100).

Thanks, my library has this, I'll take a look.

[TSSL]

This is interesting. I mean, I'm a bit skeptical that it's particularly likely to have accurate results, but it certainly looks fun.

Would one have to get a copy of the right Analog or Apocalypses and Apostrophes in order to get a hold of this article, or is it out there somewhere else as well? (I haven't come across anything.)

As far as your roster of secondary powers, in the part where you list which are secondary possibilities by population, I think it could be interesting to consider this based on projected population by the year 2300. Using the dataset that worldmapper.org has, that wouldn't substantially change your second-tier listing. It would, though, take Japan out of the population-based roster, and put in Ethiopia instead. They have Africa in general going through quite a bit more rapid population increase than elsewhere. The Democratic Republic of Congo follows right afterward. So, depending on what criteria you end up using ("get[ting] enough economic growth" would help, yes), something in Africa could be a nice contender for the late period.

Granted, this could all get thrown completely for a loop if a new power ends up being a country that doesn't exist right now. Is there a way to take that into account?

[Gareth3]

The article was also in a collected book of Analog articles, but I don't think it's available online.
Adjusting the secondary powers for projected population would be a good refinement. I'm already dropping Japan because of the demographic issue, you could do the same for Russia, France, and Britain.
New powers far enough in the future probably won't all be countries that exist now. It's best to treat country names as indicating general geographic locations and ethnicities - "Russia" can mean anything from the Czars to the Soviet Union to Putin. Barnes has a lot of federations - "Rim Alliance", "Federated African Republics" and so on. From a 2015 perspective I'm sceptical of federations becoming real military powers. I could see it going the other way. One of my ideas for a great power was "Jawa", which is to Indonesia what Turkey was to the Ottoman Empire. All the Javanese retreat back to Java Island, abandon the rest of the archipelago, and still end up with more people than Russia.

[TSSL]

Messing some more with the datasets from worldmapper.org, I came up with some more interesting results.

First I took their dataset on GDP (rather out of date, though, being from 2002), and took the GDP per capita column and multiplied it by their projected 2300 populations. That leads to nearly the same roster of secondary powers that you got from GDP alone, but swaps out Australia, with Mexico taking its place.

I got rather more interesting results from taking their projection of 2015 GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (I'm not sure how close these numbers are to what actually ended up happening). So I took that GDP per capita and multiplied in by 2300 populations. That would give us a secondary power roster of Japan, Germany, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, and Thailand.

Cross-comparing these different lists, I notice that Brazil appears to be the only one to show up in every single list so far. Good contender, that. Japan shows up a good deal as well, despite the upcoming demographic problems. Maybe they'd be a good contender in the near future, but not so much in the far future? And Indonesia, also, has popped up a couple times. Germany's managed through a couple different ways. So I'd say that those are some good options to lean towards.

I like your thought on Java as an option, too. I know very little about contemporary Indian politics, but I wonder if there's much room for plausible separatism there, too. India is pretty diverse, and has tended to be pretty divided until the British came along.

As far as major changes in the identities of countries, Africa could be a good place for coming up with new possibilities, considering the discrepancies between ethnic group and national boundaries. I'm not sure if there are any plausible larger nations that would arise, but that could be worth looking into. I have no idea what the power blocks would look like if the countries sort out differently.

[Salmoneus]

Messing some more with the datasets from worldmapper.org, I came up with some more interesting results.

First I took their dataset on GDP (rather out of date, though, being from 2002), and took the GDP per capita column and multiplied it by their projected 2300 populations. That leads to nearly the same roster of secondary powers that you got from GDP alone, but swaps out Australia, with Mexico taking its place.

I got rather more interesting results from taking their projection of 2015 GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (I'm not sure how close these numbers are to what actually ended up happening). So I took that GDP per capita and multiplied in by 2300 populations. That would give us a secondary power roster of Japan, Germany, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, and Thailand.

It might be more useful to use GDP capita modified by some projected GDPpc growth - it's likely that countries like indonesia will continue to storm past germany, japan, etc.

I like your thought on Java as an option, too. I know very little about contemporary Indian politics, but I wonder if there's much room for plausible separatism there, too. India is pretty diverse, and has tended to be pretty divided until the British came along.

My own scenario has the Subcontinent as the scene of the great catastrophe of the 21st century. The poor areas of India are desparate - malnutrition is worse than in subsaharan africa, and only going to get worse as the population grows further (50% of all underweight children live in India). The gap between rich and poor is soaring; there is already a seemingly incurable communist uprising in the east - being forced back at the moment, but as poverty worsens it's hard not to think it'll rebound. There is high inflation, rampant corruption, abysmal government bureaucracy, and an astonishingly inefficient agricultural sector. It also has terrible infrastructure, and low levels of education. We think of its economy booming, which it is: but that's the result of small growth in a vast population, combined with genuine rapid growth in a few small urban pockets (and even there, inequality remains ghastly). Unlike China - or even countries like Indonesia - India is trying to build explosively without addressing the underlying problems it faces - in particular, without redistributing. Whether that is possible seems questionable. And then of course there is the failed state of Pakistan next door, a Bangladesh that doesn't seem headed in the right direction, and the nuclear question, and rising nationalism.

My scenario has economic crashes in India, nuclear war between India and Pakistan (though in the latter case it's more 'rogue elements'), communist revolutions, civil wars and so on.

I certainly think secessionism will be a bigger and bigger issue: the cities that are growing will want to break away from the benighted hinterlands, and the latter will fiercely resist any such escape.

As far as major changes in the identities of countries, Africa could be a good place for coming up with new possibilities, considering the discrepancies between ethnic group and national boundaries. I'm not sure if there are any plausible larger nations that would arise, but that could be worth looking into. I have no idea what the power blocks would look like if the countries sort out differently.

In the mid-future, Ecowas might conceivably become a state, or at least an EU-like superstate.

[Gareth3]

Combining responses here:

One thing I stumbled across is that there's been a relatively recent revision of population projections. The 9 billion plateau on the worldmapper site has been replaced by 11 billion and rising by 2100. It's mostly due to an upward revision of African growth. It's a bit inconvenient because the projections to 2300 use the old data. But you could easily fit the data to 2100 to a curve and extrapolate. There's a summary here: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?N ... lt5LTahfIU

The Indian communist revolution thing is interesting. I was thinking up scenarios for "WWIV", and I thought the little bump before the main war might be a revolution, and the big war is everyone against the revolutionary state. This fits in with the plateau in economic growth. Redistribution starts to look more urgent when the pie isn't getting any bigger, and a bunch of middle-class people seeing their prospects dry up is a recipe for revolution. Of course this is centuries in the future and India might not be the best location then. As for present day India, I think it's very telling that even the capital city doesn't have a reliable water supply.

On succession, one future-history thing I was considering was having the powers be river names. Ganges, Yellow River, Pearl River, even Hudson. The implication would be that the densely-populated urban and suburban areas along the rivers had got tired of propping up the hicks in the rest of the country, and have declared independence.