In 1976, the Hudson Institute, now a multicity conservative
think tank, released The Next 200 Years,
a look at major trends in population, work activities, and general prosperity
around the world. Often described as
intended to refute Malthusian projections such as Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, it took the opposite view
that physical resources, such as mineral wealth and food-producing ability,
would greatly increase, and that the number of people in the world, then
extrapolated to reach 25 billion or more within two centuries, was in fact
having an anomalous surge that would fully return to long-term historical
levels by 2176. Per Institute founder
and primary author Herman Kahn, the spiking number of people in 1976 was only
part of “The Great Transition,” which would also include a per-capita Gross
World Product, similar to GDP, rising from $1,300 to $20,000.
Although we are still 158 years short of that point, it is
clear that Kahn’s predictions were outstandingly accurate. We have gone from “the population explosion”
being a worldwide worry to most highly developed countries actually losing
people and others with vastly reduced birth rates. The prices of commodities, from oil to copper
to wheat, are either about the same in constant dollars or lower, helped by not
only improved extraction processes but by discoveries of almost unimaginably
large amounts of accessible minerals. Starvation
is much rarer, with the number of people living on $1.90 or less per day below
half of that in 1987.
On overall economic activities, this book has also been
prescient. Human beings have gone
through a progression, starting with extraction (farming, fishing, mining, or
taking other resources) and moving on to manufacturing (making other things
from these resources) and then services (doing things for each other). In total employment, extraction peaked around
1900 and manufacturing in 1943. The
number of people working in services is still growing, but may soon not be in
the most developed places.
All of that leads to one question: what will come next? Following the nomenclature often used with
services as tertiary business activity, following extraction as primary and
manufacturing as secondary, the following phase would be “quaternary.” If you look that up online now, you see a
common view that it refers to research, consulting, and high-level
planning. That is reasonable, but such
activities have one flaw preventing them from deserving that title – unlike the
previous three, they cannot possibly provide jobs for most working people.
That brings us back to The
Next 200 Years, which uses quaternary to describe unpaid things done for
their own sake. If tertiary activities
are done for others, quaternary ones are done for the people doing them. Per Kahn, they are “often constituting what
we now more or less consider leisure activities” and “could include” rituals,
“demanding religions,” reading, writing, painting, composing, games, “gourmet
cooking and eating,” hunting, boating, discussion, “acquisition and exercise of
nonvocational skills,” and, if financially unjustified, “many public works and
public projects.” As services become
less and less labor-intensive, which has happened for decades now, quaternary
activities will not only keep people active but will be, as paid employment has
generally been, a main source of their identities.
The catch, of course, is that these quaternary activities do
not provide the means for living.
Whether or not that is implicit in the recent discussion on guaranteed
basic income, they go well with it.
Guaranteed income will be necessary someday, and the time people do not
spend working or seeking work will be freed for quaternary activities. How we can persuade the rank and file of
Americans to choose more active pursuits than watching television and absorbing
entertainment, both of which are held over from the days when work left people
physically exhausted, is another problem, but the opportunity will be there. Kahn called “the transition to a society
principally engaged in quaternary activities” “the third great watershed in
human history,” and expected it to be nearly complete worldwide by 2176, the
same time when the higher population percentage increase will end.
Will the practice of quaternary activities come to
pass? That is already happening. The extent that they become people’s main
occupations will depend on, among other things, where we go with guaranteed
income. That will be debated more and
more over the next twenty years. With
another depression or Great Recession, we will see that jobs are permanently
going away, so people, like it or not, will need to find something else to do
with their lives. That is where we are
going. We don’t know much about what
life will be like for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, but it’s silly to
imagine them working service jobs as if it were the 1980s. Bet on Herman Kahn’s quaternary activities –
it’s the most likely future we have.