1 - Arrived, but haven't noticed
2 - Too Right
3 - The children's renaissance
4 - The future shape of business
5 - Old men don't regret

Too Right

ONE trend that could go too far is a swing in conventional morality to the non-redistributing right. This has been visible for some time in the United States, and is especially marked among the sort of people who go to church.

There will be a revival of religion in the rich countries, partly because of the aging of their populations and partly in reaction to recent libertinism that has provided neither greater happiness nor greater art. The ordinary zealot feels it has ended in drug addiction and sex diseases instead.

The crowds will not throng back to all pews. The churches that are losing congregations are those like the Church of England that has started tentatively to flirt with libertinism just as it goes out of fashion. This church also looks comically antique as it seeks to keep gentle and eager women priests unfrocked,) with the result that it will eventually be flooded with women bishops of the opposite and ungentle and politicised sort. And it loses the intel-lectual tradition it could otherwise keep because it promotes men of emotion rather than thoughtful-ness. You can tell a man of emotion on modern television because he jabs his finger faster than anybody could if he was simultaneously doing anything even minimally thoughtful like multiplying 23 by 11. Revolve your finger and try it. That is also how politicians lose debates on television; the popular vote goes to the Bush or Bentsen who keeps his hands most still.

In the coming religious revival, the gain will go to grassroots organisations, eager to respond to and thus lead the very faithful. The most successful grassroots churches in Christendom and Islam today are frighteningly right-wing and fundamentalist. Countries will be lucky to keep a median attitude more progressive than that of America’s tele-evangelists, who will say that the fast spread of AIDS is God's sad judgment on the immoral. The picture above is of tele-evangelist Swaggart.

A scarily sterner new morality is almost bound to discriminate against the “undeserving poor”. Al-though 13% of Americans are below the poverty line, it is proven and publicised that an American has less than a 1% danger of staying long below it provided she or he does three things: completes high school, stays for more than a year in a first job even if at the minimum wage, gets and stays mar-ried. The trend in anti-poverty policy will be to-wards workfare, and to penalising school drop-outs and single mothers. This will have some nastinesses in making ruling sorts of people even bossier than they usually are. But it may have a niceness in saving up to 10% of GDP for the taxpayer. This will be important because a race will start to bring governments’ tax takes down from the 35-45% of GNP com-mon in Western Europe, perhaps halfway towards the 13% of GNP which was all America’s federal and state and local governments took before 1929.

Taxpayers flee the coop

The race to lower taxes is coming because most well-paid jobs in the new age will belong to mobile peo-ple, especially those who create or process or distrib-ute pieces of information. They include advertising agents, bankers, biochemists, bishops, lawyers, in-surance people, television producers and performers (who will send their wares everywhere by satellite or telecommunicated video), teachers, many sales-men, most researchers, all software writers—actually most brainworkers, a category to which more and more will belong. Even tomorrow’s factory workers will give orders through consoles to auto-mated machinery, and need not all be in their fac-tories when they do.

In the 1950s in Western Europe and America 70% of employed people were use-of-hand workers and 30% use-of-brain workers. Now that ratio is turning the opposite way round, quickly. Astonishingly it was only in 1979 that garment-making ceased to be the biggest export industry from New York city. It was replaced by lawyers’ services.

Because telecommunication has made information into a weightless commodity, information workers are going to be very mobile. They will be able to sit in Tahiti if they like, telecommuting to the computers and other colleagues in the Tokyo or Frankfurt or Timbuctoo-tax-haven office through which they work. The most entrepreneurial of these people will be particularly inclined to emigrate to tax havens in the telecommuting age. Areas which vote to have high taxes will be residually inhabited mainly by dummies: by people who vote to have tax money spent on themselves, without actually earning enough money to be taxed.

Then to the six-month working year?

Keynes may at last be proved partially right during the following upsurge of wealth, which this great cutting of taxes will accelerate. When rich countries’ peoples next double their potential living standards, more of them may choose to take their share of the possible doubling, not in twice their present accumulation of material goods, but in some variant of an extra six months’ holiday a year. This will not slow the emigration to tax havens, but speed it. During those longer holidays brainworkers can return to the areas where they have their roots.

It therefore becomes interesting to guess how long this next doubling may take. A country dou-bles its GNP in 20 years if it grows at 3 1/2% annually. Since 1970 an annual 3 1/2% is nearly twice what the average OECD country has got, but it is near to what it probably could have got if it had followed the main economic rule that matters namely: “once it’s clear we are doing something silly (as in Europe’s common agricultural policy) let’s stop doing it.”

So the next question becomes: in the 20 years ahead, is the capacity for economic growth going to continue or accelerate or slow or collapse, compared with this recent possible 3 1/2% annually?

The answer is that it is going to accelerate. Economic growth depends on two things: (a) the advance of knowledge, and (b) whether a country has a tolerably sensible political system for putting the advance of knowledge into productive effect.

As regards (a), the advance of knowledge, real incomes have risen in literate countries in each of the 20 decades since James Watt invented the steam engine in the 1780s. This is because of an increase in each of those decades in man's control over energy and matter. To this has been added in the past de-cade and a half a breakthrough in the processing of information. On quite ordinary computers this December afternoon any well-ordered researcher could check more correlations than Einstein could check in his lifetime. This would be an unlikely prelude to a period when the advance of productive knowledge abruptly slowed down.

Simultaneously, far downstream from the Einsteins, entrepreneurial people are becoming able to put a microprocessor into every machine, and biology is now entering the economic system. Also, as probably the biggest fact of the past decade, the two largest countries, China and India, have just been joining the competitive world economy. They will have a period of erratic, but eventually Taiwan-type, economic growth. They should be followed in the 1990s by 400m very educated Russians and East Europeans, entrepreneurialising themselves out of communism, plus 140m Indonesians and the like. Mankind as a whole, in the last 11 years of the twentieth century, is almost certainly on the foreshore of the fastest period of market-driven economic development it has ever seen.

Lamed ducks

It will still be possible for countries with foolish poli-ticians to be hurt by this. If you are employed in making things already manufactured by 60m Taiwanese and South Koreans today, and about to be manufactured by 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians and Russians and East Europeans tomorrow, then any politician who tries to protect you in your about-to-be-crowded job will protect you right down to an Uzbek's standard of life. But that should just rub home, the lesson of what is the most convenient political system to put the coming fast ad vance in knowledge into productive effect. The most productive possible system will be one that keeps politicians and existing entrenched interests out of the way.

Natural forces, including the telecommunications revolution, should be helping to get them out of the way. But technology will create some emotional problems as well. The rest of this survey will consider the prospect before each age cohort in turn, starting with the children whose new opportunities in an age of partly telecommunicated learning could become particularly spooky.

Part 3 - The children's renaissance