Opinion | The big lesson from the coronavirus pandemic: invest in people

Name: What are cryptocurrencies?
Uploaded: 2020-10-09T19:30:12.000Z
Duration: 2 min 12 s
Description: What are cryptocurrencies?

The pandemic has hastened existing trends, advancing the move online and killing off dying or obsolete industries

Given that studies have shown investing in people offers better returns than sinking funds into hardware, this should be our focus for the future

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

A teacher talks to a child in a classroom on the first day of the return of Sao Paulo state’s schools for extracurricular activities on October 7 amid the coronavirus outbreak in Brazil. Photo: Reuters

Andrew Sheng

Published: 3:30am, 10 Oct 2020Updated: 5:28am, 10 Oct 2020

Events are moving so fast that we feel as if the future is being compressed into the present at frightening speed. Conservatives hark back to the golden age of stability and gradual change. Liberals hate the current inequalities, but cannot agree on how to effect change.

But if technology is moving in accordance with Moore’s law of exponential growth, knowledge and complexity are expanding too fast for most of us to comprehend and decide how to cope.

Sociologist Mauro Guillen, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, argues in his book, 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything, that the major shifts will be demographic – rich countries are ageing, the populations of poor nations are growing, and these numbers will push migration.

At the same time, women will grow richer, and the Asian middle class will edge out the European and American middle class. Climate change will threaten cities through rising sea levels, and water and food shortages. While technology will help solve problems, job disruption will be a major political threat.

We may no longer need to own anything, but will simply rent cars, houses and smart gadgets. Money will shift to digital currencies, and finance will be very different, with zero interest rates.

02:12

What are cryptocurrencies?

These trends are well known. In 2017, two reports – the US National Intelligence Council Global Trends: Paradox of Progress, and the European Union’s Global Trends to 2035 – offered thoughtful reviews of the future from their perspectives. The rapid convergence of macro trends will make governing and cooperation harder, fundamentally altering the global landscape.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x