This interesting piece ‘Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World‘ is quite interesting about those forces mentioned, and also on the reflection that much of what we live comes from a reset of the world during World War 2.
Those forces identified in this post shaping our world today:
- the demographic shift reconfiguring modern economies
- wealth inequality
- unprecedented access to information leveling social gaps (i.e. the Fourth Revolution)
However the most important part of the article for me is the long description of what our world today owes to WW2. “It’s hard to overstate how much the world reset from 1939 to 1945, and how deeply the changes the war left behind went on to define virtually everything that’s happened since.” As examples: the baby-boom, antibiotics, all sorts of technological advances (nuclear, jet engines, social changes triggered by war economy, GI bill and higher education, and also the social net in European countries…).
Internet at the end was a technology that evolve as a result of Cold War and the need to preserve communication in case of nuclear attack. And Cold War was in itself an intermediate consequence of WW2.
We too often fail to go back sufficiently in time to understand the deep drivers of our societies. It is worth sometimes going back a century to grasp those large trends and what triggered social changes that astonish us today.
