What's Changing? - Megatrends

Please see below recent megatrends-related change.

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What's New? - Megatrends
Culture, Demographics, Economics, Environment, Geopolitics, Ideas, Sustainability, Technology and Urbanisation.

Q4 2018

If current trends hold, the world will include 48 cities with populations over 10 million people by 2035, up from 33 today. Of the 15 contenders for mega-city status, 10 are in Asia, two are in the Middle East, two are in Africa, and one is in Europe. None are in the Americas, noted GZEROMedia.

Q3 2018

EY released its latest report on megatrends shaping 2018 and beyond – “What’s after What’s next – the upside of disruption”. The report looks at disruption through a framework that highlights four distinct kinds of change: primary forces, megatrends, future working worlds and weak signals. These elements occur at different times, and with different levels of uncertainty and scales of impact. Most meaningfully for corporate decision-makers, they demand different kinds of responses.

Q2 2018

Still highly relevant is the 2017 FutureProofing podcast, which asked: does the accelerating pace of technology change the way we think about the future? It's said that science fiction writers now spend more time telling stories about today than about tomorrow, because the potential of existing technology to change our world is so rich that there is no need to imagine the future - it's already here. Does this mean the future is dead? Or that we are experiencing a profound shift in our understanding of what the future means to us, how it arrives, and what forces will shape it?
People tend to believe that others will come around to their point of view over time, according to findings from a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings show that this “belief in a favorable future” holds across various contexts and cultures, shedding light on some of the causes and consequences of the political polarisation evident today.
Click on the following widget to see top global futurists in 2018 - Futurist Influence Rankings from Ross Dawson.
As robots get better at light industrial tasks like apparel manufacturing, whole swaths of the developing world are about to get stretched tight. Bangladesh alone needs to create roughly 2 million new jobs every year to keep pace with an expanding population. But job growth in the country's most important industry, textiles, is getting clobbered by automation, according to Eurasia Group.
Some 92 percent of Brazilians are worried about the inability to discern fake news from real news online, according to a poll done late last year. That is the highest percentage of any country surveyed. Germany, as it happens, is the only country where a majority of citizens are not worried about this problem, said Signal Media,
Oxford University released a study that confirmed the worst-kept secret of the last 18 months: social media has been harnessed to spread politically polarising content. But there are also more optimistic signals, as people use technology to heal these divisions, too. VR has found a use case in helping consumers encounter challenging situations (from migraines to sexual harassment), and in the process build empathy and understanding, according to TrendWatching.
As actual conflict rages in the Middle East, noted Eurasia Group, a more nebulous battle is playing out in cyberspace where – by comparison with conventional war – there are still relatively few rules of the game. Beyond gamely broaching the subject, there’s little desire among the major cyber powers to cooperate in limiting this new form of conflict.

Pre-2018

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future presented new ideas on decision-making and learning to come up with reliable predictions to foresee and even engineer the future. Game theorist de Mesquita claimed a successful record of applying game theory to predicting the outcome of critical foreign policy issues, including a 90% accuracy rate in forecasts for the U.S. government, often about the future direction of other countries.

Demographic Trends

5 ways to prepare for tomorrow's ageing population | World Economic Forum
A report looked at ways to boost yields of the main crops, considered constraints of land and water and the use of fertiliser and pesticide, assessed biofuel policies and explained why technology matters so much.
Asia's population is ageing fast. Here's what we can learn | World Economic Forum
By 2060, this country will have the world's largest population | World Economic Forum
Can Africa diffuse its demographic time-bomb? | World Economic Forum
Charted: As Japan celebrates "Respect for the Aged Day," it has more senior citizens to honor than ever before — Quartz
Golden Aging: Prospects for Healthy, Active and Prosperous Aging in Europe and Central Asia
Longer, Better Lives in the Sharing Economy | INSEAD Knowledge
Millennials aren’t lazy – they’re workaholics | World Economic Forum
Older and wiser: how to hold on to your experienced workforce | World Economic Forum
Our life in three stages – school, work, retirement – will not survive much longer | Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott | Opinion | The Guardian
The link between increasing retirement ages and youth employment | World Economic Forum
The Triple Bottom Line: Millennials and Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurship | Inc.com
The world is about to see an unprecendented demographic shift | World Economic Forum
World population by level of fertility over time, 1950-2050 - Our World In Data

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