Forecasting the future
To understand megatrends, think like a hydrologist.
A trend is a stream in a forest—flowing in a polite and ordered manner, often unseen, easily dammed or diverted. A megatrend is a river in spate. It washes over vast terrain: an entire sector, a national economy, or the world at large. It’s unstoppable. And it changes everything, sometimes in a manner that is impossible to predict.
No one can accuse a megatrend of being unseen. The biggest of them all, climate change, dominates headlines, economic planning, political activism, trade, and nightmares. And a quick glance at a daily newspaper could give you a few other megatrends: the slowing of the Chinese economy, for instance, or the rise of artificial intelligence.
The longer a bank or consulting firm has been around, and the bigger it grows, the stronger its temptation to think in megatrends. PriceWaterhouseCoopers publishes reports about megatrends. So does Goldman Sachs. So do JPMorgan and McKinsey and BlackRock. For the big boys, mere trends are not enough.
But the notion of the megatrend as an analytical or predictive framework has attracted criticism as well. (One journal, as early as 1991, called it an example of “creaming the future”: making money off the promise to foretell how megatrends will affect a client’s business or investments, as banks and consultancies do.) And it’s true that megatrends are invariably broad and sweeping. Who can chart, for instance, the infinitude of ways in which a warming planet will affect human life—and how these influences will intersect, clash, or join up with each other?
Where did megatrends come from? And how useful are they? The answer is in your not-so-distant future.
By the digits
The numbers associated with some undeniable megatrends:
800 million: China’s population forecast for 2100. The cost of Chinese labor will rise, as will the government’s expenditure on welfare for an aging population—with acute consequences for the world economy.
49.7%: Share of US society that will be white by 2045—the first time the US will be “minority white.” The white population will also be an aging one, while Asian, Black, Hispanic, and multiracial populations will be younger—a crucial factor in voting patterns.
1.5°C: Rise in global temperature above pre-industrial levels that scientists think is now inescapable. The world will hit that mark around 2035, according to projections released last year.
68%: Share of the world’s population that will live in cities by 2050, up from around 56% today. How cities handle their swelling populations will essentially determine how well—or how poorly—people live, and also what they buy and need.
50 billion: Standard number of transistors on a microprocessor chip by 2030. Some specialized chips already feature more than 50 billion transistors. The Dutch giant ASML predicts advanced chips with 300 billion transistors by 2030, while Intel is aiming for an even more ambitious 1 trillion. These chips will drive the digital economy megatrend that features in the forecasts of numerous institutions.
The origin of the megatrend trend
The word “megatrends” is widely thought to have been coined by John Naisbitt, a political scientist who published a blockbuster book of that name in 1982. In fact, the term had been around for a few years already; among other places, it appears in a 1976 issue of Sudanow, a magazine published by Sudan’s Ministry of Culture and Information.
But Naisbitt certainly popularized the word. (Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a steep rise in its use after 1982.) His book identified “10 new directions transforming our lives,” and was a Reagan-era, techno-optimist forecast of how the market would improve human society. Political power would disperse, to the point that the presidency and Congress would become irrelevant. An information society would replace the long-running industrial society. Horticulturists would produce yellow papayas and pears that looked like apples. When he toured the speaking circuit with these insights—a few original, many obvious or ambiguous, and others wide of the mark—Naisbitt charged $15,000 a pop. “My God,” he wrote, “what a fantastic time to be alive!”
Other writers and thinkers followed Naisbitt. (What do consulting firms do, after all, but pinpoint broad economic, political, or social megatrends that affect the business of companies?) Sometimes these are useful frameworks. A reader of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Forum for the Future’s “Long-term Prospects for the World Economy,” published in 1992, would have done well to heed its emphasis on the rise of China—even if the OECD offered nothing sharper than that.
But scholars have criticized the megatrend bandwagon for at least as long as it has been gathering speed. Megatrends are valuable if they serve as a starting point for deeper thinking about the future, Richard Slaughter, a British futurist, wrote in a journal named “Futures” in 1993. The worst thing possible, he added, would be to regard megatrends as perfect forecasts—readymade for consultancies to hitch services to them. But that was precisely what had happened, Slaughter wrote: “Depending on how one views the matter, the result is a marketing bonanza or a critical nightmare.”
Quotable
“Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they’re already going.”—John Naisbitt, author of “Megatrends” (1982)
Pop quiz
In her 1991 book The Popcorn Report, the futurist Faith Popcorn identified what cultural megatrend, which would eventually come to fruition during the covid pandemic?
A. Pupating
B. Cocooning
C. Metamorphosing
D. Jazzercising
Follow the stream to the bottom of this email to find out.
Brief history
1982: John Naisbitt publishes Megatrends, his runaway bestseller. Barely a decade later, he publishes Megatrends 2000, with 10 new picks for the future, followed by Megatrends for Women and China’s Megatrends.
1995: Jackie Fenn, an analyst at Gartner, comes up with the “Hype Cycle: an explanation of how technology megatrends always move from inflated expectations through a trough of disillusionment to a final plateau of productivity.”
1996: The United Nations releases “Shaping the 21st Century,” a special report based on a host of megatrends and “futures studies,” preparatory to drafting and adopting the Millennium Development Goals.
2001-2003: The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq begin—arguably an unexpected megatrend, with vast implications for human life in those countries, energy security, defense spending, and domestic politics in many nations.
2015: In Paris, 195 parties adopt an agreement to keep global warming to 1.5°C, in an effort to battle the greatest global megatrend facing human civilization.
2020: “Is covid a megatrend?” turns into an FAQ for Megatrend Monitor, a British agency that “empowers future-forward thinkers with cutting-edge insights.” Covid is not a megatrend, “but it has accelerated and amplified existing megatrends, such as digitalization, remote work, and the importance of public health,” Megatrend Monitor decides.
Fun fact!
The fever around John Naisbitt’s idea of megatrends grew so heated in the 1980s that, in 1989, Mića Jovanović, a Serbian entrepreneur, named his new business school Megatrend University. Jovanović invited Naisbitt into the faculty, and briefly, between 2015 and 2017, even renamed the school as John Naisbitt University. Naisbitt didn’t bite. Perhaps it was the university’s reputation as a diploma mill, or its decision to award the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi an honorary doctorate in 2007, that put Naisbitt off.
Take me down this 🐰 hole!
The idea of megatrends—of identifying them and predicting their effects—belongs to a wider field called futurology or futures studies. It has its own journals and publications, and its own academic niche; you can get a master’s degree in futures research, for instance, at the Free University of Berlin, and UNESCO celebrates Dec. 2 as World Futures Day. Futures studies incorporates economics, social science, the natural sciences, political theory, and more. It is reminiscent, in fact, of psychohistory, the fictional science in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, where practitioners make forecasts about how large groups of people will behave in the future.
Poll
Which of these megatrends will most influence human life in 2100?
- The climate crisis
- Artificial intelligence
- Aging populations
💬 Let’s talk!
🤔 What did you think of today’s email?
💡 What should we obsess over next?
Today’s email was written by Samanth Subramanian (current megatrend: keeping his head above water until 2024) and edited by Susan Howson (current megatrend: dramas that feature waistcoats) and Morgan Haefner (current megatrend: buttered noodles).
The answer to the quiz is B., Cocooning, which is enabled by technology, Popcorn wrote, but it is also a response to technology—to the overstimulation and exhaustion of modern life.