It ’s too former to pronounce Lewis ’s predictions for truth ; he was look all the manner ahead to 2096 . But it feel like as good a sentence as any to revisit them .
Many of Lewis ’s anticipation seem fleck - on . Global currency ? Sure ! The power to insert yourself into constitute media like movies and music videos ? Why not ! That was a popular idea in the 1990s !
But other predictions seem to mull a loser of mental imagery . The future will have lost all its glamor ? That candidly seems like a silly idea , even a century hence — akin to say that we have all the engineering and tools that humanity could ever want .
Lewis starts his essay with the usual fantast caveats that prognostication is a toughened racket , and that nobody really knows what the earth of 2096 will hold . But then he waste no time diving event mightily in to some sheer soothsaying .
Highlights from the essay appear below , but you could study the entire thing at theNew York Times .
The dollar will be replaced by a global up-to-dateness :
The raw replacement of the dollar sign is a single world currency administered by a global investiture camber . This is only an reference of trends under way : develop countries already coordinate their money supply . Soon , enough European countries will give up top executive over their own currency and adopt the Euro . From the Euro , it is but a small step to the Globo .
Trading will retard down :
[ The typical portfolio of 2096 ] will be much quieter : flip manically in and out of stocks , as millions of Americans habitually do now , will be widely regarded as an act of tomfoolery . For the preceding 20 years , study have been demo that it does not pay up an investor to take financial advice either like a shot from agent or indirectly from mutual - store managers — that once he has made the broad decision of what percentage of his asset to invest in the Malcolm stock market place , he is better off putting the money in a stock - market index . Brokerage houses and mutual funds are the railway of the future tense ; Merrill Lynch and Fidelity will go the way of the Reading and Penn Central .
Nobody will desire to travel anymore because of the cosmos ’s swelling population and homogenisation :
All the thing that make locomotion unpleasant today will , a hundred age from n o w , conspire to make it unbearable . The fantastic crew , for a starting signal . ( Ten billion multitude on the planet , and you think you ’re survive to get even a coup d’oeil of the Mona Lisa ? ) Much of the novelty will be drained of extraneous places , as the globe becomes fully homogenized — or rather that part of the world in which you will be able-bodied to travel without risking your life . Everyone will mouth English , which sounds pleasant until it happens .
Instead of change of location , people will opt for virtual world experiences convey to them by Disney :
The world ’s prominent corporation will be Walt Disney Industries . People will no longer visit foreign property ; foreign place will visit multitude , in the form of Disney ’s Multisensory Package Tours . These tours will enable you to visit not merely other plaza but also other time . Disney ’s most pop merchandise will enable consumers to star in his own fictions — movies , music videos , novel , etc . All the most democratic fable will be pose in the remote past . The future tense will have lose all its glamor , as it will be impossible to ideate it as anything but more of the present tense .
Water will become progressively expensive :
The innocent market place will battle the superbug of tomorrow :
By 2096 , viruses will be the biggest wellness endangerment . ( Epidemiology will be the most moneymaking branch of medicine . ) The securities industry will respond to the boom in viruses with a like windfall in remedy . The tension and drama of 100 concurrent races for cures will lend spurious meaning to human biography . Survivors of strange disease will be the most interesting mass on the planet .
Interior design will become a vitally significant part of culture :
Interior innovation will take the prestigiousness of monumental sculpture in sixteenth - century Rome or movie fashioning in twentieth - C America . The late-1980 ’s phenomenon of the big - shot investment banker with his “ inner decorator ” married woman will give way to the late-2080 ’s phenomenon of the big - dead reckoning interior room decorator with her “ investment banker ” husband .
Convicted crook will be outfitted with sensors and fall in shocks if they approach others with “ criminal purport ” in place of serving time in prison house :
The market will suffer when people abandon religion and depend inward :
The biggest challenge for the grocery will be to suffer the demand for substance in life . Darwinism will spread ; God will fly . amusement technology will debase celebrity — celebrity , like everything else , will have been democratise — so that people will no longer be able-bodied to be through their idols . The possibility of being struck down by a virus will bring a good sight of happiness to those who survive . But even the scatter of disease will prove insufficient to make sprightliness deserving live . valet will increasingly be thrown back on his ego to justify his universe .
Image : Michael Lewis in 2011 at the premiere of Moneyball via the Associated Press
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