10 billion reasons to be cheerful

What will the world be like in 20502 Compared with our own gloomy times, it could be better than we think

- GREG DIXON

The future has never seemed so uncertain. Faced with climate change, war in Ukraine, a pandemic, the worst inflation in a generation, a bellicose China, extremist politics, and, God help us, a dodgy All Blacks team, the world seems bound for hell in a handcart.

Well, don't panic. The world will likely be just fine, says British journalist and futurologist Hamish McRae. He has read the economic tea leaves, studied the demographic entrails and decoded the geopolitical tarot cards and believes, on the balance of probabilities, the world will not only still be here a generation from now, it will likely be abetter place to live for more people than at any time in history.

Though not an entirely sunny vision of the next 30 years, McRae’s book The World in 2050 lays out a global future that, on the whole, will be calmer, healthier and richer; its people better educated. Hopefully, too, we'll be coping with climate change.

Cock-eyed optimism? Possibly. Bound to be wrong? Time will tell. For McRae, it is the thinking about, and talking through, what will happen next that is the thing.

“I passionately want to help people think about the future,” he tells the Listener. We all make assumptions about it. What I want to do is help people make those in an orderly way. If I make a prediction, then at least someone can test their own judgment against it. That’s the useful thing.”

History is littered with the corpses of failed prognostications, of course. Lest we forget such wildly ill-judged predictions as democracy being dead by 1950, homes full of robot servants by 1980, the iPhone being too expensive to find a market, and the forecast, in 2008, that Auckland house prices were about to slump by 30%.