It has never been so difficult as today to say anything about the future 50 – 100 years ahead, in spite of our world knowledge society. But though we cannot know the future it may be possible to say something about the forces that influence it and alternative courses of evolution. Particularly important insights driving this analysis are:

• The ubiquity of self-organization into scale free power-law, small-world networks in society, the economy, business and research;
• The important role of power laws and fat hubs;
• The predictive power of such approaches concerning the spread ISTs; and
• The connection of all those issues with building world-wide human capital and relations to issues of population growth.

The scenario development takes a world ethical perspective and asks two questions:

• Whether humankind will eventually incorporate critical physical limitations into its world economic system regime; and
• Whether, whatever we do, we will respect human dignity and individual human rights in a symmetric, fair way for all people in this world

The four cases are shown below.

Figure 1: Equity and Growth Scenarios

Scenario A is essentially the present WTO regime. The physical limitations of the world are unfortunately not incorporated adequately into the world economy via adjusted prices or other constraints. We use too many resources, we pollute too much, and under prevailing growth processes, the situation will soon become worse instead of better. This also produces unacceptable asymmetries of wealth among and within many countries. Gaps and troubles are ahead in this scenario.

Scenario B: Asking how we will eventually deal with phenomena such as overshooting and resource competition, Scenario B couples the situation of Scenario A with massive security regimes to control all people and to be enable the rich world to react to conflicts and terrorism around the globe as a result of the implied shortages, disasters, etc.

Scenario C is the so-called eco-social case. This balanced future has been discussed in many publications. It starts from the European social market economic model, and extends it by strict environmental rules. Similar structures can be found in developed Asian democracies, which use family nets etc. for creating social cohesion. The most typical current aspiration towards eco-social market economy philosophy is European Union accession process, which can be regarded as “small globalisation.” Here, less developed partners are integrated into a sophisticated frame of rules and standards which they are willing to accept, even if at the cost of economic competitiveness, in exchange for co-financing by their richer future partners. This element is also characteristic for the Montreal Protocol for avoiding CFC emissions to protect the ozone layer and for the Marshall Plan.

Scenario D incorporates physical resource and pollution limits by an asymmetric regime. The North keeps its present status as a big resource user and a big polluter, and stabilises the worldwide ecological situation by preventing the South from catching up. Note that countries in catch up processes can make grow at more than 6%/yr because they start from a low level. In addition, they can imitate developed states, and need not rely so heavily on innovation. So, in principle, (even) under current conditions the poorer countries could catch up. A resource-dictatorship regime would somehow have to prevent that, for instance by destabilising poorer states or enforcing expensive requirements or standards without co-financing. An extensive free trade order system could have the same effect, for instance, if rich countries can monopolise supplies of a bottleneck resource (e.g. oil). Considerable resistance extending to terrorism is to be expected, leading to counter-terrorism, public surveillance etc. The resulting resource-dictatorship regime, coupled with massive security architectures, is certainly not a comfortable landing place for the future.