Looking back over 20 years of rapid globalization which was, until recently, assumed an organic part of our existence, created lookalike cities around the world made of the same concrete and steel. Wherever we travel we see similar looking high rise buildings, almost identical coffee and souvenir shops and deja vu big multilevel multi-brand malls. Regardless of where in big cities they live, people in their lookalike cars spend hours in traffic jams, they fly by the same airplanes, they watch the same movies, they boast the same habits, aspirations and ambitions. Although it was mostly a positive experience for peoples and nations, it has created a sort of still waters an environment where fewer and fewer of us would be able to stand out from the crowd. Those who are into intensive world traveling must admit this all these things happened in a relatively short period of time right in front of our eyes.
This may sound like a joke, but I remember a couple of decades ago something seemingly silly Thai sweet chili sauce, a really tasty addition to any meal. It was available on sale, apart from in their countries of origin, only in the Thai and Philippine communities around New York, like the ones in Jersey City. Today it is available as a mass-produced pre-packaged sauce in any McDonalds outlet around the world, and it took only a decade for this tasty, but part of explicitly national cuisine to become a widespread international condiment. Another example. Russian cars have always been somewhat outdated and generally unappealing to own. Today one can hardly make a difference between taking a ride in a Mercedes van or in the latest model of a Russian van called a Gazelle. The latest model of a Gazelle even enjoys automatic door locks and retractable footsteps!
We go to work to similarly looking financial districts consisting of hundred storey skyscrapers be it New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dubai or Moscow.
But, the strange thing is, the more uniformly people live around the world the more conflicting became international politics: rising geopolitical tensions, rapidly expanding government borrowing and the threat of more taxes and regulations to jeopardize our common future prospects.
One of the biggest problems is that the cost of living continues to outpace wages in many places. For example, someone earning the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage would need to work almost 127 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom rental, or 103 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom rental, according to a report published this year by the U.S. National Low Income Housing Coalition.
As back in the late 1980s when the Iron Curtain was dismantled and one third of the world opened its welcoming markets to the prosperous and promising free economy, it began its countdown to the time when it has bumped straight into the apparent wall of further expansion. This outcome was easy to predict.
However, over these past thirty years we just enjoyed mutual penetration of the markets and cultures but did almost nothing to sustain the pace of scientific and research progress. Thus the Internet was created in the late 80s early 90s. Very popular nowadays electric cars were first invented, believe it or not, around the 1870s. The oil fracking technology tracks back to the early 1990s. What else can we mention? Smart phones and smart homes, perhaps? Yes, but one can argue that these innovations appeared as a result of further expansion of the information technologies, the foundation of which were laid out much earlier.