In Blade Runner, Los Angeles police officer Rick Deckard goes hunting for “replicants” in a city that is rainy and dark due to pollution. Replicants are androids that are difficult to differentiate from humans, whom they surpass in capabilities. They are dangerous because they have feelings and rebel. They work in distant parts of the galaxy and are manufactured by a large corporation that rules the world. Ridley Scott released the film in 1982 and placed that dark future in 2019. It was the dystopia that left the greatest mark among those of my generation.
A dystopia is an imaginary place in the future where people live unhappy and afraid, subject to tyrannical governments. It is a type of fiction that has been part of popular culture since the late 19th century. In Blade Runner, technologies appear that fill us with concern, such as artificial intelligence or bioengineering. But when it was released, those disciplines seemed like distant fantasies. The eighties, despite the fear of nuclear conflict, were optimistic years. Today they are not so much.
A recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) classifies Europeans into five tribes according to their fears. There are those who lived through the financial crisis of 2008, distressed because they think their children will live worse. All the people are worried about migrations. They are the most pessimistic and those who feel the most aggrieved. There are the youngest, who have not yet recovered from the trauma of the climate crisis. His illness is the one that has the worst remedy. There are those who were marked by covid, which made them feel vulnerable. And there is still room for those traumatized by the Ukrainian war and what it means.
Behind these fears is inequality, a kind of aluminosis that corrodes the system and brings out all kinds of diseases in the social structure. The historian with a bleaker view of inequality is Walter Scheidel. For him, inequality tends to grow uncontrollably and only cataclysms know how to put it at bay.
In his book The Great Leveler (2017), Scheidel cites war, revolution, the collapse of states and natural disasters as the four horsemen of that Apocalypse that humanity is periodically forced to go through to restore balance. Two examples: the Black Death, which brutally put an end to a ruined Middle Ages. Or the Great War of 1914, which resoundingly broke the unsustainable inequality of society prior to the conflict.
Despite the reputation of having been vibrant years, the twenties of the 20th century were pessimistic. Humanity was emerging from a flu pandemic and had experienced a First World War that had been carnage. But, despite the bad omens, the collapse did not come. Nor did it do so in the sixties and seventies, when there was talk of a demographic bomb, nor in the eighties, with the nuclear proliferation at the end of the cold war.
The combination of exceptional events in the first years of this decade (pandemic, war in Ukraine, climate crisis) has revived the feeling of living in dark times, in which it is difficult to know where we are heading.
In 2022, the fashionable term at the Davos summit was polycrisis, the place where the political, climate and geopolitical crises converge. This 2024 risk report published by the forum was full of threats. To those already mentioned, he added the fear of a financial crisis due to excess debt, the danger of democratic recession due to the growing hostility towards liberal democracy and the geopolitical vertigo due to the consolidation of a bloc of authoritarian countries.
Economists rarely talk about dystopias. But economics serves to explain how we got here. This is what Josep Oliver, a weekly contributor to La Vanguardia, does in the book A dystopian world. Specialized in the labor market and migrations, Oliver is also well versed in the global economy, which he has his radar on.
The economist notes the current social tension and finds its origin in neoliberal globalization, which has been able to create a lot of wealth, but also strong inequality. Oliver looks at the losers, those harmed by the loss of industrial employment, the deterioration of working conditions, the compression of wages and the effects of artificial intelligence (AI). In which they have also discovered that meritocracy has a limit and that the relationship between educational level and social advancement no longer works automatically.
The perception of grievance of these groups is greater if one considers that the past has been relatively kind, especially between 1950 and 1975, a period of redistributive policies and State intervention. Today that social contract is broken and if Oliver makes one thing clear, it is that there is no turning back. The economy today faces dilemmas that are difficult to resolve: between aging and migration, between growth and the climate transition. Europe, which at the end of the 20th century seemed a reference for the future, is today not the actor best prepared to navigate a fragmented globalization in which authoritarian governments are gaining ground.
H.G. Wells, a science fiction writer and novelist, was a hopeless pessimist who imagined nightmarish futures. He requested that his epitaph include the phrase “I told you so, you damn idiots.” He died in 1946, hopeless, months after the US dropped the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities. However, the world that came after brought growth and well-being.
Does Oliver leave any room for optimism? Not much. What lies ahead, he explains, is a narrow gorge to cross, in which we should be able to recover the growth prior to the years of globalization. “There is no royal road to well-being. And today less than yesterday,” he says. Although the previous mission will be to convince the ruling classes of the current unrest, who tend to deny a reality that makes them uneasy. The first task, then, will be to achieve a shared diagnosis of where we are.
