True lies

“No, I sell cars! That's all! C'mon... I'm actually a complete coward, if I ever saw a gun, I'd...…” (Simon, ‘True Lies’)

Most of us will admit to occasional fantasies of genuine influence. How else to explain our, now mercifully ebbing, obsession with superheroes? An endless parade of ripped loners, saddled with abundant agency, proved the popular escape from a world rocked by a rare cluster of ‘one in a hundred year’ global cataclysms. The more the world beyond our door (and border) threatened, the greater the appeal of these now tedious supers.

With the US busily dismembering itself before the world, apparently aiming to make itself super again, we look at how all this should influence our longer-term forecasts.

What of today matters for tomorrow?

From an individual mulling an investment portfolio to a company building a data centre, it is overwhelmingly the medium-to-long-term economic outlook that matters. It is there, well beyond the horizon of daily ‘expert’ gibbering, that your returns on investment will be determined. It is tempting to assume that there is abundant information about that distant future contained in the maelstrom of data, shouting and market moves of today. There mostly isn’t.

In fact, there is probably more to mislead than inform us in the current context. The long-accepted, but often marginalised truth is that most phenomena in the world we live in are unintended¹. When even the most garlanded management gurus² are willing to acknowledge that “unintended consequences outnumber intended consequences…”, we should all willingly hang up our proverbial capes.

Looking 10 years hence, what will we say in hindsight about ‘Liberation Day’? Could the unintended overwhelm intended yet again? One clue could come from a prior period of accelerated globalisation and coincident nativism. Some, admittedly glib, takes on the history of globalisation will point to the period between 1870 and WW1 as the movement’s true golden age. This was certainly a half century of dramatically accelerating global trade and interconnection. However, it was also notable for a gathering political opposition to this economic opening.

One of many theories puts technological change in the driving seat. The multiple interacting revolutions of the time clustered around newly abundant steel. Better railroads and bigger, faster ships combined with the newly laid transatlantic cable to evaporate distance-based constraints on economic activity.

Meanwhile, mechanical reapers and emerging breakthroughs in chemical fertilisers changed the balance of power in agriculture. The resulting cheap and intermittently abundant grain from the American Midwest helped upend European agriculture, forcing adaptation and mass migration – Denmark, for example, managed to migrate away from grain up to higher value-added products, exporting cheese, eggs and bacon. In Italy and much of central and eastern Europe, marginal farms were abandoned and a wave of emigrants headed for the new world³.

As with today, you can argue that politicians of the time, who ultimately raised barriers and turned inwards with disastrous consequences, were responding to rather than authoring events. It was the rapidly evolving technological context that dominated the shaping of the world they lived in.

Keep an open mind

The forces driving the world to unevenly and messily integrate are likely not done with yet. Distance shrinking technologies (from cultural to geographic) proliferate. As before, the various political and other forces trying to turn the clock back to some imagined halcyon era are best seen as fishermen shaking their fists at the incoming storm.

Those mega-pattern spotters might now see in the US some of the important tell-tale signs of a fading empire⁴. President Trump – a symbol of an interregnum – is as much subject to the mostly invisible inevitabilities of technological change as the rest of us.

Furthermore, we should be wary of leaders arguing that they can easily re-orient their economy and the areas of industrial and wider strength. The relative strengths and weaknesses of economies emerge from thousands of years of political, economic and societal weather.

For most countries and indeed companies, it is a matter of accepting who and what you are. There will always be outlier transformations, paraded by fee-seeking advisers to leaders in search of legacy. In the corporate world, you can think of Microsoft’s phenomenal rebirth⁵. In countries, the poster children for such visionary and transformative leadership are perhaps Korea and Taiwan.

However, these examples should mostly be seen as the exception not the rule. They are attractive examples of superhero-like agency from leaders that worked for a range of different reasons, with luck mostly underemphasised as usual. More often than not, the world’s countries and companies are better off accepting who and what they are and acting accordingly.