2030 How today's biggest trends will collide and reshape the future of everything

In this astute and optimistic debut, Guillén, a professor of international management at the Wharton School, examines recent economic shifts and technological advances in order to predict how the world might look a decade from now. Solving contemporary crises such as climate change and economic inequality, Guillén writes, will require "lateral thinking" that approaches a problem from multiple angles and tests numerous solutions. He explores, for example, how agricultural advances might curtail hunger in Africa, where a rising middle class will impact worldwide consumer trends. He also examines how cryptocurrencies might sabotage the banking industry, predicts an uptick in wealth for Asian countries, and offers a carefully reasoned discussion of both the positive and negative potential repercussions of increased automation. Environmentalists may disagree with Guillén's assertion that "small, ordinary adjustments to our daily behavior" can stimulate the dramatic carbon reduction necessary to mitigate climate change, and his query about the gig economy ("will monopolistic digital platforms... end up exploiting workers and consumers alike?") will strike many readers as already answered. Still, this sharp, well-informed analysis of present-day trends and future outcomes provides valuable insights to investors, business owners, and policy makers. (Aug.)

Wharton School professor Guillén examines demographic, economic, and climatic trends to project a vision of the world 10 years hence. Forecasting the future is always a project fraught with peril, as the authors of The Limits to Growth might tell you. Yet some trends of the present seem bound for a harvest of ineluctable results. The number of hungry people will grow in the next decade, but so, too, will obesity; by the author's projections, 50% of Americans will be obese in 2030. This speaks to another growing trend: inequality, a neat solution for which seems unlikely. Even so, Guillén prophesies that middle-class markets will grow in Asia at a much faster clip than in Europe and North America while Africa, which now has the world's fastest-growing populations, will be on the brink of either disaster or a renaissance that will finally bring it wealth. "For better or worse," he writes, "its fortunes will matter globally." Regarding the issue of population, the world will be older almost everywhere. Interestingly, Guillén links the success of Airbnb and other aspects of the "sharing economy" to older persons who want to remain in their homes but find them large enough to offer rooms to rent. Bearing the financial weight of this increasingly older population will be millennials and Gen Z'ers, many of whom, ventures the author, will not be able to accumulate much wealth over their working lifetimes. Some of the seemingly intractable problems of today--immigration and climate change, foremost among them--will not be fixed until the conversations surrounding them become fact-based. As Guillén notes, immigration is a net benefit to society, and "there's a great need for a calm debate about the best policies to determine the volume, timing, and composition of immigration so as to maximize the opportunities for both the origin and the destination countries and so that globalization does not leave millions of people behind as they lose jobs and their communities decline." Students of population biology, gerontology, and finance alike will find value in these pages. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.