Background Briefing: What Can Four Centuries Worth of Improvements in a Generation Mean for Your Life?

Background Briefing:

What Can Four Centuries

Worth of Improvements in a Generation Mean for Your Life?

 

Progress is our most important product.

— General Electric slogan from the 1950s

The 400 Year Project

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years from now.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In 1995, I launched the 400 Year Project, a search for ways of accomplishing 400 years of normal improvements in only 20 years. The concept was simple: Spend 20 years locating and demonstrating ways to accelerate worldwide improvements by 20 times and implement the results from 2015 to 2035 to make 400 years of normal progress in only 20 years. (If you would like to learn more about the project concept, register at http://www.fastforward400.com/.)

Helping people to understand the benefit of accomplishing this task has not been so simple. In this background briefing, let’s consider what the project’s benefits might look like for you.

Peering Forward 400 Years from 1607

All of life is a foreign country.

— Jack Kerouac

Imagine that you are Wahunsunacock, chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, in 1607, one week before the English colonists arrive to found Jamestown in what is now known as Virginia. Your power has no bounds. You are the most respected person among all of the people you’ve ever met. There is bounty for everyone, provided by nature’s goodness. All is well. Who could want anything else?

If you think about the future, it is probably to imagine that life in 1617, 1627, 1637, 1707, 1807, 1907, and 2007 will be pretty much the same as in 1607. And you would be terribly wrong.

Your daughter, Pocahontas, will marry an Englishman, John Rolfe, and soon travel to England where she will meet the English Queen Anne and be treated like royalty. Pocahontas will die there from an infection for which she has no immunity. You won’t know that England exists until the colonists arrive.

The English people will begin cultivating and exporting vast quantities of a new strain of tobacco which will help create a worldwide interest in smoking that will cause fatal diseases in untold millions for centuries to come. That choice of working to cause harm might strike you as a strange thing for the English to do instead of hunting, fishing, and enjoying life.

Your people will no longer be free to conduct their accustomed lives on their ancestral lands within a few decades because more settlers will turn your hunting grounds and growing areas into their farms and plantations. In the process, many people will be slaughtered by the English. Many others of your people will die of diseases that were unknown until the English arrived.

The most powerful nation on Earth in 2007 (which is a lot bigger than anything you imagine) will be founded and locate its capital not terribly far from your home.

Now imagine that you are any of the immigrants who came to Virginia from other parts of the world over the next 400 years. Almost all those who came, except those who were enslaved in chains, would see this new home as a virtual paradise of opportunity. Many descendents of the chained arrivals, however, would still be seeking full access to opportunity in 2007.

Sometimes 400 years brings progress for certain lives, while the same 400 years can bring setbacks for others, including the powerful. For instance, the president of the United States in 2007 probably didn’t feel nearly as well-liked, peaceful, safe, and powerful as Wahunsunacock did in 1607.

How can you learn from these experiences to be sure that you grasp more of the progress and fewer of the setbacks that the future could bring for you and your family? Let’s take a few mental trips into the future to see what can be done.

How Do You See Your Life in 2035?

If we see light at the end of the tunnel,

It’s the light of an oncoming train.

— Robert Lowell

If you are over the age of 60, you may assume you won’t be around in 2035. Read on anyway. I have some surprises for you.

If you expect to be around in 2035, you might focus on threats and describe your life in that year in dire terms after considering at where certain trends might lead:

• Epidemics of new diseases kill hundreds of millions every year, and you live in isolation to avoid that risk.

• You are divorced … for the fourth time and are broke because of the divorce settlements.

• Like billions of people, you are clinically depressed.

• Air pollution is so bad that simply breathing is the equivalent of a ten-pack-a-day cigarette habit in 2007.

• The government in your country has just repudiated any obligation to provide pensions or health care for the elderly. You’ll be working until the day you die.

• Your income declines by 5 percent every year because of competition for jobs from poor people in Africa working in outsourcing organizations.

• Gasoline sells for $25 a gallon, and you usually walk to the store to buy your groceries.

• Interest rates are 15 percent and climbing because of governments being virtually bankrupt.

• Housing prices just dropped by a third in the United States because the government stopped allowing income tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes.

Are these events possible? Let’s look at each in terms of history and current trends:

• If we travel back to the time of the Black Death in Europe, we realize it’s possible for every third person to die from an epidemic in a matter of a few years. Today more than one-third of the adults are infected with HIV in parts of the world where few can afford medicine. Without a medical breakthrough, a third will die well in those areas in advance of the life span expected when they were born.

• The divorce rate has been climbing for some time; as people live longer, the number of divorces someone may experience will increase. Those who are divorced are more likely to divorce again if they remarry.

• Clinical depression is one of the fastest growing diagnoses; hard times could accelerate the trend.

• There are places where air quality is so poor that it’s already like breathing several packs of cigarettes a day: This circumstance could worsen in places like China with more industrialization and motor vehicles. Chinese-originated air pollution is increasingly being experienced all over the world.

• Politicians and actuaries tell us that no country in the world will be able to afford its current pension and health-care promises to the elderly because declining birth rates mean fewer people to tax to pay for the benefits and longer lives for the elderly.

• Asia is already starting to lose manufacturing jobs to Africa. Can other types of jobs be far behind?

• We appear to be close to peak oil production using traditional, low-cost extraction technologies; only rapid price increases will limit consumption after low-cost oil production begins to decline.

• Before stopping pension and health-care benefits, governments will have borrowed as much as they can, leaving them with enormous debts to service. With poor credit ratings for these supposedly safest borrowers, general interest rates will go through the roof.

• A virtually bankrupt government will have no choice but to seek new forms of revenue: Eliminating home mortgage interest and property tax deductions will provide massive new income for the U.S. government. Without those tax deductions, many people won’t be able to afford the payments and taxes on the houses they live in. Massive selling will depress home prices permanently relative to where prices would have been with those tax deductions.

Gloomy scenarios are nothing new; people have been predicting worldwide disasters for centuries. But unexpected progress can happen as well, averting disasters or lessening their impact.

How Would You Like Your Life to Be in 2035?

The happy ending is our national belief.

— Mary McCarthy

This is a far more interesting question. Why? By setting some goals for what you want from life, you can begin to take actions that will improve your circumstances. For instance, you might:

• Keep track of how to avoid new diseases and change your behavior to minimize your risk. During the Black Death, for instance, if you avoided certain environments where fleas from infected rats were, you were at little risk.

• Choose not to remarry after a divorce, or act with great caution in your relationships before and after remarrying.

• Follow the advice of your physician about how to overcome depression, see a psychiatrist to help remove behaviors that help depress you, and seek the company of people who make you feel better.

• Move to a place where continual breezes of fresh air blow away pollution.

• Provide for your own retirement and health-care needs through savings and investments.

• Found a business that will benefit by being able to outsource costly activities to Africa.

• Live in a location that’s within easy walking distance to everything you need, plus has access to great public transportation.

• Pay off all of your debts so that interest rates rises don’t affect your costs.

• Rent rather than own your home during perilous economic times so that the value of what you own doesn’t shrink.

Forewarned is forearmed. With enough lead time, most of us can construct useful paths to offset the potential harm that changed circumstances would otherwise bring. So take a few moments now to consider how you would like to be living in 2035 in terms of:

• Your physical health

• Your relationship with your spouse

• Your family life

• Your friends

• Your mental health and acuity

• Your personal safety

• Your quality of life

• Your home

• Your location

• Your financial resources

• Your income

• Your financial obligations

Chances are that you’ve just painted what seem to you like a pretty rosy picture. Am I right? Well, I have a surprise for you. By focusing on avoiding problems and shifting your focus to what you would like to have, you will, however, have missed your best opportunities. Why? Because you never focused on the best that is available to you.

Let me cure you of this short-sightedness now. You need to rethink your answers about how you would like to be living in 2035. Take a few minutes to consider the best circumstances you can imagine for yourself for living in 2035 in terms of the previously listed aspects of your life. If you are like most people, what you just thought about having the best of each circumstance is substantially more desirable than what you previously thought you would like to see in 2035. Why are you are you so much more upbeat? Because now you went beyond just what you’d like to the best of what you can imagine. Let’s imagine some of those possibilities together to see the kinds of change that are possible.

What Could Your Life Be Like in 2035 with Normal Progress?

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

— Sun-Tzu

First let’s consider what life is apt to be like in the year 2035 if everyone makes improvements at the normal pace. Then in the next section we’ll imagine how things could be if improvements occur much more rapidly.

Let’s start with life expectancy. Longevity is increasing by about 1 percent a year in economically advanced countries, and often quite a bit faster than that in less economically advanced countries (except those plagued with AIDS). If you thought you would be dead by 2035 when you started reading this book, perhaps you won’t be. For those who reach the age of 60 in 2007 and live in economically advanced countries, slightly more than half will probably be alive in 2035 because the average life span is likely by then to be at least 4 years longer than it is now.

The age at which physical health deteriorates is also lengthening. Today’s 70-year-olds are often more vigorous than 60-year-olds were in the 1960s. What’s more, research shows that exercise and mental stimulation extend that vigorous period.

The number of people reaching their 60th wedding anniversaries is growing rapidly. By living longer and working harder on relationships with spouses, marriages can also be longer and happier. With long-enough lives and wisely learning from experience, even people in second marriages may celebrate 60th wedding anniversaries.

By living longer, the size of your family will grow as new generations are added during your lifetime. Assuming that you will have two children and they each have two children, you will have four grandchildren. By living an additional 4 years, more people will see at least one of their great grandchildren. If each of your grandchildren has two children, you will eventually have eight great grandchildren. That means you could have fourteen descendents rather than six in your advanced years. For those who started their families young and where that trend continues in succeeding generations, having thirty living descendents from two-child families will be possible. If more than two children are born in each generation, the size of your family could be enormous.

Longevity affects friendships, too. While many of today’s 80-year-olds have lost a lot of their friends, that won’t be as true in 2035. Similar losses won’t occur until the mid-80s. The longer period of good health means that you’ll be active with your friends for more years as well. If you stay open to making new friends, you may also find that you’ve yet to meet more than half the friends you’ll have in 2035.

People born in 2007 have some bigger surprises awaiting them. Those who graduate from college in 2029 will mostly know obsolete information by the time they are 28 in 2035 unless they continually refresh their understanding of what’s just been learned. Graduates will need to reeducate themselves again and again over their long lives. If they are smart about it, they will learn to focus during their young years on developing basic skills that will accelerate lifelong learning. Helpful skills to acquire include faster reading speed and better comprehension, creating well-organized notes about what has been studied, learning to communicate well in writing and orally, improving foreign language fluency, becoming adept at producing outstanding solutions (such as with the 2,000 percent solution process), and becoming an effective leader.

With greater longevity, we run the risk of being crippled or otherwise impaired for more years. So it makes sense to pay more attention to real, rather than apparent, safety issues. Statistics show that dangers primarily lurk at home, when driving near your home and work areas, and while with friends and family members. When drugs, alcohol, and guns are available, dangers grow exponentially greater. Yet people put more effort into keeping an eye on strangers on a city street than they do with the greater risks within their homes.

Selecting the right home for 2035 presents a special challenge. While raising children, most parents are quite anxious to pick the optimal home they can afford for providing an appropriate living environment and education. Parents move as often as they need to in order to improve what they provide to their offspring. But eventually the children grow up, move out, and move away … and they may not often return. And there you have it; two people rattling around in a house designed to sleep six and accommodate an extra three or four friends for afternoon fun. Clearly, a child-oriented home isn’t the right abode any more. But inertia sets in, and people stay where they are. Why? It just seems like too much trouble to move when you have a comfortable roof over your head that’s paid for. But how much more wonderful could your home be? Probably quite a lot if it exactly reflected your needs and tastes. Chances are that you’ll live at least three decades (and possibly five) after your last child moves out. Being in the right home for post-child years makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Before 2035 arrives, you should be considering a different home in a great locale that offers you benefits that you haven’t had before. You can have a wonderful time visiting possible new locales and meeting the people there. Your social life may bloom in ways that wouldn’t have occurred in the old stomping grounds. Plus, if you locate somewhere that’s comfortable for older folks, you won’t have to make an unpleasant shift in locales again in old age to reflect any reduced mobility you experience.

With the prospect of more longevity, finances will be a greater concern for many in 2035. If you have planned well, you won’t have to spend precious time creating more income. Or you may find a kind of work or business that can provide for most of your lifestyle desires at no cost to you due to expense-account allowances and perks. Earning an income for more years (as long as you enjoy what you’re doing) will also reduce your need for retirement income when you do decide to stop working to earn money (you may still want to do volunteer work you love). Or you might find that too elevated a lifestyle may not be healthy and decide to live in a way that’s more sustainable over the long term. Some will see increasing income as a trade-off for having more time and more fun. In that case, you might look into how lifestyle costs can be further reduced in ways that will give you more freedom with your time. Or you could choose to occasionally sample the high lifestyle rather than always be surrounded by it. The choice will be yours.

If you live a long time, debt can wipe out a lot of money gained through much good work. But keep in mind that there may be obligations worth taking on under certain circumstances, such as a reverse mortgage (one you don’t have to repay until you sell the property or you die) on your home when you are 90, as an alternative to selling at a time when the property is about to greatly expand in value.

If the future brings more challenges and opportunities, some will be overwhelmed. Most of us already work too hard. As a reminder of how work may crowd everything else out, I recently reread Peter Drucker’s last piece of advice to me: “Stop working so much!” Learning about achieving a good balance in our lives should become a priority that we focus on from a younger age. Quality of life often requires that you take steps that you keep putting off. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to grow orchids because you love gazing at their fragile beauty in warm, misted air. Orchids aren’t hard to grow, but you do need to put in a greenhouse (unless you live on a tropical island) and learn what to do. Get serious about the changes you want. You’ll have more years to enjoy those choices.

What Could Your Life Be Like in 2035

After Four Centuries Worth of Progress?

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

— Thomas Alva Edison

Let me caution you that, of course, no one knows most of what will happen next week, much less any details about 2035. If we add the uncertainty of estimating four centuries worth of progress, clearly we are in the land of make-believe. But make-believe can be fun (and instructive too)! Let’s take a look to see what can be learned.

If longevity were to improve by half a percent a year for 400 years, someone with a life expectancy now of 75 years could live to be over 250! While some scientists cite 180 years as the outside limit on the potential life span, who knows what might be learned in the future? Perhaps each of us will produce new stem cells that can be grown into new cloned body parts that will be replaced every 50 to 75 years. Realistically, accelerating progress will extend your life by 2035, but how long this progress will extend your life depends a lot on how old you are today.

Let’s assume a low-ball case. Life expectancy for 60-year-olds grew by about 10 percent in the United States from 1900 to 2000. If that modest trend were to continue for another four centuries, 60-year-olds would have average life expectancies of 120 years of age! Sixty would become the new forty in terms of life progression.

Many people will fear the possibility of being aged and infirm for the bulk of one’s much longer life. But that’s probably not what will happen. Huge advances are being made in replacing the parts of our bodies that wear out the fastest, like knees, hips, and spinal discs. Organ replacements are becoming increasingly common. We also know a lot more about rehabilitation after an injury or disease. Increasingly, those who replace body parts will find themselves functioning better than before rather than less well. With weight and exercise training, some 90-year-olds now report being more agile and active than when they were 50.

As for marriage, perhaps people who realize that a life commitment to a spouse could be for more than 100 years will make the effort to learn better how to build and nurture their relationships. Appreciating that those years when children will dominate a marriage will be relatively few over the length of the marriage may also improve both spouses’ interest in having a great relationship with one another. In addition, average family sizes keep getting smaller. Perhaps tomorrow’s norm will be to have one child rather than two. That would certainly provide much more room for spouses to have satisfying relationships with one another.

People who have many marriages following divorces often try to disguise that fact. Imagine what it would be like to have had fifteen failed marriages over a much longer life. Perhaps the unattractiveness of going through so many unpleasant endings to relationships will encourage more interest in better marriages.

It’s also possible that genetic engineering and training could play a role. Parents who want to have a happy child over such a long life may opt to employ resources from both disciplines to help children have better marriages, in the same way that parents make great efforts to help their children get into better colleges now.

Families are an area where that 120 year life span will make the most difference. If marriage and child-bearing occur at young ages, someone who has 30 descendents at 80 could have 62 descendents at age 100 … and 126 at 120! Even those who marry and give birth at more advanced ages could have 62 descendents at 120. This size in the descendent population may also influence marriage length. Many parents hang on until the youngest child is grown before separating or divorcing. Realizing how many family events you will be attending with your former spouse, you may find that it’s a good idea to stay together at least until the great grandchildren are grown.

Clearly, the generative possibilities of old age are greatly changed if you now have dozens of youngsters to keep track of, mentor, and cherish. The oldest generation will have a much greater role in creating a sense of family among far-flung sets of hundreds of relatives (when you consider cousins, great uncles, and great great aunts). Can you imagine having such a family reunion?

You also won’t have to lose your parents at such a young age. Where many people now suffer those losses in their 50s or 60s, your parents will probably be with you into your 80s or 90s, even if they die somewhat prematurely.

Friendship will also take on new meaning when that kid next door can become someone you’ll know for 115 years. If you make one good new friend a year for life, you can have so many good friends that it would take you weeks just to have couple-on-couple dinners with each one.

Homes may have to become a lot bigger to accommodate parties for friends and visits by the great great great grandkids. Here’s what home ownership progression might look like: You live in a small place when first married. You move to a bigger place with a yard in a good school district at the time when you have your one or two kids. After 25 years, you move into a small place again. After 10 to 15 years more, you buy a bigger place than you’ve owned before where the kids and grandkids can come visit and have fun together. Then, in another 25 to 30 years, you need to buy another place that’s twice as large!

If your working life can extend for 80 to 100 years, it’s also a good time to think differently about both careers and education. Not only will your knowledge become obsolete every 6 years or so if you don’t work at it, but your incentive to stay in the same field will diminish. It won’t be much more effort than keeping up with your field to go learn some other business, profession, or line of work. Where many people now change careers around age 50, we might see that happening a second time at age 75. Graduate schools may be full of 70- and 80-year-olds taking their third doctorates. Rather than choosing to become a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant, you may do all three for part of your life!

The professors may be much younger than the students to take advantage of younger peoples’ ability to absorb new information and to conduct breakthrough research. The average age of professors might decline from 50, to say, 35. That will bring a whole new meaning to the concept of “the cult of youth.” Teaching will present new challenges for these younger professors as inexperienced, young students are increasingly replaced with accomplished veterans of raising families, building organizations, and conducting important research. Imagine how much more practical professors will become.

Home location for your advanced years may be simplified by having several homes so you can accommodate scattered family members and friends during different parts of the year. Your spring home may be in Arizona; your summer home may be on a lake in Canada; your fall home may be in New England (you’ve got to love those color-turning leaves), and your winter home could be on an island in the Caribbean or Hawaii.

Longer lives will also mean that guarding against accidents, injuries, and violent crime will be more important to people. Manufacturers, service providers, and governments will probably have to vie for providing the safest environments and assistance. Homes will come equipped with safety gear to make major accidents all but impossible.

With so many more years to gain the benefits of compounding the value of a person’s investments, we can expect that it will be easier than ever to accumulate substantial wealth. Buy one piece of property on a lake somewhere, and in an increasingly crowded world you can sit back and enjoy the thought that they aren’t building much more lakefront property any more. Be cautious about oceanfront property, however; violent storms and melting polar ice caps could flood your land! Commercial property investments for retailers will be similarly lucrative if you buy where everyone will want to be for the next several decades. Safe bets like spots overlooking Central Park in Manhattan and Waikiki beach views from up the mountain in Honolulu will probably create many trillionaires in the future. You can now buy index funds of several thousand of the largest companies in the world. These stocks compound in value around 5 percent a year in real terms. That means doubling in purchasing power every 15 years. Put $100,000 into such an index fund at age 30, and the value of your portfolio’s purchasing power in today’s dollars will be $6,400,000 at age 120.

Debt will, of course, be potentially even more ruinous. Imagine if you keep making late payments on your credit cards until the interest rate gets up to 29 percent and you are charged additional over-limit and late fees of 10 percent a month! You could owe a trillion dollars at 120 on a debt that was only a few hundred dollars at age 30. Wise use of debt to make good investments, however, will be even more profitable than ever as you have more years to compound your gains from what you purchase. With a longer time frame, you’ll be able to be more patient with investments that will be all right in time, but which don’t look very good during a downturn.

What about the future potential for income? Average productivity gains over long periods of time have been about 3 percent a year. Incomes tend to track the rate of productivity gains so we can use this statistic to estimate how much purchasing power will increase in the future. At that growth rate, purchasing power doubles every 24 years. That is almost seventeen doublings over 400 years. For someone who earns $35,000, four hundred years of such progress would expand income to $7.5 billion in today’s purchasing power. If that happens, chances are that only those who really want to work will be doing so for very long. Or perhaps the work week will shrink for most people to just a few minutes. Someone who worked 30 minutes a week would earn $94 million a year. I think I could get by on that. How about you?

How might you earn this much for so little effort? Someone who developed a great computer program for investing money might need to spend only 30 minutes a week overseeing the program’s application. Money managers are already paid in the millions if they are any good. A great one could certainly earn $94 million a year today.

How would the average person earn that amount? I suspect that computer technology will develop to such a point that anyone will be able to establish a profitable specialty that’s enormously valuable to others. What will your specialty be?

* * * *

You can see then, that 400 years of progress in the areas of longevity, health, personal relationships (spouses, family, and friends), homes, work, education, and finances can provide huge improvements in our lives. Does enjoying any of that potential between now and 2035 strike your fancy? If so, read on to find out how the 400 Year Project can help you to gain these delightful opportunities for you and your family.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.