Douglas Carswell

Cheer up doomsters! The world is getting better

The OECD famously failed to foresee the financial crisis of 2008-09. That has not stopped this Paris-based think tank from publishing a report telling us what the world economy is going to look like in 2060.

According to the OECD, there will be less growth, more inequality, and lots of jobs are going to disappear.

If that wasn't bad enough, Channel 4's Paul Mason has now written a piece suggesting that the doomsters at the OECD are being hopelessly optimistic. Things, he suggests, will be even worse.

We should take this all with a large pinch of salt.

To be sure, many jobs will disappear over the next fifty years, just as lots of jobs disappeared over the previous fifty years. They will tend to be the more repetitive, menial ones, and they will generally be replaced with more interesting ones.

Many more people in 2060 may indeed be working part time. But that is because they will earn more for doing less.

Seen from the perspective of a dawn-to-dusk farm labourer in the nineteenth century, today's work patterns, with seven-hour shifts and two-day weekends, must seem pretty part time. And a very good thing too.

Far from slowing down, I suspect that growth will speed up. The internet will make us more interconnected, allowing ideas and innovation to happen faster. The network of specialisation and exchange that drives human progress will be even greater.

Far from being less equal, many of the barriers to individual success are starting to come tumbling down. Elite university courses, once the preserve of a privileged few, will be available online to the masses. Access to capital, without which would be entrepreneurs cannot succeed, is becoming ever easier.

Specialist knowledge, once the preserve of the powerful, is a mouse click away. Thanks to solar and shale gas, energy costs in 2060 will, I suspect, be a whole lot lower.

Paul Mason claims that the best of capitalism is over. What capitalism? Today we have a system of crony corporatism masquerading as the free market. It is about to get blown away by the real thing. A system of capitalism under which anyone can own the means of production, distribution and capital.

The world in 2060 will as a consequence be much more prosperous, better educated and more equal. Folk will have much more leisure time and vastly higher living standards.

One thing perhaps that won't survive is the twentieth century Western model of big government knows best that gave rise to today's creeking corporatism. But that really is about the one thing left that is holding us – or at least the Western part of humankind – back.

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