Why the fickle human heart may be the biggest barrier to global prosperity in the decades ahead

For several years, I've been talking about the "wormhole decade" (2001 to 2010), a period in human history when the traditional rules of economic might, social status and political hierarchy were upended. In the last 6 years, we’ve witnessed the start of what may be best called the “decade of disequilibrium,” catalyzed by the dramatic, non-linear changes of the wormhole decade.

As we watch more fissures and dislocations occur around the world, I can’t help but wonder if our true societal constraints are not what the famous 1972 book The Limits to Growth predicted about population growth and finite resources, but instead the very fallible human capacity for shared respect and understanding.  Let me elaborate.

The Wormhole Decade

It all started with 9/11, the first large-scale attack on U.S. continental soil in nearly 200 years. Two months later, the BRIC economies were named for the first time in a Goldman Sachs analyst report, and we began watching as nearly 15 percent of the world’s economic productive capacity shifted from the developed to the BRIC economies in less than a decade. Then came the Iraq War, 2008 and the global plummeting of interest rates, the meltdown of a country named Iceland, a rocky start to the Euro, and a dramatic restructuring of the global finance and accounting sectors.

This same decade saw the invention of the smart phone and social media, catalyzing the transformation of politics and social movements, marketing and reputation-building; not to mention the lodging, transportation, and grocery industries, among others; and of course, a revolution in how family, friends and colleagues meet and talk (or not).

The Decade of Disequilibrium

What is particularly strange is that for the longest time everybody has been acting as though this type of change was normal. But, it wasn’t. It was supercharged, cataclysmic, unprecedented in scale, speed, and scope in human history. And what we have seen since can only be characterized as massive reverberations. Hence why I refer to the period that began in early 2011 with the Arab Spring as the “decade of disequilibrium,” a period of growing uncertainty, instability and insecurity.

It began in 2011 and has only escalated from there… Consider the continuing refugee crises in Africa and the Middle East, which have resulted in more than 65 million people being dislocated – that’s one person in every 113 alive today. Simultaneously, we’re witnessing historic rates in worldwide youth unemployment. In dozens of countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, unemployment is over 30 percent, with Spain and Greece topping 50 percent.

Then there’s the growing Chinese influence on global markets, including Africa and South America, Hong Kong’s umbrella revolution, and Putin’s latest electoral interventions. Outside of Asia, we’re seeing free markets accelerate income disparity, wiping out decades of equalization, and the surprising (for many of us) Brexit and Trump votes.

Our human experience was completely transformed in just 10 years. So, it shouldn’t surprise us that this second decade of the new millennium has been characterized by division, dislocation, and often violence.

The Path Forward

But if humanity is going to flourish in the rest of the 21st century, we will soon need a decade of integration – a time when our world leaders and best business minds unite around a set of shared principles that will guide how we craft our future on this finite planet – principles that build and sustain a deeper sense of our shared fate. That means principles (and ultimately policies) that focus less on growth via scale, cost efficiency, and competitive advantage. And political environments that are not driven by the oversimplification of truth and the amplification of difference.

Why do I believe this? Twenty-five years ago, I ran a psychological study as a doctoral candidate at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In this study, I put MBA students into a simulated resource scarcity environment, where different groups were each sharing a pool of water. I’d read about psychologists using these experiments to study what triggers people to behave more cooperatively. I was trained in economics and, as such, was a big believer in using markets to solve social problems. In the game, as the shared resource started disappearing, I thought that all we needed to do was to run an auction where some people could buy others out, so that there would be fewer people consuming this shared resource. I was stunned when, instead of the resource lasting longer, the people who bought others out proceeded to consume the scarce resource even faster than those who didn’t have that option. 

What I learned from that experiment was the powerful shift in human behavior that occurs when you foster a sense shared social identity and shared fate versus allowing a sense of individual or small group determinism to dominate. This powerful trigger point, a capacity that exists in each human mind, underlies the difference between pursuing collaborative solutions versus self-interest.

Psychological research shows over and over that to the extent that people perceive and value a greater good, they will sacrifice personally to achieve a vision that extends beyond the self. This shift lies at the heart of patriotism – an emotion and mindset that has long helped humans found and defend communities and nations, as well as political and religious ideologies.

But as my research demonstrated, this shift is fickle – it can be heightened, lessened, and easily redirected. Want proof? Consider the U.S. today where it seems that Republicans and Democrats are more focused on expressing hostility toward each other, than uniting to join in outrage toward Putin’s interference with our election.

As we look toward the next decade, we need to use our newfound technological ingenuity to build structures and dialogues that foster deeper understanding and respect for our shared fate as human beings – that foster greater global patriotism, per se. I believe that fostering and sustaining that simple psychic shift, one heart and mind at a time, will be the most critical factor to assuring long-term economic growth and prosperity for our species. The alternative is likely decades of greater and greater division, dislocation and conflict. Hardly what I’d call “progress.”