Abstract
By 2050, our world will be completely different than it is today. China, instead of enjoying the benefits of half a century of rapid population growth, will be grappling with the consequences of half a century of population decline. Europe will be much older, and far less white and less Christian. Instead of being mainly rural, the developing countries will have become mainly urban. And Africa will have grown enormously, such that Nigeria alone will be more than half as populous as all of Europe, and Africa as a whole will have a population almost as large as that of India and China combined. This world will impose new challenges in regard to migration, economic growth, and stable governance. Rising to those challenges will require new forms of international and intergovernmental cooperation and organizations, and innovative policies based on acceptance – rather than denial – of this new world.
About the Speaker
Jack A. Goldstone (PhD, Harvard University) is the Richard Elman Family Professor of Public Policy at HKUST, and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. He has won major prizes from the American Sociological Association, the International Studies Association and the Historical Society for his research on global history and social change, and has won grants from the MacArthur Foundation, JS Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation. Before coming to HKUST, he taught at Caltech, the University of California and Northwestern University, and was the Hazel Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University. Goldstone’s research focuses on the impact of population change on the global economy and international security, and the cultural origins of modern economic growth. Goldstone has authored or edited ten books and published over one hundred articles in books and scholarly journals. His recent essay in Foreign Affairs – “The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends that will Change the World” – has been widely cited as a critical guide to the impact of future population change. His latest books include Why Europe? The Rise of the West 1500-1850 (McGraw-Hill, 2008; Chinese Translation 2010), Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (Oxford 2012) and Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2014).
