Globalism vs. Nationalism
Throughout the last century, political parties in most developed countries have typically been divided by their alignment with socialist or capitalist ideals. In this century, we expect the core political divide to pivot around globalism vs nationalism.
While this does somewhat shift the terms of the debate, the core question remains the same:
Will society function better with a centralized system in which resource allocation is managed by highly trained technocrats (this time at an international level) or a decentralized system, which prioritizes organic sorting at the local level?
This book isn’t really a “politics book,” so we won’t dive too deep into this topic as we expect it to become more partisan with time. That said, we think the history around this subject makes the optimal outcome fairly obvious: The system will eventually reach an equilibrium that favors decentralized structures, but only loosely (if society is on a slider between centralized globalism and decentralized nationalism, it should be 70% in favor of nationalism and decentralization).
This debate’s equilibrium point is predetermined as it involves many of the same questions posed by the previous capitalism vs. socialism debate but at the super-national level: “How much do we want a command economy vs. realms in which decisions are made organically by people closer to the problems at hand?” Nothing has fundamentally changed about these questions. This won’t be true of the next centralization vs. decentralization debate, which we expect to be centered around AI vs. human-run systems. We say this, as most of the failures of historically human-run centralized systems can be addressed by AI.