Attali-Millennium-Winners&Losers in New World Order(1991)

This is Jacques Attali's revealing book Millennium - Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order (1991) which delivers a broad outline of the economic and social order for the next millenium. As the next millenium approaches, religious leaders predict the end of the world and sell their services, profiteers predict catastrophes and sell emergency-packages. Authors of all genres, not only science fiction, have taken the arrival of the new millennium as a chance of reviewing the past, evaluating the present and making predictions about the future. French political economist Attali, adviser to Francois Mitterand, contends that "only a radical transformation of American society" can prevent Europe and Japan from supplanting the U.S. in global supremacy. The author, president of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, further charges that the decline of the U.S. is rooted in a "cult of immediate gratification" as opposed to the long-term vision of the Japanese. He envisions life in a post-Cold War, pluralistic, technology- and market-dominated society. Economic growth must be environmentally sound, he warns, and balanced by social justice adopted by underdeveloped, overpopulated nations. Finally, he counsels, the U.N. must win truly international authority to settle global problems. Picture a world filled with select "rich nomads" roaming the world spending money and hordes of "poor nomads" endlessly migrating in search of goods beyond their reach. This is but one of Attali's descriptions of the next world order. This diverse author/thinker has produced a future view more disturbing, controversial, and gloomy than found in other futurist works, such as Taichi Sakaiya's The Knowledge-Value Revolution and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Attali predicts a new economic order, instant communication, a warming, polluted atmosphere, and a bitter division between "winners and losers." He argues for the rise of a new world center in either the European or Pacific sphere accompanied by the decline of the US and also for the creation of an increasingly mobile elite that does no longer have roots and threatens humanity by the excessive use of new technologies on the expense of the unprivileged majority and generations to come. Every new order that evolves through this accelerating process is based on its ability to manage violence. Despite the success of religion and military force to achieve this, economic power – the order of money – has proven to be the most successful way of control, which can incorporate both other forms. The "new order of money", as Attali calls it, has finally won because of the promises of the market and consumerism. Choice is the essence of the market and it’s accompanying political order – democracy, and at the same time its major problem. Millennium describes a provocative, unsettling vision of a future world that will startle and sober readers, and should be of interest to business leader/futurist thinkers and concerned laypeople. 130 pages. A must read for everyone.