A Systems View of Global Trends and Their Consequences
Dennis Holeman
21 August 2019
The trends of many current factors are interacting in complex ways. It is important to consider the trends from a systems perspective to gain insight into how future conditions will evolve, at both a national and a global level. The table, A Systems View of Global Trends and Their Consequences, endeavors to provide a broad view of primary trends, their first-, second-, third-, and fourth-order effects, and what has to be done, at a minimum, to mitigate serious adverse consequences of these trends.
Areas addressed in the table include
- Environmental trends
- Consumption trends
- Habitation trends
- Demographic trends
- Financial and economic trends
- Military trends
- Technological trends
- General political trends
- U.S. political trends
The table is necessarily an incomplete and living document, to be updated and fleshed out as new information becomes available. The important insight is how responses to current problems have to take many different factors into account simultaneously, so that matters are not made worse on the larger scale by a narrow solution to an individual problem. A systems perspective is essential to this.
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