Forecast for 2050: U.S. Affluence
Most business forecasters focus on the near term, rarely more than a few years into the future. But one research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., has tried to take a look 60 years into the future to determine what the world will be like in 2050.
Among the forecasts that the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit association of consultants, made in January for that year:
* Even with a modest rate of real gross national product growth in the United States--about 2% a year--U.S. society will have grown to “remarkable levels of affluence,” with GNP tripling from present levels.
* The United States may have formed a trade bloc with Japan to compete with the European Economic Community (which by 2050 may have grown to include Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union).
* Current forecasts for flat population growth in the United States will have “almost surely” been proven incorrect. Immigration restrictions will have been relaxed because increased immigration will be seen as a good thing for the United States during the early decades of the 21st Century.
* The number of workers employed in the U.S. manufacturing sector will continue to decline--a trend firmly in place today. But manufacturing will still account for about 20% of the nation’s GNP.
* That staple of U.S. business and personal transportation--the passenger automobile--will still be with us in 2050, and it will not be replaced by either mass transit or devices such as personal aircraft.
“Certainly none of us presumes--and neither should you--that we generated accurate predictions of the future,” the report concedes. But the group does feel that taking a very long-term view can provide interesting glimpses of what may lie ahead and helps sharpen the focus of more near-term projections.
Although the unification of the European Economic Community in 1992 will provide new opportunities for marketing U.S. products abroad, language and cultural barriers will remain significant.
Cultural barriers may prove the more difficult to overcome, according to Michael Wahl, chairman of the Howard Marlboro Group, an international marketing communications company.
Even within the same country, urbanites have very different tastes from their country cousins. Cooking traditions make food the most difficult category to market across cultural borders, according to John Quelch, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard University. Cosmetic and high-tech items will be the easiest to market, but most U.S. products will require adaptation to be successfully marketed in Europe--such as different colors and packaging.
Wahl concludes that a major decision facing U.S. companies will be whether to position their products individually for each country or broadly throughout Europe.
