The Future by Al Gore Page A

of jobs from developed countries to emerging and developing markets will soon begin to displace many of the jobs so recently created in those same low-wage countries. 3D printing could accelerate this process, and eventually could also move manufacturing back into developed countries. Many U.S. companies have already reported that various forms of automation have enabled them to bring back at leastsome of the jobs they had originally outsourced to low-wage countries.
CAPITALISM IN CRISIS
    The emergence of Earth Inc. and its disruption of all three factors of production—labor, capital, and natural resources—has contributed to what many have referred to as a crisis in capitalism. A 2012 Bloomberg Global Poll of business leaders around the world found that 70 percent believe capitalism is “in trouble.” Almost one third said it needs a “radical reworking of the rules and regulations”—though U.S. participants wereless willing than their global counterparts to endorse either conclusion.
    The inherent advantages of capitalism over any other system for organizing economic activity are well understood. It is far more efficient in allocating resources and matching supply to demand; it is far more effective at creating wealth; and it is far more congruent with higher levels of freedom. Most fundamentally, capitalism unlocks a larger fraction of the human potential with ubiquitous organic incentives that reward effort and innovation. The world’s experimentation with other systems—including the disastrous experiences with communism and fascism in the twentieth century—led to a nearly unanimous consensus at the beginning of the twenty-first century that democratic capitalism was the ideology of choice throughout the world.
    And yet publics around the world have been shaken by a series of significant market dislocations over the last two decades, culminating inthe Great Recession of 2008 and its lingering aftermath. In addition, the growing inequality in most large economies in the world and the growing concentration of wealth at the top of the income ladder have caused a crisis of confidence in the system of market capitalism as it is presently functioning. The persistent high levels of unemployment and underemployment in industrial countries, added to unusually high levels of public and private indebtedness, have also diminished confidence that the economic policy toolkit now being used can produce a recovery that is strong enough to restore adequate vitality.
    As Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it in 2012:
    It is no accident that the periods in which the broadest cross sections of Americans have reported higher net incomes—when inequality has been reduced, partly as a result of progressive taxation—have been the periods in which the U.S. economy has grown the fastest. It is likewise no accident that the current recession, like the great Depression, was preceded by large increases in inequality. When too much money is concentrated at the top of society, spending by the average American is necessarily reduced—or at least it will be in the absence of an artificial prop. Moving money from the bottom to the top lowers consumption becausehigher-income individuals consume, as a fraction of their income, less than lower-income individuals do.
    While developing and emerging economies are seeing increases in productivity, jobs, incomes, and output, inequality within these countries is also increasing. And of course, many of them still have significant numbers of people experiencing extreme poverty and deprivation. More than one billion people in the world still live on less than $2 a day, and almost 900 million of them still livein “extreme poverty”—defined as having an income less than $1.25 per day.
    Most important of all, among the failures in the way the global market system is operating today is its almost complete refusal to include any recognition of major externalities, starting with its