Susan Glasser is editor of Politico.

You don’t generally think of Bill and Melinda Gates as pundits. But with their foundation pouring billions of dollars into global development, in effect the two are in the (highly data-driven) prediction business: placing bets on which investments will change the world the most. In their annual letter, released today, the two hazard some fairly specific guesses about the biggest changes in the world over the next 15 years, from cutting the number of childhood deaths in half and reducing deaths in childbirth by two-thirds to eradicating polio and a farming revolution to make Africa self-sufficient.

It’s not a sure thing, of course, though when we spoke recently, Bill Gates insisted that, barring “nuclear war or asteroid strike or gigantic epidemic that comes along,” his bets had “a very good chance.” Sure, he allowed, many of the most optimistic predictions—those Jetsons-era dreams of flying saucers and a jetpack for every kid—take much longer than their promoters expect. To boost the chances, many of the most specific of the innovations touted by the Gateses are rooted in new technology or advances in the science of global health. “A lot of prediction is overoptimistic in the short run, but then because of science and the ability of getting the exemplars to be copied by others, 15 years gives us a chance to do virtually all these things,” he said. “There are elements in there like polio eradication that we expect to be done literally within the next three years.”


And like all smart pundits, they have based many of their bets on applying models that already work elsewhere in a bigger, broader way. “Look, on the childhood and mortality numbers that we’re talking about, you know, childhood mortality has been cut in half in the last 15 years,” Melinda Gates pointed out in the interview. “And just in the last five years, Rwanda’s seen the steepest decline in childhood mortality in the history of the world. And we know what they did in Rwanda. We know the health system that they set up, we know the vaccines that were delivered, we know how they’re going about doing it. Ethiopia is literally copying that system and everybody’s iterating on it. So we’ll be able to see those similar declines in other countries.”

Bill Gates, who has remained the world’s richest man, according to Forbes, while giving away his billions, did allow that “you wouldn’t bet all your money” on achieving each of his predictions (he said the two-thirds reduction in maternal mortality was “one of the riskier ones”), but still, he argued, there are a bunch of world-changing slam dunks out there for the doing. With that in mind, Politico Magazine asked 15 other big thinkers and doers for their idea of what will change the world the most in the next 15 years. We got back lots of inspiration—from the transformative power of opening up national borders to the commercialization of the human genome—and one dyspeptic dissenter. Read on, for a sense of the possible in the planet of 2030.

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Genes as commerce

By Alec Ross, senior fellow at the Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs

Fifteen years from now, everybody reading this will live, on average, two years longer than their current life expectancy because of the commercialization of genomics. The price of mapping an individual’s genetic material has fallen from $2.7 billion to below $10,000, and it continues to fall.

Omniscience into the makeup and operation of the 3 billion base pairs of genetic code in each of our bodies will allow for tests to be developed that will find cancer cells at 1 percent of the size of what can be detected by an MRI today. It will allow for personalized prevention and treatment programs for nearly every illness, and will make today’s medical practices look medieval by comparison.

Of course, all of this will benefit the wealthy before it becomes affordable and available to everybody. That is the cruel reality of many of the innovations to come. They will make people live longer, healthier lives—but not everybody, and not all at once.

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The democratization of media to fight rights abuses

By Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch

Human rights abuse thrives on secrecy. Pretending to respect rights is a key element of legitimacy for governments and even most armed groups. Occasionally an entity like the Islamic State publicizes its atrocities, but most hide them because they are shameful. Communication innovations make it harder to cover up. Back when news had to travel by sailing ship, an atrocity could be ancient history before most people heard of it. Only large, long-lasting abuses like the slave trade could be tackled. The emergence of the telephone and then the Internet enabled us to learn more quickly about abuses and to take steps to curb them while action still made a difference. But we still largely depended on the media to get word out widely, and photographs and video were harder still to obtain and disseminate.

Today, social media, growing Internet access and broader bandwidth have made it easier to spotlight abuse. The proliferation of smartphones means that someone is frequently able to video or photograph abuse, and the rise of social media and broadband makes it easy to disseminate the visual evidence. Shining a spotlight has never been easier. Some abusers will simply brave the public-relations disaster, but many will want to avoid it, generating more pressure for them to refrain from or stop abuse. Governments know this, which is why they are trying to increase electronic surveillance of the Internet and crack down on those using it to publicize their misdeeds. Activists, in turn, are developing new ways to circumvent surveillance and protect themselves. At stake in this cat-and-mouse game is not simply Internet freedom but the effectiveness of a powerful tool to protect all rights.

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Women controlling their fertility

By Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development

The breakthrough that can change the world is not a new technology or a new business process or even a new policy. It is the outcome of every girl, by the age of about 10, even in the poorest countries, internalizing thoroughly the option of controlling her fertility and thus her future: whether, who and when she marries, what education she can hope for and when, what work and career she can have. A world in which every girl everywhere at age 10 is even vaguely aware of that option (and her brothers and her father get it, too) is a world transformed: safer, richer and happier.

On the one hand, the option of completely safe and low-cost fertility control (and the associated idea of women’s and men’s liberation from assumed roles throughout life) is not anymore new in much of the world. On the other hand, it has not gone the last mile to 10-year-old girls in parts of Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. In this century, as with all new ideas and new knowledge, there’s no stopping its continued spread even in the harshest settings. The question is only whether conventional barriers will slow its spread, or renewed ambition to liberate women everywhere will accelerate its spread. Renewed ambition ought to embrace as fundamental access to modern contraception wherever it is still limited. After all: Is it only coincidence that the women’s liberation movement in the West took off in the late 1960s, at the same time as the contraceptive pill became available?

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Digital ID cards

By Edward Lucas, senior editor for energy, commodities and natural resources at the Economist

Estonia is offering foreigners its digital ID cards—called e-residency—giving people anywhere in the world the ability to sign contracts, send secure authenticated email, encrypt documents and access government services all across the European Union. This “Estonian Express” card will do for our travels on the Internet what Amex did for real world travel in the 1970s. It is backed by a biometric check and state-of-the-art symmetric key 2048-bit encryption. Estonians take the freedom and security this brings for granted. Now foreigners can enjoy it too. I was given the first one.

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Contact with nonhuman life?

By Aaron David Miller, vice president for new initiatives and distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center

The single most transformative, world-changing, universe-rearranging development by 2030 or anytime thereafter is as obvious as it is unlikely. Just spend a few minutes looking at these photos of the Andromeda Galaxy taken from the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope to understand why. The sheer size of our nearest galactic neighbor and the existence of billions or trillions of stars with solar systems and planets putatively capable of sustaining life is impossible to fathom. The very possibilities of that discovery, however, are diminished by the remote probabilities of contact, given these vast distances and the challenges of space and time. But if we could make contact—whatever the risks and dangers (think of any number of good and bad sci-fi movies that depict threatening aliens who come visiting)—the transformation would be profound across every conceivable field of the human enterprise, religion, philosophy, science and technology, biology, physics, cosmology and evolution. And it would leave us with perhaps the greatest realization of all—that we are not alone—and a potentially profound implication—a reappraisal of what it really means to be human.

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A second food revolution

By John Norris, executive director for the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress

We are poised for the second great food revolution. The “green revolution” in the late 1960s and early 1970s transformed food production with new crops, technologies and innovations that prevented what many feared would be mass starvation in Asia and Africa. The second food revolution will be in the dramatic reduction of food loss and waste.

Right now, about 30 percent of all food is lost between field and fork—a staggering amount when we consider how much food is produced and eaten around the globe. The developing world loses about 30 percent of crops and food to pests, and because of lousy infrastructure, that means lots of goods decay before they get to the market. In the developed world, we lose the same 30 percent, but for very different reasons. Farmers overproduce to cope with variations in price, big companies simply get rid of lots of fruits and vegetables for not being “pretty enough” for the grocery store and we put “sell by” dates on food that are designed more to move product than to actually inform consumers about real risk.

The second food revolution will happen because lots of people have a stake in making it happen: Less loss means more money for farmers and agribusiness; less loss means less use of fuel and less greenhouse gases; less loss means less rural poverty; and less loss means more people with enough food to eat and water to drink. We might dream of using oxygen for fuel or mounting lasers on sharks, but the great breakthrough might actually be taking place on your dinner plate.

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More open borders

By Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development

I’m hoping for fusion power, cheap and easily recycled batteries, vastly more efficient tunneling equipment, a whole range of new antibiotics, malaria and HIV vaccines. And it would be epochal to discover life on other planets. None of that seems beyond the bounds of possibility. But the social change to come that will have the biggest impact on the global quality of life is a dramatic decline of discrimination by place of birth.

At a time when the United States can’t pass immigration reform and Europe is seeing the rise of far-right parties, it might seem ridiculous to suggest that legal and social discrimination against those born in other countries could rapidly decline, but there are a bunch of forces working in favor of such an outcome. Economic convergence is reducing the income gap between rich and poor countries, while global values across a range of issues, from the importance of democracy and the environment to women’s rights, are converging as well. The West is rapidly aging as populations begin to decline, which will create considerable demand for imported labor from the rest of the world.

Globalization continues apace, and global problems, from climate change to the emergence of infectious diseases, are making it increasingly clear that we’re all in the same boat. The generation born in the new millennium is already far more global in outlook than those that came before, and the next generation will doubtless see themselves even more as world citizens.

It might be too much to hope that discrimination against place of birth will collapse as rapidly as discrimination against sexual orientation at birth has weakened in the United States, but if the change is only half as rapid, the world will be a far richer, healthier, secure and sustainable place in 30 years. As my Center for Global Development colleague Michael Clemens has amply demonstrated, opening borders is a trillion-dollar opportunity waiting to be grasped—and the next generation could be the one to grasp it.

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High-tech classrooms

By Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress

Over the next 15 years, technology will become more ubiquitous in our schools and become a more effective tool for understanding how our children are learning, as more and more classroom instruction is assisted and accelerated by computers. This advance will help teachers to personalize their instruction and allow children to learn more at different rates, thereby better addressing the needs of all students. It should also help eliminate the need for unsophisticated, time-consuming standardized tests, as richer measures of learning will occur in real time to inform and improve instruction. And the effectiveness of our education system may improve dramatically.

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Recognizing the rights of the poor

By William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University and author of The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

Most suggestions for world-changing breakthroughs, like those put forward by Bill and Melinda Gates, are technological. Technological innovations command universal appeal in part because they don’t threaten any status quo or political interest—who doesn’t want better technology? Yet technology is not the panacea that it seems; otherwise the technological innovations that have already happened would have already led to universal attainment of good health, farming, banking and education, to cite the areas mentioned by Bill and Melinda Gates. Technology’s limitation is that it does not implement itself; it requires people to implement it. The incentives for local people to do so vary widely around the world, helping to explain why take-up of existing technology also varies widely.

The needed breakthrough today is the appreciation that the political and economic rights of the poor are necessary for the technological breakthroughs. These rights give the poor the ability to hold their public and private suppliers accountable for supplying the public and private goods that embody the latest technologies; with such rights, the poor can drive out of business unsatisfactory private suppliers and drive out of office unsatisfactory public suppliers. Rights thus create the incentives for technology adoption. The breakthrough of understanding the centrality of poor people’s rights would help us understand why technology take-up is mostly absent in a repressive autocracy like Ethiopia while mostly present in a country with political and economic freedom like South Korea.

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Real civic engagement

By Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, lawyer, author and former presidential candidate

Underneath all change for a just world is civic mobilization toward a more representative social, political and economic democracy. An acceleration of civic energies in all fields will make existing innovations and technologies serve the people and not blow back against them. Deliberate organizing and funding of such civic initiatives in various directions of human needs and possibilities are what can have the biggest impact on the world by 2030. After all, where did the progress in justice and freedom come from over the past 100 years? History teaches!

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Closing the gender gap

By Melanne Verveer, director of the Georgetown institute for Women, Peace & Security and former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues

The full realization of women’s equality would have the biggest impact on economic, political and social progress. Women’s economic participation in the formal work force or as entrepreneurs would create jobs, grow economies and alleviate hunger and poverty. Women’s political participation and leadership would bring women’s talents, perspectives and experiences into public policy decisions, which affect not only them but all of society, and address a range of issues, from corruption to climate change. Women’s participation in peace and reconciliation processes, from which they are largely excluded, would contribute significantly to global security. Ending the epidemic of violence against women and girls would unlock and unleash their full potential to benefit all of society.

There is a growing body of research to support these statements—gender equality is an evidence-based case. Indeed, it is not only the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do. Until the gender equality gap is closed, global progress and prosperity will be never be fully realized.

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Setting few—but smart—targets

By Bjorn Lomborg, director of Copenhagen Consensus

By September, all 193 governments will set the world’s development goals for 2030. Yet few people outside the negotiations have heard about this. It is the follow-up to the so-called United Nations Millennium Development Goals established in 2000. This next round will determine how $2.5 trillion of development aid is spent helping the world’s poorest. Right now, the world community has 169 targets, which essentially promises everything to everyone. Having 169 priorities is like having none.

Together with some of the world’s top economists, my organization, Copenhagen Consensus, has researched which targets will do the most good for people, the planet and the economy. And, importantly, which targets won’t. Steve Jobs once said, “Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” The most important innovation we can achieve in 2015 is to get the world to pick a small set of highly efficient targets, focusing trillions of dollars to where it will achieve the most good. Coral reef protection, for instance, will deliver $24 of goods (better fishing, better ecosystems and more tourism) for every dollar spent, our research has found. Preschool in Sub-Saharan Africa: $33 per dollar. Tuberculosis treatment: $43. Infant nutrition: $45. And reproductive health (contraception): $120. The Doha round of global trade negotiations, meanwhile, will make the world $11 trillion better off by 2030, or about $2,000 per dollar spent to pay off Western farmers.

Smart targets could literally make the world trillions of dollars better off each year. Getting it right for the next global targets is likely the best thing any of us can do this year.

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Technology for the good

By Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

Technology is advancing faster than people think and making amazing things possible. Within two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods and do our chores. It will also become possible to solve critical problems that have long plagued humanity such as hunger, disease, poverty and lack of education. Think of systems to clean water; sensors to transform agriculture; digital tutors that run on cheap smartphones to educate children; medical tests on inexpensive sensor-based devices. The challenge is to focus our technology innovators on the needs of the many rather than the elite few so that we can better all of humanity.

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No breakthroughs for the better

By Leslie Gelb, president emeritus and board senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

The world of 2030 will be an ugly place, littered with rebellion and repression. Societies will be deeply fragmented and overwhelmed by irreconcilable religious and political groups, by disparities in wealth, by ignorant citizenry and by states’ impotence to fix problems. This world will resemble today’s, only almost everything will be more difficult to manage and solve.

Advances in technology and science won’t save us. Technology will both decentralize power and increase the power of central authorities. Social media will be able to prompt mass demonstrations in public squares, even occasionally overturning governments as in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, but oligarchs and dictators will have the force and power to prevail as they did in Cairo. Almost certainly, science and politics won’t be up to checking global warming, which will soon overwhelm us.

Muslims will be the principal disruptive factor, whether in the Islamic world, where repression, bad governance and economic underperformance have sparked revolt, or abroad, where they are increasingly unhappy and distained by rulers and peoples. In America, blacks will become less tolerant of their marginalization, as will other persecuted minorities around the world. These groups will challenge authority, and authority will slam back with enough force to deeply wound, but not destroy, these rebellions.

A long period of worldwide economic stagnation and even decline will reinforce these trends. There will be sustained economic gulfs between rich and poor. And the rich will be increasingly willing to use government power to maintain their advantages.

Unfortunately, the next years will see a reversal of the hopes for better government and for effective democracies that loomed so large at the end of the Cold War.

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Investing in childhood education and health

By Esther Dyson, founder of HICCup and chairman of EDventure Holdings

The biggest breakthrough would be very simple: We would all start thinking long-term and with a reasonable appreciation for math/statistics/science—call it what you will—in the areas of early childhood education and health. In other words, we would invest billions now that would pay off in trillions of reduced costs and increased welfare later—just as we regularly buy oil for our cars and repair our bridges … well, just as we buy oil for our cars, anyway. We would also charge to producers the externalities not just of carbon production but also of the diseases and related costs of sugar consumption.

The costs of poor health, properly accounted for, include not just health care, but also lowered productivity or unemployment, as well as human suffering. The costs associated with poor nutrition and lack of early childhood education and unprepared students and ineffective primary education likewise include underemployment and low productivity and crime … and ultimately, the same stupid thinking patterns that lead to these very ills.

The problem is, none of these billions or trillions of dollars feel real. And indeed they are not. They are projections with loads of assumptions, even though no serious statistician would argue with their basic import. That’s why—as a former journalist whose job it is to reveal facts rather than as a pundit who makes persuasive arguments—I decided in 2013 to launch a five-year experiment to show how those numbers work at a small but concentrated scale, in five small communities with support from pay-for-success investors and other partners. We plan to track each community’s progress so that by 2019, we will be able to show the beginnings of a breakthrough that could be huge in 15 years if enough other, larger communities pay attention to our outcomes and steal our ideas.