The Three Biggest Problems in the World

And How to Solve Them

The biggest material problem in the world today is economic stagnation. The global economy is flat. But that’s just the beginning. Median incomes across the advanced world haven’t grown for decades. Translation: the world’s richest middle classes are imploding.

Nor are they being “replaced” by rising middle classes in the east. While incomes are rising in the east, they aren’t rising fast or high enough to make up for the losses in the west. Hence, a flat global economy. Further, gains in the east come at the expense of liberal democracy, basic rights, and human capital investment.

Translation: the global economy is broken.

As a consequence of a broken global economy, extremism is spreading. That’s the second big problem in the world today. It’s extremism of a certain kind: authoritarian, nationalist, often tinged with religious overtones. Hardly confined to the poor world, extremism is ascendant on the US, UK, France, Russia, to name just a few. ISIS and the national socialist movements of the rich world have more in common than they’d care to admit: both are products of societies in which order, opportunity, and stability is disappearing. Extremism doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It is the consequence of the political void left in a failing system where the middle is collapsing.

The middle is collapsing because at precisely the moment the world needs leaders worthy of the word, they seem to have disappeared. As a simple example, Hillary and Trump are the two most intensely disliked politicians in modern American history. Then there’s David Cameron, whose legacy is Brexit. Wherever you look in the world today, you will see the defining feature of an era: an era of low calibre leadership, in which the best we have simply aren’t very good – let alone good enough.

The forging of leader is a subtle alchemy. Part education, part culture, part training, part osmosis. What low calibre leadership tells us with great clarity is that this alchemy has gone badly wrong. Instead of turning lead to gold, it is turning lead to tin. Like tin cans, today’s leaders are easily crumpled, dull, and can’t hold much up – let alone the future of a suffering world.

So how do we solve the world’s three big problems? Shall we shrug our shoulders and declare defeat? Not a chance.

To really solve them, we’re going to have to begin at the beginning, not the end. That is, not with economics, but with leadership.

Not by waiting for better leaders. But simply by playing the role of those better leaders, in our own lives, whatever tiny way we can. Whether it’s by challenging our organisations, starting businesses, or just being defiantly decent humans.

If enough of us do that, then things – incentives, norms, institutions – begin to change. And if we don’t? They don’t.

Maybe you think that’s optimistic. Good. It is. This is a dark age. It is up to each and every one of us to create a little light wherever and however we can.

Dark ages aren’t dispelled by the sunrise. The midnight of the human soul is forever. But by the stars.

Umair