There are a lot of end of the year reviews. What I want to concentrate on in mine are the longer term trends that will determine how we and our descendents will live in the future.
I'm going to start with technology, because in the long run technology causes the biggest changes in how we live.
The surprising thing is that contrary to popular belief, technology has reached a plateau. Economists such as Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon have talked about such a plateau and how it will cause economic growth to slow down. Incremental change still occurs. But the most recent major advances, dense integrated circuits, the Internet, and digital radio communications, have been in place for some years now, and the incremental elaboration of these inventions is not going to cause any basic changes in life. The difference between an iPhone5 and iPhone 4 is inconsequential compared to the change that happened when the Internet became available to most people in the 1990s.
But there is one major area that quietly has been building momentum. This is the area of artificial intelligence. By artificial intelligence, I mean the ability of machines to do information processing that previously could only be done by humans. Some examples are the Google self driving car, the Watson computer system that can play the game Jeopardy, and the Baxter industrial robot. What is more, with the new methods of analyzing "Big Data", computers are doing things that were never possible before.
This should make society as a whole richer, but it might have the paradoxical effect of making most workers poorer. Our current economy and society cannot deal with the possible situation where machines do most of the work. Paul Krugman has begun to look at this situation, and I hope that he has a high enough profile that more people will look at it. But right now the people in power are clueless. We desperately need a lot more discussion of how to share the benefits of technology with everyone.
In the social and cultural area, the most important question is this: will the women of the world all achieve full civil rights and control over their own reproduction? At stake is nothing less than the lives and rights of half the human race, and in the long term the environment and resources of the entire planet. If women have full rights, population growth will slow down, without having to use repressive measures as in China. The earth already has too many people to support the a decent lifestyle for everyone without exhausting resources and the environment.
Even in this country women's rights have been attacked. Those who have been paying attention know that the opponents of abortion rights also would like to attack birth control. Abortions are being restricted in this country, but birth control is still freely available for most American women. But it is in the poorer parts of the world that most people live in where the need for progressive change is greatest. But change is still too slow. We can only hope that the efforts of people like Malala Yousafzai will begin to make change happen.
The other big social story in this country has been the increasing social divisions that are dividing the people into tribes that are often bitterly opposed to each other. The rise of cable TV and the Internet has had the effect of allowing each tribe to have its own media, making the divisions worse.
In the economy the story has been entrenched inequality. The US suffers from this more than most, but is has been a world wide trend. The level of inequality in this country did not exist 40 or 50 years ago, so we know it is possible to do better. But it is very disheartening how unwilling those with any power have been to try to deal with the problem. The Occupy Wall Street movement did a great service by bringing the issue up, but actual action on the issue has been not happened. Progressives who constantly discuss the issue do not have enough political influence to put it on the agenda for any real action. The danger is a plutocracy that uses its financial and political clout to rule unchallenged, and we are getting all too close to that.
Economic growth has stagnated in general. Growth comes from improvements in productivity, but the huge technological advances that have driven growth in the past have paused for now, as I mentioned above. Maybe the new artificial intelligence advances could change that, but only if we allow the average person to share in the benefits.
In politics, the federal government has become paralyzed. The election just continued that paralysis. Obama is a cautious centrist , while the Republicans in Congress are dominated by the rigid right wing. If Romney had won, and the Senate had been taken over by Republicans, the paralysis might have ended, but at the great cost of Republican policies being put into place. The idea of Mitt Romney, a symbol of plutocracy and the financialization of the economy, being President of the United States, is just grotesque. So the paralysis will continue. The most important political event in 2013 will be the fate of the Senate filibuster rule. If that fails, it will indicate paralysis is becoming institutionalized.
The right wing has worked under the radar to take over many state governments. They are working to make their states more like Alabama or Mississippi, among the poorest states. What is starting is a race to the bottom that will make the problem of inequality even worse. The combination of paralyzed federal government and race to the bottom states threatens to ruin the middle class and make the poor even poorer.
The net effect is that in 2012, not much really significant happened. The most significant thing is something that did not happen, the total takeover by the Republicans. But the bad trends have not been reversed, and no one can know if they will be in the future.