ABSTRACT

Writing about the future is both an easy and an impossible task. Because nobody knows anything about the future – except that “in the long run we are all dead,” as John Maynard Keynes reminded us – we are free to speculate about it; but for the very same reason it is impossible: how can one write about something that we do not know anything about? Danish humorist Robert Storm-Petersen was famous for saying: “It is difficult to predict, particularly the future” (Det er svært at spå, især om fremtiden! ). So, what we are embarking upon here is guesswork, and the way we go about it is to investigate the past and the present, and then judge the possible future strength of general tendencies and various constituencies and other actors in the field of welfare entitlements and provisions, leading to suggestions as to whether existing trends are expected to be continued, or whether curves are expected to break and point in other directions. In retrospect, the social sciences have not been very good at predicting the future. Nobody had foreseen the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent crumbling of the state socialist system, or the Arab Spring in 2011. So, qualitative and radical political changes are difficult to foresee. In the field of economics it does not look much better. Nobody had predicted Black Thursday in the US in 1929, announcing the beginning of the Great Depression. The same goes for the first oilshock crisis in 1974 announcing the new period of globalization, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998, nor the recent (and at places, current) crisis – the Great Recession which began in the US in 2008 and quickly spread to most parts of the world.