By Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden | 23 September 2026 (IDN) — In 1776, Adam Smith published his “The Wealth of Nations”, which has guided economists and political thinkers ever since. It marks the start of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and then spread throughout most of the world. That was 246 years ago.
It is not that long ago—only 4 life-spans or so, the time of your great-great-great-grandparents. Where will we be 246 years hence? Presumably just as today we listen to Mozart, born 270years ago, and watch or read Shakespeare, born 462 years ago—they have survived all changing tastes and spread well outside their original orbit of European culture to countries as varied as Japan, China, Argentina, Tanzania and South Korea- we can be sure that generations to come will have much the same cultural interests.
In all likelihood, in 2250 we will probably still enjoy tastes picked up from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries- perhaps the Beatles, Picasso, some of the outstanding Nigerian and Indian novelists writing today or the pristine recordings of the magnificent Chinese classical violinists and pianists now emerging. We won’t have better artists- who can ever rival Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy or Shakespeare- but a handful of those to come who are as good.
What Will Survive From Our World?
Our religions will persist—for Christians mainly among the less well-educated. Astronomy will probe to the very edge of our universe and to universes beyond (if they exist, as is suspected), but still does not find God to settle the debate on belief for all time.
In 2250, the great world wars of the twentieth century, the holocaust, the rise and fall of communism, the first black president of the US, the dominance of America, humanity’s early exploration of the solar system, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, the beginnings of body part replacements, the great recessions of today and the century before and the poverty and underdevelopment in Africa will have become faded memories. Will Artificial Intelligence have taken us over? I think not- the self-preservation instinct is too strong to let it happen.
A World of Abundance—and Longer Lives
Instead, for most, all possible economic and material needs will be satisfied. People will be satiated by progress on this front. Some people will live until they are 200 years old, totally bored by prolonged retirement and wishing they had died 100 years earlier. But the arts will also flourish. Space travel will have made mining on the moon an everyday practice, and spaceships (unmanned), taking 150 years to travel so far, will have explored the distant reaches of our galaxy, beaming back intimate pictures of far space with tantalising glimpses of black holes.
As it is today, the means and future of economic progress will be a topic of intense conversation. The “limits of growth” will no longer be discussed. Making do with less, the world will have abundant energy, food and minerals, and these will be available everywhere. “Less”, because science will have brought us fusion power feeding on seawater, crops that produce unimaginable yields and ways of transportation that require only small amounts of energy.
Keynes and the End of Austerity
John Maynard Keynes’ thoughts (he wrote in the 1930s) will still dominate future economists’ thinking. His ideas on demand management will remain in vogue, and the ideas on austerity to balance the books will long have been declared null and void. Economic progress, he wrote, will enable us to be free “to return to some of the most sure principles of religion and traditional virtue- that avarice is vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful”.
Will Tyrants and Nationalism Disappear?
The likes of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mobutu, Pinochet, Assad, Putin and Trump will have been thrown into the dustbin of history. People will be too well educated and prosperous to allow tyrants to emerge, and the world will be so cosmopolitan and intercultural marriages so common that nationalism will have withered on the vine.
Democracy and the observance of human rights will prevail. The Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam will no longer be theocracies. Atheistic, non-violent Buddhism will be ever more popular as the source of a universal moral code, and Buddha’s denunciation of war will make military conflict and the abuse of human rights regarded as the practice of inferior human beings. The words of the American political thinker, Michael Mandelbaum, who wrote in the early twenty-first century, are spot on: “The great chess game of international politics is finished. A pawn is now just a pawn, not a sentry standing guard against an attack on the king.”
Is this my idealism, or is it true? As the poet Robert Browning wrote, “Man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? (IDN-InDepthNews)
Copyright: Jonathan Power
Editor’s Note: Jonathan Power’s speculation about human life in 2250 resonates intriguingly with Skyward Haven – A Speculative Novel by Ramesh Jaura, which imagines a future shaped by technological transformation, artificial intelligence, and humanity’s attempts to build new forms of society.