The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
tariffs, a solar storm and 4G on the moon. These are all things we might see in the next 12 months. Nope, it won't all be Trump. Today we're launching our World Ahead series, predicting the top themes of 2025. I hope you're ready.
And, in the spirit of knowing a bit more about what's coming, our next installment of the Economist Reads series outlines the books you should have a look at if you want to understand Elon Musk, a bit of biography and quite a lot of science fiction. First up, though. There can be
no nobler, no more ambitious task for America to undertake on this day of a new beginning than to help shape, adjust, and peaceful world that is truly humane. Our commitment to human rights must be absolute. Our laws, fair, our natural beauty, preserve
In Washington, on January 20, 1977, a giant peanut-shaped balloon hovered over the inauguration of America's 39th president, a folksy but ambitious peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter. It wasn't an easy time in America or in the world. Mr. Carter inherited and presided over crisis after crisis, not least in the supply of oil. And I'm asking you, for your good and for your nation's security,
to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day for a week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. That was an unpopular suggestion, his ratings slipped further after an ill-fated plan to free hostages in Iran. I share the disappointment of the American people that this rescue mission was not successful.
and also share the grief of our nation because we had Americans who were casualties in this effort to seek freedom for their fellow citizens who have been held hostage for so long.
Mr. Carter was always guided by principle, by his southern Baptist faith. And long after the presidency, by that commitment to human rights, he outlined on day one. After one rocky term, he left office, revealing what might now seem a quaint view of the job. Tonight, I would like to first say a few words about this most special office. The presidency of the United States.
This is at once the most powerful office in the world and among the most severely constrained by law and custom. Jimmy Carter's presidency is generally considered to have been a failure. John Prado is our United States editor and hosts checks and balance our sister show on American politics.
So many things went wrong on his watch. Frankly, not many of them were his fault, but he got blamed anyway. In retrospect, I think his presidency looks a lot more successful. And as a post president, Carter is perhaps the best post president America's ever had.
So let's wind back first and talk about Jimmy Carter, the man, before the president, before the post-president. Who was he? He was a southerner. He was brought up in the woods and swamps around Georgia. He'd been a peanut farmer and a one-term governor of Georgia. Hi, Governor Carter. I'm Georgia. I'm your president. I want to ask you to help me next year.
In the beginning, Jimmy Carter's campaign was a lonely one. 1976 was the first post-Watergate election. It was a time when disillusionment with the same old same old in Washington was very high. So being a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, that was a pretty good look. And you said at the time his presidency was not viewed favorably. What happened on his watch?
Well, there was a general malaise in America in the late 1970s. Inflation had taken off earlier in the decade with the oil shock and had never come down. There was high crime in cities, a sense of order breaking down. There was a sexual and gender revolution underway, which was disconcerting for many people. In foreign policy terms, America was still humbled by Vietnam.
So all of these things coming together were a lot for a president to try and reverse. And then there were specific things. His presidency and foreign policy terms was dominated by the Iran hostage crisis. Since last November, 53 Americans have been held captive in Tehran, contrary to every principle of international law and human decency.
The United States began to implement. That was hardly Carter's fault that the Ayatollahs decided to take American hostages at the embassy there. The bungled attempt to rescue them didn't reflect well on the president. The hostages were
eventually released, but to compound the whole thing, the Ayatollahs waited until Reagan was inaugurated president after Carter had been voted out to release them, and that altogether gave the impression that it was somehow Carter's fault and that he was impotent and America was impotent, and that didn't reflect well on the president.
Energy was very expensive in the late 1970s, and that was neurologic to many Americans. Carter had various schemes to try and bring down the cost of energy, but they mainly relied on trying to persuade people to use less to be more frugal. And again, that wasn't really what people wanted to hear.
When it came to the things that were within Carter's control, he wasn't terribly good at some of the aspects of presidenting. So he wasn't very good at schmoozing. He seemed to upset the barons on Capitol Hill with his attacks on pork barrel spending. And he came into the White House as a terrible micromanager. There's one book about the era which says that Carter personally oversaw bookings on the White House tennis courts when he came into office. So none of that helped very much.
And he said all that, though, there were some achievements of his presidency. There definitely were. I mean, both in foreign policy and domestic policy. The people of this trouble region have played a terrible price in suffering and division and hatred.
He oversaw the camp David accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978. There was the salt to disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. More controversially, he returned the Panama Canal to Panama
Donald Trump is talking about trying to take it back at the moment. These things, the salt to disarm and treaty, the Panama Canal, they were criticized by some people as giveaways at the time. In retrospect, I think they look like very sound policy and policy that was consistent with Carter's whole worldview. He was intent on peace for its own sake. One of his first acts as president
was to pardon all of those who'd evaded the Vietnam draft, so an attempt to try and heal that deep wound that was still very visible in America at the end of the 1970s. And then in terms of domestic policy achievements, though what people remember is the hyperinflation and the hectoring speeches about turning the thermostat down. It's also the case that
there was some really important economic policy. So there was some deregulation, including of the airline industry under Carter, that becomes really important later on. And lots of people wrongly attributed it to Ronald Reagan. And crucially, Carter makes Paul Volker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volker is the one who under Reagan is credited with finally getting inflation down. And again, credit for that tends to go to Reagan. It was Carter who appointed him.
A history perhaps not so kind in the meantime about his presidency, but really much of the discussion around Mr. Carter was what he did after he left office.
He was extraordinarily successful, Jason, and in many ways the model for all the presidents who came after him, though none of them I think quite measured up. He started Habitat for Humanity, which is a charity that builds houses for the poor. He raised some of the roof beams himself with a hammer and nails and even appeared on a TV show called Home Improvement to publicize the charity. Hi, Tim, Alan Gill. I'd like to thank you for your participation in Habitat for Humanity housing blitz. You're welcome.
He set up the Carter Center in 1982 and became a champion really for peace and democracy. He traveled extensively as an election monitor, trying to end wars through negotiation and also to advocate for human rights. And where he disagreed with subsequent presidents, he did so loudly. So he had a prominent disagreement with President George W. Bush over Iraq.
I think history is pretty kind to him about that. I think he was right. In 2002, before the Iraq War, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So in the fullness of time, John, how do you think Mr. Carter's legacy will shape up? Will the stumbles of his actual presidency be forgotten in light of all that he did after?
Yes, I think that's what will happen. He was such a profoundly decent man that it would be childish, I think, to hold his single term in the White House against him, particularly given how difficult the circumstances were. I'm not sure anybody could have been a successful president in those four years.
and his achievements subsequently, partly through his charitable work and partly just through his example. He was a very religious man. His faith, he was a Southern Baptist, wasn't for show. He was really guided by his Christianity, his autobiography.
called keeping faith. He was not somebody of extravagant tastes. After he'd finished being president, he moved back into his old house with his wife and lived simply. That's a huge contrast with the Bill Clinton style of post-presidency, the idea that a president who is still young should go around, raise lots of money, rub shoulders with billionaires. It's an even bigger contrast, of course, with Donald Trump, a president who has very, very different values to Jimmy Carter,
And his passing now is a reminder, there are two sides to American values. There's the country that venerates success and wealth, and those values seem more in the ascendant at the moment. The other values less worldly things. It's based on Christian virtues of modesty and charity. Carter embodied all of that. And the sadness at his death that I think some people feel, even at the age of 100, this was hardly unexpected.
It's a reminder of how deep-rooted those other American values are too. John, thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason. You might say the predicting what could happen in the future is a mug's game.
The wildcards just keep coming. Thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant. 221,564 cases of coronavirus, and they've been, for instance, Vladimir Putin, has launched a major military operation against Ukraine. But at the Economist, we do like a challenge. So every year we forecast what to expect in the months ahead.
Each day this week we'll be asking what might happen in 2025, looking at different parts of the world and the global economy. But today we're considering the overarching themes that may tie the whole year together. And there's one man that's going to have an outsized influence. If you look back at the elections of 2024, incumbents everywhere did badly. Regardless of their political orientation, people voted for change and nobody is promising change on a larger scale than Donald Trump.
Tom's standard is editor of The Economist's World Ahead 2025. The trouble is we don't know what he's actually going to do. He said he's going to impose massive tariffs. He says he's going to deport millions of people. He says he's going to cut taxes even more than he cut them last time. He's probably going to do some version of some of these things, but we don't know which ones. And that makes predicting the future very difficult because these are policies that have consequences, not just for America, but for the whole world.
As you say, Tom, Donald Trump will be a central figure of 2025. In which areas do you think his impact will be felt most? So the big tests, I think, are in foreign policy and in trade. So in foreign policy, we are going to have something happening with Ukraine next year. The majority of Ukrainians would now like there to be a settlement. And Donald Trump says he's going to solve it in a day. I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours.
We don't know what that looks like, and we're not sure what sort of deal he might propose. And of course, it has to be something that Ukraine is willing to accept. So yeah, would there be American security guarantees, for example, if Russia was allowed to keep the bits of Ukraine, it's already conquered? If not, then would Europe have to provide security guarantee? We just don't know. And this is a very early test of how Trump wants to
focus less on Europe in the Middle East and focus more on China. But then the other big area is of course trade because he's talked about imposing these big tariffs. The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn't have to pay the tariff. He may impose tariffs on a smaller scale and then threaten to ratchet them up if he doesn't get concession. Again, we just don't know. And this could be really devastating for America's trade partners.
Tom, what's going to happen overall to the global economy next year? I think the big picture is that the thing that a lot of economies were grappling with, which was inflation, is in retreat, it's dying, if not dead, and the thing that's really coming onto the agenda is fighting deficits instead.
We haven't really heard a lot about this in 2024 because you don't win elections by promising austerity and cutting with deficits. You win election by promising people goodies. And in the US, Kamala Harris's policies would have increased the deficit, not by as much as Donald Trump's policies would increase the deficit. But both of them were talking about increasing what is already 6% of GDP deficit America.
spending more in 2024 on debt servicing than it does on the military, which is really saying something since it's the world's biggest military spender by quite a substantial margin. So the fact is we are going to be hearing about austerity in 2025. Lots of countries are living beyond their means having increased spending during the pandemic and not ratcheting it down again. And this is a problem in France, for example, it's a problem in Italy. There are many countries that have essentially deficits that need tackling.
Tom, aside from Trump, the other question I keep coming back to in interviews is how AI will affect a particular area. And of course, AI is going to be another huge theme of the coming months. What are your particular predictions in that arena?
I think the thing to watch is whether AI adoption can essentially start to catch up with the enthusiasm we're seeing from technologists and investors. There is an enormous disparity at the moment. We've got something like $1.5 trillion in investment going into AI infrastructure. But if you look at what companies are doing, only 5% of American companies say they're actually using AI in their businesses at the moment.
What's really interesting, though, is if you poll employees rather than companies, you get a very different answer. About a third of American workers say they use AI every week. This goes up to 78% for software engineers, 75% for human resources staff. And OpenAI, the makers of chat GPT, say that 75% of their revenue is coming from consumer subscriptions, not corporate subscriptions.
So what that suggests is there's actually quite a lot of AI adoption happening in America. It's just happening unofficially. It's happening secretly. People are using AI at work, but they are not telling the boss. So I think the big question for 2025 is will adoption of AI actually start to tick up? Will it start to deliver the goods and deliver real results before investors lose their nerve?
Tom, I think you've played it pretty safe so far. The global economy, wild card leaders, AI, we know they're going to be things that are important in 2025. What are some of the more outlandish and implausible sounding scenarios that you've put forward for the coming year?
Probably my favourite one is the possibility of a large solar storm causing damage to satellites and power grids. And this is something that has happened on a smaller scale a few times in recent decades. There hasn't been a really big solar storm since 1859.
And there was a really big one then, but of course we didn't have any satellites or power grids in those days. All we had was the electric telegraph network, which melted down. And if we had a solar storm on that scale today, we would be much more vulnerable. The GPS system could be knocked out altogether. It might take months to get power grids back online. And the damage could run into trillions of dollars, according to some estimates.
There are other slightly less gloomy prospects for next year. We're going to probably have a 4G wireless network on the moon, which is a way of testing, using off-the-shelf technology for communicating on the moon. Another possibility is the people who are trying to extract ancient texts from carbonized scrolls in herculaneum.
And they're using AI to do it, they seem to be making progress, so perhaps we'll get a lost work from antiquity, lost work by Sophocles or maybe some poems by Sappho or something like that, that would be interesting if that happened. Another rather gloomy prediction is the prospect of another pandemic. There is a very nasty strain of bird flu, H5N1,
that is on the loose and it's spread to farm animals in America. And the sorts of people who were ringing alarm bells about the prospect of global pandemics in the last 20 years before the COVID pandemic hit are very concerned about this. And so I think we should keep a very close eye on that as well. So I'm afraid there are some quite nasty possibilities for 2025, but there are some slightly more fun ones as well. When you're putting together your top 10 trends to watch, do you worry about being wrong?
Yes, and the other thing I have to do as well as writing the top 10 letter is I have to write the how we did piece, which goes over what we got right and wrong in the previous year. And we have to fess up. We didn't predict the pandemic. We didn't predict the war in Ukraine. And this year, we said that Donald Trump had a one in three chance of winning and we ought to and retrospect have been possibly a bit more optimistic about his chances of winning.
And what's your ultimate takeaway? I think if you want to understand the future, the lesson from 2024 is that you should anticipate the unexpected, anticipate the unlikely. Just open yourself up to a wider range of possible things that might happen, because we keep getting surprised by these unlikely sounding things. A pandemic shuts down the whole world, a volcano in Iceland, closes down transatlantic travel,
And I'm trying to sort of broaden the window of possibilities that people consider possible outcomes in 2025. And the worst that can happen is that these implausible outcomes don't happen. But if they do, you will at least have been made aware of them and give them some thought and maybe even thought about how you might respond. The ultimate get out of jail free card for the forecast, Tom. Thank you so much. Great to have you talking to us. Thank you.
And in the coming days, we'll be looking in more detail at what to expect from 2025 in our World Ahead series, including some of the themes Thomas talked about today.
The essence of science is questioning and really trying to say, like, what is probably true versus not. Love him or hate him. Elon Musk has revolutionized two separate industries, cars and space. His companies include Tesla, SpaceX, X, and now he's part of the US government, one of the two heads of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. His interests are rockets, Mars, electric cars, brain implants, grid scale batteries, robots, tunneling machines, cutting the deficit, low birth rates, and satellites.
Tim Cross is a senior science writer at The Economist. So a man of many passions, we've put together a short list of some books to help you understand the history, personality, hopes and opinions of the tech titan. The first book is Foundation by Isaac Asimov, which is a 1950s science fiction classic.
So you could start with one of the two biographies that have been written about Musk, but I think science fiction is actually a better place to begin. Like a lot of tech bosses, he read a lot of it when he was growing up and still quotes him. He was recently quoting June on X, for instance. But the reason I went for foundation is partly because he said how much he enjoys it, and partly because it gives a sense of
why he thinks in such grand or grandiose if he prefers terms. So the story is essentially a sci-fi retelling of the fall of the Roman Empire and as a historian in this far future galactic empire who invents a new discipline called psychohistory.
And that's a sort of mix of statistics and history that lets you predict the broad outlines of the future. And he realises that his own discipline tells him that pretty soon the Galactic Empire is going to fall and there'll be a 30,000 year dark age, so the parallels are pretty obvious.
And I think the reason this tells you something about him is because science fiction at its best is a literature of big ideas. And Musk is a big fan of big ideas. He thinks humans should colonize other planets. He talks about forks in the road of history. He often talks about something called the Great Filter, which is this idea invented by an Italian physicist called Enrico Fermi, that something out there prevents intelligent life, which arises on planets, from expanding out into the universe and preserving itself.
So if you want a sense of where the sort of big visions comes from, I think this is a good place to start. Well, I think we should celebrate breakthroughs in technology because they help make life better for people. Second book is another science fiction book because the man really is very keen on science fiction. I do think this explains a lot about his worldview. It's surface detail by Ian M. Banks,
If foundation was about the big bold ideas, then I think surface detail and the culture novels in general are about another thing that characterises Musk, which is his vision of the future is quite an optimistic one. It's based on technology and science and the advance of those things. And he's also described himself as a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by ENM banks.
Now, whether Banks, who was a man of the left, would agree with that, I think, is an interesting question. But unfortunately, he died in 2013, so we'll never know. But the point of the cultural novels is they describe this super-optimistic vision of the future, in which poverty's been eliminated, wants to be eliminated, there's no more disease, people live to be hundreds of years old, humanity or something like it has spread throughout the galaxy, and all its citizens enjoy these lives of hyper-abunded luxury.
And this is all thanks to these godlike AIs called Mines that run the show. And in fact, SpaceX fans will know that its fleet of drone ships are named after some of these mines. One interesting wrinkle is that the villain in this novel is actually a super rich industrialist.
Our next book is Power Play, Tesla, Elon Musk and The Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins. Our goal is to get to cars that everyone can afford as soon as possible. The clue for this one is in the name. It's about the early years of Tesla, which is probably the best known of Musk businesses.
And Tesla's vital insight was that technology, batteries, electric motors and so on had advanced to the point where electric cars could be fun and desirable. Because at the time, a few electric cars that existed had a reputation of being sort of milk floats, but the hair shirt environmentalist crowd.
and that limits the market. So Tesla's hope, or Musk's hope, was that if you make electric cars into desirable consumer goods that people want to buy for essentially selfish reasons, then you can advance the cause of decarbonisation and preventing climate change by appealing to people's self-interest. The book also offers a kind of up-close look at what Musk is like to work for, where he comes across as very focused, very demanding, and absolutely relentless.
both of which are good things and bad things depending on the proportion in which they're mixed. Our final book is actually two books, although really it's one big book that's been cut in half. It's liftoff and re-entry both by Eric Berger.
Moving on from Tesla then, we come to SpaceX, which I think blew a bit under the radar for longer than Tesla did, but is Musk's most ambitious company by far and the one with the most obvious science fiction roots. It was established to allow humans to settle on Mars, the idea being to give civilization a back up if anything happened to Earth.
And the two books, again, they chronicle SpaceX's pan-to-mouth early years when it was trying and mostly failing to launch small rockets from a remote Pacific island. It nearly went bankrupt through to some NASA contracts that it won and the development of its much bigger rockets, which have led to the present day where it dominates the space business to an almost ludicrous degree. And it paints a portrait of the company itself and why so many engineers were so keen to work there then and are still so keen to work there now.
And that's partly because even as a relatively junior high, you can end up with quite a lot of responsibility quite quickly. But I think the biggest thing is just the sheer grandeur of the goal you're going for. Now, Musk himself, he's not always the easiest person to work for, but it makes it pretty clear that without his drive and vision, the company wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today.
For Tim's full list of books about Elon Musk, click on the link in the show notes, or search economist reads in our app to see recommendations on subjects from children's books to America's culture wars. Somewhere in the list, you'll find a really good one about cocktails too.
That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
