A dangerous age of political discontinuity.

• Author: Smick, David
• Position: FROM THE FOUNDER

The G-20 policymaking community is in a situation reminiscent of the old joke about Mary Todd Lincoln: "Other than the disruption from the intruder, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" Other than completely missing the global political dynamic as exemplified by the Egyptian and Libyan developments, what a masterful job the G-20 has done of managing the world economy.

The truth, of course, is that the world has entered a dangerous age of political discontinuity. The United States, Europe, the Middle East, and even China are all vulnerable to political forces beyond their control. And a lot of the tension stems from the assault by governmental and/or corporate elites on future middle-class wage income.

Over the next decade, 400 million young people will join the global workforce. The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, predicts as a result that the world "could see rising social and political instability within nations--even war." As developments in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya have already shown, a rising global worker population is on a collision course with the elite bureaucratic forces of the status quo. These will be unusually challenging times because populations have the ability to ignite through cellphones, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube a spontaneous organizational dynamic in digital space. Problems such as food shortages, inflation, joblessness, corruption, and human rights abuses can become intensified in the public's thinking. The risk is the spontaneous production of what analyst Harald Malmgren calls "leaderless revolutions" that are difficult to predict and sometimes impossible to control.

The world is also about to experience the emergence of a disgruntled global middle class of mind-boggling size. In the year 2000, for example, the world's middle class numbered only about 430 million people. By 2030, according to the World Bank, the global middle class is expected to total more than 1.5 billion. On the surface, this huge middle-class expansion would seem to be a good thing. It stands to reason that as families enter the middle class, they tend to be more favorable toward democracy and free speech. In one form or another, they tend to be more tolerant of private enterprise and to crave educational opportunities. In other words, they tend to sound more like the American middle class.

Yet like most changes in the global economy, there is the potential for unintended consequences. As...