Daniel Franklin, executive editor of The Economist, noticed some time ago that most of the stories about business in the magazine seemed to be focused on changes in technology.
“Everything was becoming a technology story,” Franklin said Tuesday during a luncheon talk to the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville.
That really wasn’t surprising, because Franklin realized that technological advances are one of the fundamental shifts impacting the global economy.
It’s even affecting his business. Franklin said one developing trend is that online advertising spending in the U.S. is overtaking spending on print and outdoor ads.
“That’s another sign of the times,” he said.
“I can assure you The Economist has a very cunning plan to deal with this,” he said, but he did not elaborate.
Besides changes in technology, Franklin has seen shifting trends in a number of areas affecting the global economy.
One of his roles at the magazine is to it edit its annual “The World in …” publication, and he shared some informational tidbits from the latest edition, “The World in 2015.”
• The U.S. has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil producer. “This has far-reaching consequences not only for price but also for geopolitics,” Franklin said.
• China has overtaken the U.S. in purchasing power parity, a measure of the value of different currencies. “I think that is a mind-concentrating moment for America,” he said.
• “Meanwhile, India may be overtaking China in GDP (gross domestic product) growth,” Franklin said.
• China is losing out in another area. “Facebook is overtaking China in the size of its global population,” as Facebook reaches 1.4 billion members, he said.
• Also on the technology front, the number of mobile phone subscriptions is passing the size of the global population, with many people apparently needing more than one phone. “It does reflect the mobile era, the mobile planet that we live on,” he said.
Besides shifts in technology, another area of fundamental shifts affecting the world economy is demographics.
Franklin said it only took 12 years for the world population to increase by 1 billion people from 6 billion to its current level of 7 billion. In contrast, it took from the beginning of the human species until 1800 to get the population to its first billion.
“That was quite a long time to get there,” he said.
Although population growth is likely to slow down, there are additional demographic shifts as the world population gets older and more urban, Franklin said.
Another fundamental shift is the movement of the economic center of the world toward the India and China border, after years of being centered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he said.
Franklin said while countries like India and China gain economic strength, the U.S. will remain important in the global economy.
“America still is the indispensable nation,” he said.
One of the challenges of the fundamental shifts is to create new jobs as technology causes old jobs to disappear, particularly in regions where the young population is growing faster such as Africa and India.
“The hope is we discover work that needs to be done,” Franklin said.
Franklin said technology does create new opportunities.
For example, there are jobs such as app developer and drone operator that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
“I have great faith in human ingenuity,” he said.
Franklin said his visit to the World Affairs Council was his first trip to Jacksonville and he’s seen enough to want to return, despite the gloomy weather he viewed from the Downtown River Club during his talk.
“What could be better than the combination of Southern hospitality and British weather?” he said.
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