How will the economy evolve in the twenty-first century? What systems will be left behind in the economy of the future? How will the excesses of the twentieth century be dealt with?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: In economics, the next consensus is likely to be in favor of balanced economies, ditching the twentieth century's failed strategies of rigid state oversight and unbridled markets for a mixture or compromise or third way—which advocates like to call the "social market": According to this model, the state takes a major or exclusive role in infrastructure, health, education, defense, and policing, while supervising services, housing, communications, transport, manufacturing, and—above all—finance through a mixture of close regulation and direct provision in competition with private enterprise. A shift to responsible, restrained, publicly monitored competition might avert some of the worst excesses. Critics, however, blamed the capitalist convergence of the late twentieth century for more: the degradation of the environment, the pollution of the planet, the depletion of resources, the extinction of species. These were undeniable effects of human agency in the twentieth century, but they happened under every economic system.