George Soros is usually worth a read, even if you don’t agree with him. To mark the new year, he’s fired off a piece on The World Economy’s Shifting Challenges, which includes these gloriously optimistic passages:

“Future [European] crises will be political in origin. Indeed, this is already apparent, because the EU has become so inward-looking that it cannot adequately respond to external threats…

“there is an unresolved self-contradiction in China’s current policies… How and when this contradiction will be resolved will have profound consequences for China and the world… failure would undermine still-widespread trust in the country’s political leadership, resulting in repression at home and military confrontation abroad.

“The other great unresolved problem is the absence of proper global governance. The lack of agreement among the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members is exacerbating humanitarian catastrophes in countries like Syria – not to mention allowing global warming to proceed largely unhindered.

But, in contrast to the Chinese conundrum, which will come to a head in the next few years, the absence of global governance may continue indefinitely.”

Dystopian sci fi futures are still on the agenda even with the reduced threat of nuclear apocalypse – yaaaaay!