Quote from: Ahoyhoy on October 06, 2012, 04:25 pmIn the future power will shift slowly towards those who own land, those who control the distribution and sale of what remains of the world's natural resources and those who produce and sell food.I appreciate this is counterintuitive, but there are several reasons why that is unlikely to happen. Pine is trying to put WoT on a diet, but I will point out two observable facts that contradict this view.1. It is usually the case that the poorest countries also have the most abundant resources. This is called the resource curse in economics. The idea is that there is no positive correlation at all between natural resources and overall wealth, with oil being an extreme outlier, but it is not representative at all. Look at Japan. It has no natural resources whatsoever, but it's the world's 3rd largest economy, and was the world's 2nd largest economy for decades until very recently. Conversely, with the exception of South Africa, the whole of Africa is abundantly stacked with resources of all kinds, but it's the poorest place on earth. Similarly Russia has vast mineral wealth, but exploitation of that wealth has not made it into a rich country. Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Luxembourg, these places are some of the wealthiest on earth, yet they have almost no access to natural resources to speak of! Almost every natural resource is imported to such places.Wealth and power then, don't have much to do with geography directly. You can tell me that Africa/Russia et al have been manipulated by external interests, but this is beside the point, even if we accept such an idea it still doesn't explain why those external interests were so much more powerful than the ones right on top of the resources, who had 'first dibs' as it were.2. Power and wealth, over the last 300 years, has not drifted to those with the most productive land. That was the case certainly, a long time ago. Once the Landlords were the most powerful people there were. But... The entire paradigm of Capitalism itself has shifted power away from the Landlords to the Factory owners, to those who hold ownership of things far more abstract than physical land. In fact history shows that the Landlords nearly all went completely bankrupt as a result.In order for your prediction to come true, you need reasons why that shift would reverse. While food is obviously an important sector of the economy, the power and wealth of that sector is negligible. Farming represents a tiny tiny part of the overall economy. It used to be close to 100% >200-300 years ago, now it is so tiny you'll be hard pressed to locate it in a pie chart of the economy. It's not that obtaining food to eat is unimportant. It's just that every other sector of the economy has grown much faster. The only way for the Landlords to get back into power is through massive monopolization. But given we live in an age of container ships and cargo planes, anybody trying to corner the market on food is going to go utterly bust (or literally busted by angry mobs). See, let's imagine that water becomes a lot more scarce and this generates the world you envisage where control over food production becomes hugely more important. What happens then is that there is enormous pressure on developing effective desalination equipment. In fact there is so much current research into desalination and the cost of doing it is dropping so fast it is really a non-issue. I know some people think differently, but countries like the UAE, Singapore and Australia have already put a ton of pressure on scientists to obtain decent ways of extracting fresh water from seawater, to the extent I think they'll eventually be able to do it for almost nothing.In fact the only ways I see that coming true, is if there is a sudden shift, not a slow one, where the world becomes a whole lot more dystopian for some reason e.g. like the Fallout videogames! Either that or world governments seriously cock it up. That seems feasible! (nearly all famines in the 20th century were man made ones, not natural Malthusian ones e.g. where governments prevented food moving, or people from moving around).tldr; it doesn't seem likely, but it's easy to collect bottlecaps just in case :)