An excellent summary of where the world is going in the next 50 years.

The four major transformations we are seeing:
1. The War in Iraq and the effort to modernize the Islamic world
2. China as an emerging super-power
3. Population decline in western countries (Japan, Europe and the US)
4. The “fracturing” of American business into smaller, more efficient entities

Only #4 was really a new insite for me. His example was IBM. In the olden days, IBM made the machine. Now Intel makes the chips, Microsoft makes the software, NVIDIA makes the graphics card, etc. Even that isn’t the case anymore. Intel and NVIDIA design the chips, companies in Asia actually make them. We are seeing a fracturing of american business all they way down the supply chain.

This is great news for those of us in the creative work force. Well great news if we are able willing to always be innovating and learning new things. Its bad news for the people who bought into the “Get a good education, find a job at a good company, settle down and raise a family” BS of our parents and grandparents generation. More and more people will become independent guns – brought in to apply their experise to solve a certian problem, then jump ship to the next company to solve the next problem.

The biggest impact of that for policy makers is how we manage health care in this country. With people in my generation and career path changing jobs every few years, employer provided health care is an ugly mess. We need to move away from employer provided care and insurance companies paying for every little thing. Your auto-insurace company doesn’t pay for your oil changes, your health insurance company shouldn’t be paying for your annual checkup. We need high-deductable policies to cover unexpected issues like cancer or heart disease and medical savings accounts (or better: the FairTax) to reduce the cost of the annual maintenance stuff. Finally we need doctors and medical professionals to pull out of the HMO racket and setup real practices where the market and not HMOs, PPOs and the government set the prices of routine doctor’s visits.

Here is the full article. I highly suggest you read it.
The Braden Files : A Global Intelligence Briefing For CEOs