POINT OF ORDER
Fasten your seatbelts for a turbulent 2017
Fear engendered by the huge global shift from west to east and its ramifications for SA will ensure 2017 will be no less dramatic than 2016, writes Tim Cohen
The year 2016, as we all know, has been a humdinger. What if I told you 2017 is going to be worse? Of course, this prediction comes with the usual caveat. As Danish physicist Nils Bohr said (although he was probably paraphrasing), "predictions are very difficult, especially about the future". Yet, if there is anything that 2016 tells us, it is that several incremental changes to the world’s trajectory that have been quietly boiling away in the background for the past few decades have suddenly popped out into the mainstream. In 2016, the most obvious manifestations have been Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as president of the US. It is not by accident that both events happened in the same way and against the same trajectory. In both cases, the "intelligentsia" were wrong.In both cases, the predicted outcome by normally reliable prediction methodology was at odds with the actual result. In both cases, the victors won their battles with, frankly, lies, simplifications and innue...
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