Book Review: Andrzej Lubowski, Świat 2040. Czy Zachód musi przegrać? [World 2040. Does the West have to lose?], Znak, Kraków 2013

The book entitled “World 2040. Does the West have to lose?” by Andrzej Lubowski was released in 2013 by “Znak” Publishing House. The content is divided into four parts. Part one is entitled “Tough Life of a Fortune-teller”, part two – “Where Are We and Where Are We Heading To?”, part three – “Riddles, Hopes, Pitfalls” and the last one entitled “Slides of Future”. The book ends with an epilogue. Andrzej Lubowski is a well-known economist and journalist. He has published articles from economic and the managerial fields. He graduated from Warsaw School of Economics. He lives in the US and he has been working in the US financial sector for nearly 20 years now. He used his experience of working at Citibank, Visa USA and both Polish and American boards of supervisors in writing the evaluated book. The Author’s professional career has been aligned to the energy sector, technologies and banking. He is aware of the difficulties that come with the attempts of forecasting in which way the world will be developing. According to this he quotes Niels Bohr’s words: “The forecasting is extremely difficult, especially the forecasting of the future”. The author tries to set himself against three visions of the world in 2040 that have been created by an analysts of Goldman Sachs bank (“BRIC swallows G7” theory), the analysts of Citibank (“Africa outruns Europe”) and Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize winner in economy (“China declasses the world”). These three perspectives are based on the belief that the World 2040 development factor of most importance is the demography. The starting point of the discussion is the Author’s opinion that the energy policy and the specific mental determinants of the particular nations are more important than the demographic issues.