Hello and welcome to the world ahead on Economist Radio. I'm Ann McElvoy, Head of Economist

Radio. This future gazing series of podcasts will examine an assortment of speculative scenarios,

what if conjectures and provocative prophecies. Some will be more likely to come true than

others, but thinking about possible futures can help us understand the present and the various

paths along which events might unfold. Today we're asking what if actors were replaced by digital

versions of themselves. We're kind of already seeing this, there's nothing technologically to stop,

five or ten or fifteen more terminated films or starring Arnold Schwarzenegger going out way

into the 21st or 22nd centuries. And how will the future be framed for the eyewear industry?

I really feel the self-culture and Instagram is really making a big difference.

First we travel to the year 2024. President Donald Trump is in office for a second term

and his constant attacks on allies, be it on trade, security or social policy has dismantled

much of the international rules-based order. I'm joined by David Rene, the economist Beijing

Bureau Chief to discuss what might replace it. Hello there David. Hello. And welcome to 2024.

Now in your vision of the future, America has lost a lot of ground on the international stage.

How did you envision that happening? Well you can break it down into big areas of kind of trade

and security policy, ways that America has been picking fights already. With these sort of

futures and exercises, often the thing that we're trying to do is to look at current trends and

just kind of draw that line further up and see how far it could go in a kind of worst-case scenario.

So you can look at trade already, the United States is worrying some trade experts because it's

blocking appointments of new judges to what's effectively the appeals court of the global trade

regulator, the World Trade Organization. If they keep doing that and in this scenario we imagine they

do, you see the potential for a country like China to come up with some alternative parallel

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