“I was asked: ‘how does one become a futurologist?’ I think the answer is by being unable to get a job in the present,” said Magnus Lindkvist, trendspotting futurologist and author. He explained that writing books for a living is “only marginally more profitable than doing pottery.” It may explain why he can’t be hired in the business world.

Originally from Sweden, Lindkvist said during a Luxembourg Stock Exchange event in Kirchberg on Wednesday 19 June that he wanted to shed light and share thoughts on what “it entails to radically transform a country and its financial markets,” given that the theme of the LuxSE event was about “creating a new kind of financial hub in Luxembourg.”

“We live in a world of info-besity”

Reporting on a study published by Katherine Barbieri and Omar Keshk (see chart on the image above), Lindkvist confirmed that as a strategy manager, you may have justifiable reasons to feel “anxious and nervous” given that we are “living in that cliché of fairly unique times, at least with a 200-year perspective.”

Growing up in the 1970s, Lindkvist thought we would be flying cars and living on Mars by now. Asking people nowadays about the future, he noted them saying in a panicked and conspiratorial manner: “it’s gonna be climate-denying, Isis will train AI with bird flu, they will take my job because of hyperinflation and WW3 unless you avoid gluten,” jokingly warned Lindkvist.

Feeling a Kansas moment?

It is when “you feel so nostalgic that there is a deep sense of unfamiliarity with the present, and things you once learned or knew may not be true anymore, and new things are taking you by surprise,” defined Lindkvist. He explained that it may have happened to you when exposed to discussion about digital tokens or artificial intelligence or “horrible geopolitical disaster” as we thought that wars and pandemics were things of the past.

“This could happen to companies.” Given the zeitgeist discussions on the relevance of electric vehicles, Lindkvist reminded the audience about the story of the Hermès brothers, who were the “world’s finest saddle makers… and equipment made of leather.” Emile, one of the brothers, set sail New York City in the 1910s to discover that cars were running the streets. He came back and said: “Oh well, I’m not really sure this horse thing is going to work out so well in the future.” The same happened with radio, electricity and the telegraph.

Yet, Lindkvist reassured the audience that “in every Kansas moment, there are also new opportunities.” Indeed, Emile Hermès is said to have discovered the new cool technological gadget called the zipper and managed to negotiate the global rights outside of America. It transformed Hermès “into the world's first leather zipper hybrid company.”

Feeling bored may be your salvation

Referring to a German learning institute (your correspondent could not capture the name through the Swedish-English pronunciation), Lindkvist reported that “a high percentage of innovations occurred when people were on training courses, but really bad to trading courses.”

Lindkvist gave the account of the Bee Gees. Out of boredom, they noticed that wheels make that repetitive noise as they cross bridge joints and decided to record that as a basis for a disco song. Indeed, they had now the drum beat from the bridge and a funky guitar, both laying the foundation for a second and much more successful career.

What happened to the Bee Gees can happen to a country

Lindkvist explained that Sweden also experienced its Kansas moment in 1992 when interest rates reached 500%. “I think the word panik is relatively similar in most languages,” he said, to reflect the mood of the time.

Despite being the crowned the most dangerous country in Europe by the , Lindkvist takes comfort that Sweden is now home of the “most admired startups in the world and the third biggest private equity firm in the world…. and the biggest, per capita, exporter of pop music and heavy metal as well.”

Better be safe or competent?

Lindkvist credited that Swedish success to entrepreneurialism. As a parent, he thinks it is better to expose your child “to do things, let them learn, take risk and hurt himself” to make them competent. When asked by parents about the best education for a “future-proof job” for their child, “I say, laconically, [the child] should study to become a compliance officer. It’s an infinite job market in so many companies and countries.” It is unclear how many compliance officers laughed in the audience.

Lindkvist looks at the to better understand dynamism in nations and economies. The index measures “uncertainty avoidance,” or the ability “to defer the amount of tolerance around unpredictability.” Countries such as Greece and Portugal score high under the metric. Somehow unsurprisingly, in Europe, Sweden, Ireland and the UK score low. In other words, the latter countries love uncertainty, danger and dynamism. Not listed on his slides, Luxembourg seems to score in the middle of the pack according to speaker guidance.

To assess the future strategy for Luxembourg as a financial hub, he compared the general cultural traits in the culture such as individualism, long-term orientation and individualism for Luxembourg and Sweden but did not come up with a summary profile or say whether one country should outperform the other.

Imaginative resources are a lot more valuable than natural resources

Despite starting from a much lower base and without natural resources, South Korea, a relatively poor country many years ago, has enjoyed an economic outperformance versus Peru. He explained the growth difference on the back of Koreans’ ability to drill resources from their brain instead of commodities from the ground.

He thinks that a country’s complexity supports greater wealth, as per the atlas of economic complexity from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It will come as little surprise that the failed state of Venezuela scores poorly given its reliance on oil. The opposite is true for the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, for instance.

According to this methodology, he concluded the economic model of Luxembourg is more akin to Venezuela than other advanced economies given its over reliance on the financial sector. Yet one can’t find Luxembourg on the .

Positively, countries can reinvent themselves. Lindkvist reminded the audience that Dubai, starting from a desert plot, became the “most attractive place for expats,” whereas Singapore began in a swamp. “We have to be open minded about how fast power relationships change.”