International Futures

• 1. Introduction

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  International Futures is a model that asks what the world will look like decades from now, and then actually tries to answer. Built by Barry B. Hughes at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in Colorado, it runs simulations across eleven interconnected global systems: economic, demographic, education, health, environment, technology, domestic governance, infrastructure, agriculture, energy, and the political ties between nations. The model covers 183 countries simultaneously. It is not locked away behind a paywall or an institutional subscription. Anyone can use it, either through a browser or as a downloaded program. What kind of tool earns a place in the National Intelligence Council's flagship forecasting reports? What does it take to model the entire world? And who, exactly, decides what counts as a useful vision of the future?

• 2. A Model for the Whole World

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  Hughes designed International Futures around a core architectural idea: the sub-models that make up global reality do not operate independently. A country's education levels affect its economic output. Its economic output shapes its health systems. Its health systems feed back into its demographics. IFs captures these relationships by linking all its sub-models dynamically, meaning a change in one flows automatically through the others. That linkage is what makes IFs unusual. Most modeling tools treat one domain, say energy or population, in isolation. IFs endogenizes the impact of eleven systems at once across all 183 countries it tracks. The help system bundled with the software walks users through the model structure and the computer code behind it, making the architecture auditable rather than opaque. Three core functions sit at the heart of the software: data analysis, scenario analysis, and display.

• 3. More Than Two Thousand Data Series

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  The data analysis section of IFs draws from over 2,000 data series collected from major international data gatherers. That foundation is continuously updated as new series become available. Users can slice through this database in three ways. Cross-sectional analysis lets a user pick one variable and plot it against up to five independent variables at the same time. Longitudinal analysis traces the relationship between a variable and time, running back to 1960 for most data series. A third option displays data as a world map, using GIS tools so patterns across geography become visible at a glance. The cross-sectional view adds a particularly striking feature: the map can be animated to show how a relationship has shifted across the more than forty years of data held in the database. The scenario analysis layer builds directly on top of all of this, allowing users to move beyond historical data into projected futures.

• 4. Building Your Own Future

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  Scenario analysis is where IFs becomes a decision-making tool rather than just an archive. Users can open the parameter and variable settings that drive the model and alter them to reflect a policy intervention or a changed assumption. The software then runs the model forward and shows how the results compare against the base-case. Pre-run scenarios come packaged with the software, including work completed for the United Nations Environment Programme and the National Intelligence Council. For policymakers who want to test a specific question, that baseline gives a point of comparison without requiring them to build a scenario from scratch. The display section then presents those forecast results across different provinces, countries, and groups. Specialized views include population projections, educational attainment, mortality rates, the Gini coefficient, the Millennium Development Goals, social accounting matrices, advanced sustainability analyses, and World Bank financial flows.

• 5. The Pardee Center

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  A gift from Frederick S. Pardee, formerly of RAND, funded the construction of the Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver. The center took on responsibility for maintaining and expanding the software, running training sessions, and producing a book series called Patterns of Potential Human Progress, known by its initials PPHP. Five volumes have been completed under that series. The first addresses the reduction of global poverty. The second covers global education. The third examines health care systems. The fourth looks at global infrastructure. The fifth turns to domestic governance. The journal Poverty and Public Policy reviewed the first PPHP volume and found that Hughes and his co-authors had succeeded in their stated goal. The reviewers wrote that the intended contribution was not prediction but promoting thought about poverty policy, and that the volume was attractively presented, lucid, and very usefully fulfilled its promise to the student and policymaker.

• 6. Reaching Governments and Global Institutions

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  The National Intelligence Council used IFs in three of its Global Trends reports: Global Trends 2020, Global Trends 2025, and Global Trends 2030. Those reports inform long-range strategic planning at the highest levels of the United States government. The United Nations Human Development Report and the Global Environmental Outlook have both drawn on the model as well. On the access side, Google Public Data Explorer, the Atlantic Council, and the Institute for Security Studies each host IFs free for public use, extending its reach beyond research institutions to a broader audience. The collaboration with the Institute for Security Studies produced a dedicated offshoot called the African Futures Project, a joint effort with the Pardee Center to promote long-term strategic planning for African development. That project has generated its own policy briefs, monographs on long-term African development, and a dedicated website where users can run the IFs model specifically to explore African futures.