If time travelers from 1912, well-read in Edwardian science fiction, arrived in the early part of next year, they would find our era unexpectedly familiar in a number of ways. Since by 1912 automobiles and aviation were already in existence (my house has a perfectly serviceable 1911 garage) our lifestyle would show far less change for them than would be witnessed by an 1862 visitor to 1962. Culturally, our art, music and literature mostly reflect trends already apparent in 1912. Our financial system would appear bizarre and overleveraged, with few comprehensible advantages over the 1912ers’ own system. Yet in one respect they would find our world completely familiar, indeed more comprehensible to them than to us: we live in a globalized world with a multi-polar and mutually antagonistic power structure, similar to their own but quite different to anything we have recently experienced.

Naturally, there would be features of 2012’s world that would be truly amazing to 1912er visitors, which were not dreamed of in their science fiction. While television (perhaps transmitted through telephone cables) was a standard Edwardian fantasy, the Internet, with its infinite ability to summon information and interactions from all over the globe, would have seemed to them pure magic. Indeed the idea of computers on which calculations could be performed, documents created, games played and videos viewed, would have seemed to them equally wonderful. While Charles Babbage had created his Difference Engine sixty years previously he was an almost unknown figure in 1912 as his work had seemed to lead nowhere.

Another modern wonder at which the 1912ers would have marveled would be pharmaceuticals and medicine generally. The tragedies of everyday life, which had decimated Edwardian families and taken people off in the full vigor of their youth, are far less common today. Doctors by 1912 had barely achieved “operating break-even” in which they killed fewer people than they cured, so our modern achievements would be suitably awe-inspiring. 1912ers would however find it strange that we grow old and die at about the same rate as they did, having lengthened the average lifespan while doing little for the maximum.

1912ers would find it even stranger that we were still bound to this lonely planet; having seen in the previous 50 years transportation revolutionized in unimagined ways, they would have expected that progress to continue to at least inter-planetary travel and colonization. (Alas, we would disillusion them sadly when we told them that Percival Lowell’s Martian canals and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ beautiful Martians had no possibility of existence.)

In the arts, 1912ers would be surprised by our lack of progress, and indeed by our relative decay. Musically, their musical tradition led by Mahler, Puccini and Stravinsky would have degenerated into an obscure minority cult, while the fringe primitive rhythms of ragtime and Storyville jazz had come to dominate mainstream listening. Artistically, the post-impressionist, cubist and modernist movements would have continued to dominate our output, while entirely losing their excitement of 1912-13. Architecturally, our cities would look to them like the Futurist fantasies of Antonio Saint’Elia, only entirely without those fantasies’ panache. Only in literature and in film would we have developed forms that did not derive from movements already in existence in 1912, and 1912ers would envy us only the latter.

Our financial system would seem to 1912ers both strange and retrograde. Our banks are much larger than theirs, even taking into account the shrunken value of our money. However they are by 1912 standards excessively leveraged, up to 30 to 1 compared to the 5 to 1 regarded as a suitable limit at that time. 1912ers knowledgeable about finance would have understood our derivatives, since futures and options were around if minor in their time, but they would not have understood why derivatives played so huge a role in our financial system.

Our monetary and fiscal policies, especially our leverage, our ultra-low interest rates and our orientation towards short-term trading, would have appalled them, and they would have regarded it as completely unsurprising that our financial system is in danger of collapse. They would doubtless have pointed out smugly that in their system no major British bank had gone bust since the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878. However we could in response have reminded them that their previous failure, that of Overend and Gurney in 1866, had involved much of the wild trading, poorly understood novel financial instruments, exuberant lifestyles and unsound practices that are associated with financial failure today.

Our global economic system would be familiar to 1912ers; indeed they would assume until told otherwise that it was simply a peaceful evolution of theirs. In global trade, we are less protectionist than they were – in 1912 the United States had high tariffs as did many European countries after an epidemic of tariff-raising dating back to 1879. However we are marginally less globalized than they were in terms of the share of foreign investment as a percentage of total capital investment. Our foreign investment differs from theirs in two respects: theirs was mostly in rich countries and mostly directed towards producing for the local market, rather than our outsourcing for global consumers, which has been greatly facilitated by the Internet.

It is in the field of geopolitics, however where the 1912ers would know us better than we know ourselves. We are only just adjusting to the waning of U.S. supremacy and the emergence of a multi-polar system of global power and economic influence. Before the uni-polar system we have been used to, we lived for a half century in a bipolar and mutually antagonistic system, with very little contact across the divide. 1912ers would regard that bipolar system as thoroughly artificial and unpleasant, and except for the very old, who had been adults in the period of partial British hegemony before 1870, would also not have related easily to our 1990-2008 uni-polar world. However the system of belligerent and moderately antagonistic multipolarity we are currently entering, and do not yet recognize, would be entirely familiar to them.

To them, our China would be their Wilhelmine Germany, aggressively expanding both economically and militarily. Our Russia would be their Austria-Hungary, economically inefficient and corrupt, but nonetheless militarily dangerous. Our India would be their United States, of immense potential but not yet taking its full place in the global system. Our Europe would be their France, in gentle decline but recognizing the fact only grudgingly and resentfully. Our United States would be their British Empire, apparently wealthy and glittering, resented by most other powers, but with weaknesses both economic and military that were not yet fully apparent. Finally our Islamic terrorists would be their Communists and anarchists, seeking to destroy the existing system by force and occasionally pulling off a damaging assassination or atrocity.

The 1912ers would have lived with this geopolitical system for forty years, and would have adapted to it. We are in this respect at the beginning of the system, say about 1875, still figuring out the capabilities of the new powers and not yet sure the previous uni-polar system has disappeared. However, to the 1912ers’ patronizing lectures about the reality of the world we have recently entered, we would have an awful riposte. Their own adaptation to multi-polarity, the formation of two mutually antagonistic alliance blocs, was to end in civilizational collapse into unimaginable conflict only two years ahead.

The antagonisms between aggressive rising powers, smug status-quo powers and resentful declining powers of 1875 had by 1912 been coagulated by the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance into a bipolar system of mutual antagonism and mistrust that was to prove much more dangerous than multi-polarity itself. The declining France was to recover from 1870-71’s localized Franco-Prussian War within five years; the declining Austria-Hungary was to be broken up entirely by the total war of the alliance system, not to recover its civilization, artistic, scientific and intellectual strength and relative freedom for at least three quarters of a century. However we solve the novel (to us) problem of competing mutually fairly hostile powers, forming two major antagonistic blocs is not the answer.

1912ers would be able to give us excellent advice on how to repair our monetary and financial system – we need much lower leverage and a Gold Standard. The difficulty would lie in persuading us to take their advice. On the other hand, they would have little to offer us other than recognition in considering our geo-political system, since in the end they manifestly failed to make their equivalent system work. In that area, we are thus on our own.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)