I've been sitting on drafts for a while now, having chosen late September as the best possible time to get back into blogging. I (naively) figured I'd be able to crank out some posts throughout October, only to find my energy gradually sapped by the increasingly close political race in the United States. Then came the election, and...
...welp.
Around that time, I decided to plow through Peter Turchin's "End Times", my weird way of confronting the bleak reality staring me and my friends down for the next two to four years - provided a lifelong diet of McDonalds doesn't choke the President-elect's heart out before inauguration - and found the data within a sort of cold, if cozy, comfort. As a data-driven dinosaur, I can respect Turchin's desire to data-ify the historical record, build a model upon it, and then plugin present data to extrapolate likely future outcomes and patterns. Sure, there's the familiar taste of historicism (in the same vein as Asmiov's psychohistory) at times, but I thought the man made pretty compelling points. As the saying goes:
History rarely repeats, but it often rhymes.
Turchin ends his book with eerily accurate guesses (he makes it clear these are personal guesses of his, not his model) about persons of import in the present times and their role in the rising populism of the United States, but little else in the way of guidance. He's here to warn, not to lead, and stays (mostly) in his lane in that regard.
Meanwhile, I've got an itch to take up a banner and lead the way forward in the best way I know how: long-term planning.
Setting the Stage
Before I get to the speculation part of the piece, let's establish the context I'm writing this within. It's the end of 2024, and the world is, broadly, at a cross-roads. Global conflict is on the rise, between Russia's continued invasion of Ukraine, Israel's genocide of Palestinians, and a smattering of Civil Wars and territorial disputes all over Africa, Europe, and Asia. Populism remains on the rise globally, with a year of elections seeing the throwing-out of the incumbent parties every single time in the West. While COVID is in the rear-view mirror, the trauma it brought has never really been addressed by the populace, resulting in distrust of institutions and medicine in general. In short, the malaise of the 2010s has given way to boiling anger in the early 2020s.
2024 itself has seen a wave of sparks threaten to ignite the powder kegs we've built our society out of. The current US President-elect saw one definitive assassination attempt, and possibly a second one depending on the media you consume - nobody's really quite clear on the count, only that it happened definitely once, and maybe twice. The most recent spark, the assassination of a US Health Insurance CEO on the streets of Manhattan, finally gave a concrete voice and high visibility to just how deep the mistrust and anger of the masses goes. CEO's and other high net worth individuals spent the following week shoring up private security and demanding their media and government mouthpieces denounce the assassination, while a plurality of the populace made it abundantly clear they're glad he's dead, and others should meet similar fates. That's not exactly the hallmark of a stable, functioning society, but more reminiscent of pre-revolution France, guillotine memes and all.
Fueling this populism is, principally, a level of wealth inequality not seen since the American Gilded Age. Worker wages, when adjusted for inflation, grew a meager $1.37 per hour on average, from 1979 to 2021. This is in spite of the price of everything else - housing, food, healthcare, education, transport, etc - growing by multiples over the same time period. It's also in spite of worker productivity being better than ever, with American worker productivity growing by 243% between 1948 and 2013, while wages only grew ~109%. I could dive deeper into the data, but then this post might never be finished - much like my essay on the US Housing Crisis, sitting in my drafts folder and waiting to be completed. Besides, there's ample YouTube celebrities on every side of the political compass arguing their belief that the other three quadrants are to blame, so there's no need to take a detour through that cesspool. And while wealth inequality is a principal cause, it's hardly the only one: climate change and its associated disasters, government capture by wealthy elites, popular immiseration of the well-educated who can't find work to pay off their debts, outsourcing of work abroad to increase margins at home, the list goes on.
To make a long story short...
2024 is coming to an end in a few short weeks, and the world very much feels like a decrepit warehouse filled with dangerously cheap fireworks, and everyone has suddenly decided to take up chain-smoking indoors with matches and flint. With 2025 looking to be even worse, a non-zero number of folks are looking for answers or guidance as to what comes next. Will we be saved before we destroy ourselves? Will the world devolve into a dystopian hellscape of mass privatized surveillance in service of Capital? Will Antifa annihilate all the good, decent fascists of the world and force everyone into Transgender Conversion camps so as to irreparably pollute Olympic sports?
The answer to all of those is probably not. Mass surveillance has proven lucrative for advertising but less so for security, there's no such thing as a good fascist, transgender people generally just want to be left the fuck alone like everyone else, and the Olympic games are already polluted with doping, bribery, and corruption scandals anyway.
Your Ten Day Year Forecast
Why ten years? The time frame was chosen because that's about the practical accuracy of my longer-range predictions. Beyond that, and there's simply far too much potential in the intervening time for everything to go off the rails; any less, and it's increasingly more of a coin flip than a prediction or forecast.
It's also worth noting that this is speculation on my part. Informed speculation, something a High Schooler might call an "educated guess", but speculation nonetheless. In fact, quite a bit of this could be construed as opinion, and as the saying goes:
Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one and they usually stink.
So take everything I say within the context that I'm but a mere armchair analyst, a generalist of skills and experience. I am not a subject matter expert, an authoritative source, or a psychic. This is not financial or legal advice, and taking it as such is ill-advised.
The Populist Problem
Populism is here, people are pissed, and the ruling class has been reminded that they're just as vulnerable as any of their workers to the violence of a determined individual. Taking a closer look at this populism provides clues as to how things might unfold in the near term.
For starters, let's talk about employment. The modern worker has spent their entire lives watching wealthy countries outsource their jobs to cheaper labor overseas, while said cheaper labor has grown increasingly aware of the neo-colonialism exploitation this relationship entails. American workers might be pissed that their jobs are increasingly going to workers abroad, but those workers are just as pissed they're being paid a fraction of what they're worth just because they're in another country, and with harsher rules to boot. It's no surprise that while business leaders are demanding return-to-office policies, engaging in mass layoffs, and toting the "benefits" of longer work weeks, the workers are disgusted with being treated like chattel, housed in crumbling cities with antiquated infrastructure. Chinese leaders briefly aligned on that point as well, but wisely began walking it back when they saw the failings of their peers in stemming the tide of populism, especially with the rising tensions at home over working conditions and wages.
At its core, employment is the single biggest sticking point for the masses. Society demands we work to survive, yet the wealth classes wish to remove the ability to work and to survive from the working class. Inflation is a moot point when wages keep pace, and that simply hasn't happened for the majority of the world populace for decades. It's why populist leaders have been able to exploit anti-immigrant sentiments into positions of power: western workers know that their jobs are being replaced by cheaper labor abroad, but don't understand that immigrants here aren't the ones displacing their labor. The workers see manufacturing, resource extraction and refinement, and even high tech jobs being shipped to other countries, while the cost of everything here continues to climb.
How does this shake out? Well if the wealth class is to be believed, AI will simply replace all human labor, forever, yet somehow without completely collapsing a global economy built upon consumption, which itself is fueled by wages from the output of labor. Mercifully, I don't see this happening - yet. Rather, I expect the employment problem to be gradually resolved through broader geopolitical decisions stemming from the climate crisis and a shifting world order. Simply put, the protectionist policies of nations and their allies will reverse some of the more toxic aspects of globalization, including a reshoring of jobs back home in the name of National Security.
Peaceful(ish) Protectionism
Now is as good a time as any to tackle the Protectionist possibility. Up until very recently, the world has been dominated by United States hegemony and associated policies. In some ways, this has been a good thing: the formation of the Eurozone and BRICS as a way to increase cooperation among neighbors and create a valid competitor to the US economic engine, for instance, while United States pop culture and social policy ebbed out across the world, helping to fuel social progress in areas like sexuality and gender identity as well as religious tolerance. While not all was good (US Imperialism was incredibly harmful, and we'll be dealing with its effects for another century yet), good things came from the nakedly-selfish intentions of the United States in some areas.
Nothing lasts forever though, and as the wealth classes globally focused on lowering costs and raising prices, this also resulted in kickstarting huge economic engines in underdeveloped economies - chiefly among the BRICS countries. Manufacturing, refining, resource extraction, research and development, and high-tech jobs exploded in quantity and necessity in these countries in a comparatively short amount of time. To put this into context, India only gained independence from the UK in 1947, yet today its labor force is imported by countries around the world seeking to fill high tech and high skilled jobs. China didn't begin industrialization until the 1950s, yet today is the world's largest manufacturer of goods. With the newfound power and skilled labor force, these countries are seeking to flex their power on the world stage, and the United States (and indeed, much of the developed West) is ill-prepared to combat them.
See, while the United States has allowed parasites to extract wealth and profit from its desiccated corpse, China in particular has focused heavily on its own National Security apparatus. While the US prioritized private profits, China reigned in their wealthy elites and forced them into compliance with national goals. The results speak for themselves: while the Chinese technology infrastructure is highly modernized and heavily secured, the western world saw their infrastructure widely compromised by (alleged) Chinese espionage groups. Turns out that if you spend decades neglecting good security practices in favor of share buybacks and executive bonuses, you leave yourself wide open to attack - who could've guessed? Compounding matters is that China's own economic policies net it a higher return on investment for its military spending - and their outcomes are directly challenging US supremacy in this area.
That being said, direct military confrontation seems unlikely in the short term as both sides have a lot to lose while the other is a comparative military equal, especially when the likely outcome is a stalemate. Instead, we're far more likely to see increased protectionist policies from the various spheres of influence. The US and China are already in an escalating trade war, with the latter cutting off rare earths and resources while the former (futilely) tries to cut off advanced chip technologies. Europe, staring down Russia, the Middle East, China, and the United States, is also focusing more on protecting its domestic interests and walling itself off from the world stage. With the world powers consolidating their influence at home, the global South - particularly South America and Africa - find themselves with breathing room to settle internal strife, and a glut of natural resources to sell abroad.
The resulting world is likely to be more protectionist in nature, while still remaining mostly peaceful. To combat the threats from abroad, countries will reshore as much of their core economy as possible - manufacturing, extraction, refinement, sale, logistics, all of it is likely to return to a sizable domestic capacity, if only to preserve and protect National Security interests. Such shifting priorities will also mean a need to balance the needs of the masses against the demands of Capital, likely resulting in higher wages and better benefits for workers, while lowering costs on important value-add employers by taking on certain existing for-profit industries through new or expanded government agencies - think single-payer healthcare and defined-contribution pensions from the state replacing for-profit health insurance companies and employer-sponsored 401k portfolios.
Is that a good outcome? On its face it sure sounds like it, as protectionism typically has a side-effect of reducing wasteful consumption and harmful business practices in the name of protecting the interests of the state. For several years, if not most of the decade, I think these policies will generally do more good than harm. I say most, because there's still the Big Bad (TM) lurking around the final corner, generally around 2030 or so.
Climate Catastrophe
Let's not mince words: our elected officials and the ruling classes fucking failed to tackle Climate Change. They had one job - protect the planet - and failed miserably. If ecocide were a crime, the entirety of the US Political apparatus from Reagan onward would be tried for it, from State Governments up through the Presidency and Judiciary - as would China, Europe, several Middle Eastern countries, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
That's tragically behind us, though, and serious effects are locked in (barring some miracle carbon capture technology that we can rapidly and affordably deploy at scale). While the effects are already being felt globally, the really significant impacts aren't due to start until around the 2030 mark, and only accelerate rapidly from there. This is where protectionism makes or breaks entire nations, as those who used their new policies to build resilient infrastructure and shelter away from the most affected areas will be setup for success, while those who ignored its impacts or delayed action will be set upon a course of violence. Whether that violence is directed within (civil conflict) or without (international conflict) depends on the degree of populism present at the time, and how successful political demagogues are at shifting the blame for their own party's failures.
Speaking from an Ameri-centric perspective, this is the likeliest point of fracture within the United States. The populace is presently moving into the Southeast and Southwest to try and escape the housing crisis, placing a majority of the population in areas expected to be hardest hit by the climate crisis. If the country continues vilifying its migrant population and refusing to meaningfully build housing in more durable or resilient regions, then the current insurance crisis of Florida and California will become a full-blown collapse under the weight of overvalued housing stock in unsurvivable locations. This would trigger a mass migration northward, into areas already struggling with a lack of affordable and quality housing stock, now without the labor force or natural resources to build quickly and cheaply. Countries like China or areas like the Eurozone, who have consistently invested in climate-resilient infrastructure, would quickly become elevated to superpower status while the United States scrambles to rebuild at home.
Recap
It's not all doom and gloom, despite the forecast for tomorrow being quite grim. Broadly speaking, countries and regions are realizing that globalization didn't benefit them or their populace, but solely the wealth class or undeveloped economies. With nations like India and China flexing their economic superpower on the world stage, the established US hegemony is rapidly crumbling under the excesses of its own parasites - a boon for everyone not the United States, generally speaking.
In the short term, trade wars and non-violent conflicts (like nation-state hacking) will combine with populist demands to create more protectionist policies. These policies will foster domestic development even if it's not the best economic outcome in the short term or for shareholders, because the reality is that shareholders do not benefit countries as much as labor does. The development decisions of these protectionist regimes will ultimately determine their success or failure in the face of global climate catastrophe, with countries who develop meaningful solutions to climate change (fusion energy, alternative nuclear fuels, carbon capture, next-generation batteries) in a position of economic dominance over those without.
In the mid-term (early 2030s), conflict is expected to increase as resources become scarcer, fresh water in particular. Countries that invest in water recycling and desalination will be in a better position than those that do not, with landlocked African and Middle Eastern countries in particular at significant risk of civil unrest without infrastructure to provide drinking water and nutritious food. This will put increased strain on larger countries, as populations that did prepare and develop against climate change will (rightly) protest the seizure or use of their resources to assist those that did not; this is a particular problem in the United States, where the unique political makeup of state governments and the disconnect in the Federal Government will undoubtedly result in a patchwork of states that did prepare and those that did not, with built-up resentment in the former likely resulting in refusal of assistance for the latter.
Beyond that...it's almost anyone's guess, really.
Parting Words
As I very thoroughly explained in the beginning, this is just my speculation based on my own curated datasets and experiences, predominantly in the United States (and even then, excluding the Rockies, PacNW, Alaska, Hawaii, and our colonies territories). This is not a definite forecast of what's to come, nor am I a psychic. If I could accurately predict the future with any degree of reliability, I'd have won the lottery and bought a house by now.
So if I'm to leave you with a parting thought, it'd be this:
Despite the apathy, the rage, the anger, the disgust, and all the negativity out there, nothing is set in stone. Everything can be changed, if we truly work for that outcome together. The absolute worst thing you can do is to sit back and observe while protecting your own self-interests.
Get involved. Volunteer in your community. Run for political office. Help those in need. Try to do the right thing, even if (and especially when) it's not the profitable thing.
And for fucks sake, stop policing the sexuality of consenting adults. There's infinitely more important shit to do than to police the genitals of strangers.