MIT PREDICTED COLLAPSE IN 2040 BACK IN 1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOTPAxrrP4
The progressive fantasy is that science and technology will save us from it.
Tech Won’t Matter because we’ve exhausted consumption capacity (really) and are down to selling virtue signals and hedonism. We knew this by the early 00s.
Almost all of us in the contrarian side of the economics discipline, especially Turpin, with Strauss and Howe in history, and of course Kondratiev, have predicted the collapse from 2020 to 2030.
Most of us were certain by 2004 at the latest. I’ve been right about 2008, the teens, and even the insurrection in 2020 – although I assumed it would have been worse.
Why? Demographics is destiny. And demographic destiny over time determines geostrategic equilibria.
Why is there a problem today? In the postwar period we stopped all research on human differences, and instead pursued study of equality. This turns out to have been surprisingly catastrophic and even far more so than I’d expected.
Why? Because the rate of prosperity (evolution) is dependent on the rate of evolutionary computation (competition), and that rate is dependent upon the demographic distribution more so … vastly more so … than anything else including geography and resource availability.
So studying individual and group differences and seeking opportunities for reciprocity and a heterogeneous economy would have produced sustainable innovation and political harmony instead of conflict.
So, between the decline in demographic quality (ability), demographic shrinkage, and demographic asymmetry (comparative advantage), geostrategic geo-equilibrium, and (surprisingly) the negative consequences of seeking equality in business, academy and state, that lowered rate of competitive innovation across all but a tiny spectrum.
As for positives? Hope is not a strategy.
The dark side is that these changes always produce war and collapse. I’ve said that the USA is going to be much poorer than europe is today, and europe will be as poor as ukraine and russia.
Best place to live? Middle america. Waterways, food, oil. The only place that absolutely positively will have food. 😉