Three things we’ll be focused on in the 2020s
As we enter a new decade, it’s time to reflect on what will be important to us and what will capture our attention
We’re passing from one decade to another with surprisingly little fanfare. (It only recently hit me that one day we’ll be referring back to the coming decade by saying things like, “It was back in the ’20s,” the way my grandmother talked about her childhood.) Nonetheless, it’s worth marking the change; you don’t see all that many changes of decade even in a long human life. I want to mark this one by pointing out three trends from the 2010s that weren’t exactly overlooked at the time but that I think will be much bigger in the next decade. Here they are:
The ballooning debt
It’s not that the problem isn’t noticed – a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 53% of people view the federal deficit and thus the debt as a serious problem, significantly outweighing other more-discussed issues such as climate change, terrorism or racism.
Right now, yearly deficits are going up, but the debt – essentially the sum of all previous deficits – is
skyrocketing. It’s done that for a decade, except for a couple of years when it briefly leveled off due to the influence of the tea party. I’m sorry to say that I’ve kind of given up talking about it because nobody seems to care, and I’m afraid the politicians in both parties will kick the can down the road until something really drastic happens. I’m guessing that might happen in the next decade, but although the rule is that something that can’t go on forever, won’t, there’s no guarantee as to when it will stop. I feel safe in predicting, though, that it won’t stop due to a sudden infusion of virtue and self-control into our political class.
Fracking and the change of the United States from oil importer to oil exporter
Writing about the last 10 years of war in Afghanistan, Richard Fernandez observes: “If the War on Terror seems largely won today, or at least less desperate than September 2001, it is because radical Islam has discredited itself, the strongmen of the Middle East have self-immolated themselves through their own dysfunction, and entrepreneurs have eased American dependence on foreign oil through fracking and other innovations.” Of those three factors, the last is probably the most important.
U.S. foreign policy revolved around making sure that oil flowed from the Middle East. Even though the United States became a net petroleum exporter in September, we still import some oil from the Middle East (oil markets are complex), but now that we’re the world’s biggest oil producer, we’re vastly less dependent than we used to be. And American presidents, whether President Trump or a successor, will always have the ability to boost production dramatically by opening up federal land or offshore areas.
This is valuable both as an alternative and as a threat. The upshot is that our politics and strategies will depend much, much less on the problems and concerns of backward Middle Eastern nations. It’s also drastically weakened the position of Russian President Vladimir Putin since it makes Russia’s oil output, on which he depends for economic and political leverage, much less significant. This is a huge achievement that has gotten surprisingly little attention. (And why do some of the Democrats running for president want to ban fracking and throw that advantage away? That’s a whole ‘nother column.)
Space
When I was a kid, I thought I’d live to be a tourist on the moon. That’s looking doubtful now. But after nearly 50 years of post-Apollo NASA stagnation, private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are making serious strides. I predict that we’ll see multiple private missions to the moon, and quite possibly even to Mars, before the next decade is out. More importantly, I expect advanced technologies and a commercial rather than big-government approach to space activity will lead to much lower costs for doing things in space. (Already, SpaceX can launch a kilogram to orbit for $2,720 – the space shuttle’s cost per kilogram was $54,500 per kilogram, meaning that SpaceX is doing it for roughly one-twentieth the cost.) As we’ve learned from the computer revolution, when things get a lot cheaper, people find all sorts of new uses for them. The same will be true in space, and it will start to happen in a big way over the next decade.
These are my predictions, and two out of three of them are even cheerful. As for the debt, well, some left-leaning economists are pushing a school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory that purports to show that debt doesn’t matter. I have serious doubts about this – the “this time is different” arguments usually don’t turn out well – but hey, maybe they’ll turn out to be right. If so, it’s all cheerful. Either way, happy 2020!