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America has been in stagflation for years. Society is afflicted by the depression and the Vietnam syndrome, with the main movie of the generation being The Taxi Driver and such. Britain is even worse off than the United States. The USSR continues to expand its sphere of influence and pump up its military might, taking advantage of the rain of petrodollars. The vast majority of Sovietologists do not expect the collapse of the Soviet state in the coming decades. China is in ruins after the Cultural Revolution. Japan seems to many to be the next world economic leader. Germany is called the "sick man of Europe."
Here comes the year 2000.
The USSR does not exist. China is developing at an incredible rate. The Japanese call the 90's the "lost decade", their economy has stopped growing. The U.S. has attained a dominance unprecedented in history – in economics, finance, technology, military power, and politics. Once again, London has become one of the world's two major financial centers.
Every time we turn the knob twenty years ahead, we find ourselves in an entirely new world that no one could have predicted beforehand. Yes, some features could be guessed, but not the picture as a whole. And haven't yet written anything about all sorts of third- or fourth-rate countries.
Today's observers expect to see in ten or twenty years a world that will be basically the same as it is today, but with one change. Russia will fall apart, or the United States will be torn apart by civil war, or China will have its own Great Depression and overthrow the Communist Party. But imagine a world in which there would be none of the constituent parts we are accustomed to today – not the United States, not the European Union, not China, not Russia, not Ukraine, not (insert country name of preference) in their current form. Some will become more powerful, and some will disappear altogether – temporarily or permanently. Judging by the news, the likelihood of such a world is getting higher by the day.
... and then 20 years later things are exactly the same, except for Covid, which is a blip on history. The Japanese economy is still bad, the USSR still doesn't exist, China is still developing, the US is still dominant.
The last two decades have been unremarkable indeed.
That said, my feeling is that we put too much emphasis on stories and not enough on statistics.
Would anyone in 1900 be surprised that America became a great power? They shouldn't have. The combination of population growth and natural resources made greatness a given.
The years from 2000–present are a time of consolidation for China. Every year, their economy grows at twice the rate of the West, and they still have hundreds of millions of rural peasants. Already their economy is quite a bit larger than the US (PPP) and still grows much faster.
The pressure builds beneath the surface and then erupts. History look only at the eruption, not the things that made it inevitable.
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Yeah, I think unless you were alive at the time (and old enough to be aware of what was going on), you don't get how the Fall of the Berlin Wall was something astonishing. Overnight, the system had just gone up in smoke! What everyone had come to accept as "This stalemate between the US and the USSR is going to go on forever" was now just not happening anymore. The West had (seemingly) won.
That's just one of the many reasons why I've cooled so much on doomerist predictions, including "within five/ten/twenty years AI will be eating us alive!"
We can't even foretell what is going to happen next year with any certainty. Did anyone expect the pandemic? Did anyone expect it to go on for as long as it did? Before the 2008 crash the economists in my country were by and large assuring everyone the good times would continue to roll forever. Things were different now. We were never going to go back to the old days.
One aspect of doomerism is hard to knock back though. Climate change. Because it's not up to what people and nations do, anymore, barring some sudden and miraculous changes. The polycrisis era that climate change will bring is coming almost no matter what we do, isn't it?
Not at all. Climate change is eminently solvable, unlike AI alignment. Furthermore, its effects over the next 100 years will be quite small. Pity the poor animals who will be made extinct, but humans will adapt.
When are the eminent solutions going to appear?
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Most Republicans don't believe climate change is a problem at all, your optimism is incoherent
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