The History of America & the World From 2000 to 2050
The overview from 2100 on how we solved the pandemic & climate crises, drove the global long boom, & reinvented a much better world by 2050
Editor’s Note: To mark the arrival of the year 2100, Medium is embarking on a series of deep-dive interviews with writers, thinkers, scientists, and technologists who will look back on the remarkable events of the last century. First up: Stuart Rand, a journalist working mostly for Medium for three decades from the first coronavirus pandemic of 2020 up until 2050. His work during that period — and a string of acclaimed books published in the decades that followed — helped define our understanding of The Transformation right up until today. We asked him to kick off the series by focusing on the overarching story of America in the first half of the 21st century.
When I was born — January 5, 2000 as it happens — people who lived to 100 were rare, and their health and memory faulty. But our understanding of medical science was relatively crude at that point. Remember, I was 3 when we cracked the first human genome. The progress in human health and longevity since then has been extraordinary. I have every reason to think I could live another decade or more.
I was part of what was then dubbed Generation Z, a moniker that, when we were growing up as teenagers in the 2010s, felt strangely appropriate — as in the ones born at the end of the line. If you could wade through all the contradictory messages we were bombarded with on the relatively new media infrastructure of the internet, it sure seemed like the end times.
First off, it was clear the climate was changing — global temperature was rising and disasters were dramatically increasing — and yet adults were doing little about it. This was unsustainable. The economic system was grossly unequal, with the bulk of wealth going to those at the very top and the vast majority of people struggling to get by. This, too, was unsustainable. And politics was broken, polarized and paralyzed, certainly in the Western developed nations. Pretty much nothing got done collectively to solve these mounting problems. And that left most adults enraged or in a funk. We spent our teens thinking something had to change.
Then in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic hit and everything really did change. In a matter of months, the new virus spread, the entire global economy went into a tailspin, and the ranks of the unemployed swelled to levels not seen since the 20th century’s Great Depression. The old economic system pretty much collapsed and our old way of life froze as everyone around the world sheltered in place to avoid the contagion. It all happened so fast that people were just stunned at first.
Much has been made over the years about the parallels between the 20th century’s Great Depression and World War II period, and what came off the early 21st century’s Coronavirus Crisis, as it became called. Well, that spring of 2020 was our Pearl Harbor. The crisis dramatically exposed the profound economic and social problems that had been festering for decades, and showed how woefully unprepared we were for the new realities of the 21st century. That summer a police killing of an innocent black man caught on video sparked a movement for racial justice that brought mass protests to the streets of most American cities. That fall wildfires of unprecedented scale raged up and down the West Coast and finally settled the argument that climate change was real.
But the crisis also jumpstarted efforts to transform what seemed to be an unmitigated disaster into an historic opportunity. If we were going to spend trillions of dollars rebuilding our economy and society, did we really want to rebuild the old 20th century systems that got us into this situation in the first place? Wasn’t this the time to rethink how we could build 21st-century systems that worked better for more people over the long-term?
Lucky Timing for the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020
The year 2020 was a fortuitous time for this global pandemic to hit, strange as it would have sounded at the time. By then we had at our disposal some truly amazing technologies as assets for the quick response and the long rebuild. For all the blame we could heap on the older Baby Boom Generation for allowing intractable problems like climate change to metastasize, we had to give them credit for pulling off the digital revolution in the previous 40 years. In 1980 most people had no access to a computer, had not even heard of the internet, and almost no information was digital. By 2020, more than half the people on the planet had powerful smartphones, wirelessly connected to the internet, and all data was digital.
When the pandemic hit, the infotech infrastructure was in place for pretty much all the world’s 250 million knowledge workers to stay in their homes but continue to productively work through their personal computers and interactive video channels. All the scientists in the world could instantaneously self-assemble to coordinate their efforts to find a vaccine. We had first-generation artificial intelligence to dramatically augment our capabilities and accelerate the process.
Then there was the biotech world. By 2020 the whole field of biological engineering had matured and was ready to take off. We understood genetics and could quickly and cheaply sequence anything we wanted — including the mutating virus. We could edit genomes of all living things and synthetic biology was starting to fundamentally change the way we could produce food, meat and more sustainable materials that we soon would need.
The previous 40 years had also seen the rise of a raft of clean energy technologies now poised to out-compete carbon-based fuels like coal and oil. Electric cars had gone from an expensive dream to a practical option with all auto companies in the world starting to build them. When the Coronavirus Crisis decimated the price of oil, we actually had practical alternatives to rebuild a fundamentally different energy and transportation system.
If the virus had hit just 20 years earlier, we humans would have been almost as helpless as we were in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We would have only had a nascent internet populated by a handful of Americans. We still would not have cracked the first human genome. And solar cells would have been far more expensive than even coal.
The technology world had a real opportunity to redeem itself through this crisis too. The companies had started the previous era of the digital revolution as scrappy startups but a handful of them ended the era as the most valuable corporations in the world. As they grew in power, they had drawn increasing criticism and eventually a public backlash, in what at the time was called the Techlash. The pandemic opened a path for them to provide crucial technology and show real leadership by letting go of their monopolistic business models and returning to their roots of open, interoperable, decentralized systems. They also had an opportunity to use their economic heft to pioneer new ways of treating workers and communities, and help shape a new form of stakeholder capitalism, which they did.
The Fork in the Road to a Global Future
That previous tech era was equally known for globalization, which knitted together the global economy — for better and for worse. For better, China pulled 800 million peasants out of extreme poverty and ended up a global superpower. For worse, the economic long boom in the developing world was mostly powered by coal and oil, and turned climate change from a theory in 1980 to a crisis by 2020. Globalization generated its own public backlash over that time too. The form of globalization of that first era had been optimized for corporations rather than people. Companies were more concerned about efficient global supply chains than the livelihoods of workers. Governments in the developed world were more concerned with the free flow of capital than the outflow of good jobs.
The pandemic brought to a head two fundamentally different strategies about how to deal with the new realities of our globalized world going forward. The fact was that the world had close to 8 billion people, heading towards 10 billion, living on a relatively small planet. A new virus that appeared in an inner province of China had the capacity to spread around that planet, killing millions, and freezing almost all economic activity within just months.
One approach to deal with the pandemic, and the next pandemics that were sure to come (and did) was to increase global cooperation and coordination. We could forge ahead and build different kinds of high-tech, globalized systems that would deal with this new reality of one world in a more comprehensive way. Those systems could go beyond the shortcomings of the previous form of globalization and could be organized around more equitable principles, and be optimized to work for more people over the long haul.
The other approach was for individual nations to go it alone, maximize their comparative advantages and prepare to operate more independently no matter what came. A form of 21st century populist nationalism had been building throughout the world in the 2010s characterized by a deep suspicion of foreigners, an obsession with control of the borders, and backlash against immigrants. This new nationalist politics found expression in authoritarian regimes in the developing world, in increasingly popular right-wing parties throughout Europe, and most memorably in American president Donald Trump.
The Historic Election of 2020 Marked the Turning Point
The Coronavirus Crisis of 2020 happened to hit in the United States with Trump up for reelection. The election provided an opportunity for the American electorate to definitively decide whether they wanted to continue down the nationalistic path and the conservative policies of Trump and his Republican party. Or whether they were ready to try a new way forward. To make another analogy to the Great Depression era, Donald Trump was our Herbert Hoover.
The pandemic, in short, brought about a political realignment that had been inexorably building for years. For one, the generational guard was changing. Baby Boomers had dominated American politics through the last era from 1980 to 2020, maintaining policies that, among other things, exacerbated inequality and denied climate change. The equally huge Millennial Generation, the children of the Boomers plus many new immigrants, generally held more progressive values, such as spreading wealth and dealing with climate change. These two huge generations roughly held each other at bay — until we came along.
The vast majority of my Generation Z adopted pretty much the same political posture as the Millennials. Both generations had little invested in the existing economic system and were stuck at the bottom of the pyramid with nowhere to go but up. We both knew our entire lives would be defined by periodic pandemics and the changing climate, and we would be left dealing with all the consequences.
What really brought us together and fused us into a potent political force was our mutual embrace of a racially diverse society and the rejection of white supremacy in any form. Both generations were split roughly 50/50 between racial minorities and whites, and had grown up with much more social and cultural integration between races than any previous generation. Almost none of us wanted to live in a society that did not truly treat all of us as equal.
In fact, Generation Z eventually came to be called the ReGeneration, as in regenerate the planet or rebalance the economy or reinvent society. Each year more of us ReGens were added to the workplace, became the core consumers, and got the right to vote, while more Boomers retired and died off. We initially helped shift balance to more sustainable business practices and politics, and over time we created a double-barreled generational alliance that led to transformative change.
But the political shift of the 2020s also was driven by other massive social trends that had been building for decades and would have been hard to stop. The American population had been fundamentally changing, with more immigration boosting the numbers of people of color. The 21st century high-tech knowledge economy ratcheted up a century-long trend of urbanization that kept emptying out rural areas. Educational levels kept rising to feed that knowledge economy.
This coalition of young, diverse, urban, and educated people first started to dominate politics in the first decades of the century in what were then called the Blue States, the mostly coastal or urban regions, the home of the most dynamic economies. They gravitated to the Democratic party and increasingly carried the label of progressive. But through the 2020s, with the continued migration of minorities and young people with families into the heartland, that coalition grew to a clear majority of the country writ large.
The politics of the 2020s turned out to be much different than the 2010s right from the start. The crisis quickly swung the pendulum from an embrace of conservative free market fundamentalism to progressive active government. With many businesses flattened, and the numbers of unemployed workers piling up, citizens looked to what federal, state and local governments could do. Government was back in business.
The Mobilization off the Pandemic towards Climate Change
Soon a reinvigorated federal government mobilized to wage a war for the future. One front focused on healthcare. The pandemic dramatically exposed the structural problems of a national healthcare system that tied medical coverage to employment and left tens of millions uninsured. The virus was able to run rampant through a society organized that way. The longstanding push for reform built to what soon became a reinvention of personalized healthcare that benefited everyone. More later.
Another front focused on jobs by creating infrastructure projects at a scale that could help jumpstart the entire American economy. The one obvious candidate was to fully build out the clean energy and sustainable infrastructure that under any long-term perspective needed to be built. The pandemic highlighted the need for resilient, redundant, decentralized systems that could allow people to live locally for long periods of time when future pandemics or other catastrophes hit.
Climate change similarly demanded that societies ultimately organize in more resilient, redundant, decentralized ways. As temperatures rose and the climate changed, we knew we were heading into more wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and rising sea levels. The demands of a future of more pandemics and mounting climate change were aligned. The adaptable infrastructure needed to deal with both challenges overlapped. The pandemic kicked off the rebuild of our energy systems — and just in time.
A mobilization of the public and private sectors began that was reminiscent of the Great Depression and World War II. Governments borrowed heavily at rock bottom interest rates to build needed infrastructure, guarantee profits to businesses, and create many jobs. But governments also provided the backstop and set the context for vast amounts of private capital to productively invest in the buildout too. The economy of America and other countries adopting similar strategies started the long reboot.
The World-Historic Tech and Economic Booms
If only we could have seen back then what everyone today in 2100 can see with the long lens of historical perspective. The 2020s brought the start of a massive tech boom carried out simultaneously in three different directions. Infotech roughly doubled its reach in the space of one decade — adding 3 billion people to the internet by 2030. At that point everyone in the world was connected via the internet to the global economy and society — and to ubiquitous AI. Few anticipated how AI-enabled simultaneous language translation would accelerate innovation by cross-connecting people and ideas from every corner of the planet.
Biotech also took off and gave humans what would have once been considered god-like powers to re-engineer all biological things. We soon found we could redesign plants, animals, and organic materials — which led to an insane number of new products, which were, by definition, biodegradable and so super sustainable.
Energy technology had an even more astounding expansion. The prices of solar and wind energy systems kept plunging and soon became cheaper than any carbon energy source. So we had cheap renewable energy, completely safe, and totally scalable. In the span of 30 years we fundamentally reshaped the world’s energy system.
By the 2030s we found ourselves in another global economic long boom that dwarfed the famous Post-World War II expansion and the long boom in the previous digital era. Each of these three tech fronts created entire new industries that spawned a wide range of new products and services that spread through the developed and developing world alike. Sure it was good for humanity, but the driving force was economic: There was just an incredible amount of money to be made and good jobs to be had in making the shift to clean energy and a sustainable society.
By the 2040s people started realizing that they weren’t just part of a long economic boom but were going through more like a social transformation. The changes to their societies were so profound that people all over the world started calling it: The Transformation. This was particularly satisfying to me since I had been writing about The Transformation in a long-running series of stories since the 2020s.
The Transformation of Society towards a New Civilization
We in 2100 now understand how that transformation all played out. How whole industries went virtual and robots took over many of our routine jobs. How cities reconfigured and people learned to travel less and work closer to home. How transportation went all electric and vehicles autonomous. How economic theories changed and capitalism got overhauled. How power shifted and democracy itself evolved.
We also understand how close the people back then came to failing. For every two steps forward they’d take one step back. Every new technology caused new problems that had to be solved. That’s always the way change of that scale happens. I’ve always been an optimist and focused on the positive, so I’ll steer clear of recalling the many disasters and stick to the mostly positive story that prevailed in the end.
Those of us living today in 2100 know what the people back then could not have known: that they did indeed do enough to successfully prepare for the next pandemics, which they then took in stride. They did slow global warming, adapting to the climate changes that were already in motion, and mitigating the worst effects. To be sure, glaciers melted, oceans rose, and we did have to resort to some geo-engineering. But we avoided the disaster that many had feared.
In the process the people of that period laid the foundation for the very different civilization that we live in today. We now thrive in a society that is all digital, fully global, and entirely sustainable. All three of these are world historical thresholds that are step changes for the ages. A completely computerized and interconnected society is fundamentally different than all societies that came before it. Same with a society that operates on a planetary scale with little ongoing damage to the environment.
We owe much of that to the accomplishments of people in the first half of the 21st century. We now see their efforts as part of an even larger story that spanned more than 100 years of civilizational change that we still call The Transformation. The civilization building of the 21st century is comparable to the monumental accomplishments of The Enlightenment, which arguably created the modern version of Western Civilization in a comparable span of 100 years or so.
The Enlightenment came up with five core innovations that created the operating system upon which Western societies, and ultimately societies around the world, built on for more than 200 years. The Transformation superseded all five of those core innovations and created a different civilization in the process. Their steam engine was our digital computer, the core building block of the new system. They scaled up carbon energies, and we did the same with clean energies. They had their industrial revolution. We had our biological revolution. They invented financial capitalism and we reinvented sustainable capitalism. They invented representative democracy, and we devised digital democracy. I’ll return to talk about all these civilizational changes in the end.
An Overview of the Rest of this Extraordinary Story to 2050
I’m honored that you’d ask me to give my take on the first half of the century until 2050. To be honest, it was an extraordinary time to be alive. I was a college kid studying American history and wishing I could have been alive at the critical periods of reinvention in the past like the American Revolution, Civil War, and World War II. And then the Coronavirus Crisis hit and I found myself smack in the middle of another one.
I wrote down 15 two-word phrases in preparation for this interview that distill the most important developments that defined that era and impacted America, which is what you wanted me to focus on. I’ll use them to help structure the rest of what I will say. The first critical developments had to do with the world of Infotech: Universal Connectivity and Ubiquitous AI, which led to Accelerated Innovation. Then there were the equally important developments in the world of Biotech: Genetic Understanding and Biological Engineering.
No story of that period could be told without understanding how we dealt with climate change, which involved the next four developments: Clean Energies, Electric Transportation, Climate Cooperation, and Burgeoning Capital. And that involved big changes in politics and economics, involving all these developments as well: Generational Shift, New Majorities, Reinvigorated Government, Rebalanced Economy and Restructured Wealth. That leaves the last talking point that caps everything: Civilizational Change.
If anyone back then had known that these generally positive developments were about to happen when the first pandemic hit in 2020 — their anxiety would have dissipated. If anyone back then had known what everyone now knows, they would have had a huge strategic advantage and could have ended up making a lot of money too.
Like other historic transformations, it all seems so inevitable now. Each of these trends had been building through the previous decades and would have been hard to stop. But most people at that time of the Coronavirus Crisis were freaked out and couldn’t see much farther than their outstretched arms holding their smartphones. They had little idea what the future would soon bring.
Editor’s Note from the Medium package marking the arrival of the year 2100: This is the 1st installment of the Medium interview of renowned journalist and author Stuart Rand to kick off the new year in 2100. You can read all installments of the entire interview at the series landing page or find them in order here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Due to popular demand we may take questions from our global audience and Stuart will answer the best of them as a regular feature in the year ahead.
Ending note from the world of 2020: This story is part of The Transformation series that tells the largely positive story of America and the world from 2020 until 2050 from the perspective of Stuart Rand, a journalist and author born into Generation Z, looking back at the end of this life in 2100. All the stories can be found on the series landing page here. You can directly go to an introduction to the series in the voice of author Peter Leyden writing in 2020 here.
We may continue the series with periodic updates from Stuart Rand in the year 2100 as he answers queries from his global audience. The best way to be notified on those updates is by following author Peter Leyden or subscribing to the newsletter of The Transformation.
