The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

by George Friedman

Transformative and core technologies go through four stages. The first innovative stage is when the core technology exists but the technologist is trying to perfect it and develop a business around it. The second stage is a working product that evolves in unexpected directions and dramatically increases productivity. The third stage is a mature, enormously useful product that still changes and produces new business models but not at the rate it had in the second stage. Productivity growth from the technology begins to fade. In the fourth stage, the technology continues to be important but ceases to be dynamic. Henry Ford introduced the automobile, a derivative of the internal combustion engine, to the mass market in about 1915.

It took the microchip from about 1980 to 2020 to achieve maturity, again forty years.

The right school and the right friends can sustain a career.

The emergence of two different cultures will intensify in the 2020s. Already visible is the culture of technocracy, in which merit is defined by top universities and expectations on marriage and family will continue to deviate from historical norms in various ways. Above all, the technocrats will insulate themselves from the social and political upheaval by enclosing themselves in a sense of moral excellence complementing their technical excellence. The “outsiders” will live in a sense of desperation and anger and will also experience the shift in marriage and family but as a social crisis.

flipping

The selection process at the best schools is presently designed not to find the best minds but rather to find minds already shaped to the culture and ideology the universities regard as being able to benefit from their education.

Harvard is a wealthy school and can afford to help poorer students who qualify for financial aid or scholarships.

Why a college education is so expensive has two dimensions. First, many college campuses, particularly of elite universities, are well-manicured parks. I did my graduate work at Cornell, an extraordinarily beautiful place I enjoyed very much, ranging from its racquetball court to its lakes. No sane student would be unhappy there, but the cost of building and maintaining a college campus is staggering. Moreover, the value of the university properties, if they were sold, would make a serious dent in the student loan problem. There is no inherent reason why a college education requires such facilities. I attended CCNY in New York, with an austere campus, as well as Cornell. I did not notice that Cornell’s delightful campus stimulated my intellect any more than did CCNY.

The second problem is that being a university professor is among the highest-paid part-time work in the world.

The average semester lasts about thirteen to fourteen weeks. Assuming a week spent grading, the average tenured professors work six months out of the year. During this period in elite schools, they may teach one or two classes a week, about six hours in the classroom or as much as twelve hours a week in the least prestigious. The professor is teaching a subject he is an expert in, so over time preparation approaches zero hours, and in universities with graduate programs the grading is done by graduate students. The professor is expected to do research and publish, and some do, while others, with tenure, do less. But there is al...

My point is not to trash the university. It is indispensable. It is also unsustainable in its present form.

vitriolic.

The technological gap between the microchip and the follow-on core technology will continue to cut into productivity and continue to discourage investment.

cadence

Diseases that kill quickly are economically sustainable. Keeping people alive who can’t produce is economically debilitating.

Therefore, the need is for a massive revolution in biological research applied to medical care. And as we’ve seen in past cycles, it is the need that drives technological productivity. A range of diseases must be eliminated, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and others that render the elderly not only non-contributors but drains on society and the economy. But to do this, the underlying biological processes will need to be understood far better than they are now, and then a medical system able to apply the treatments’ cost effectively must be in place.

Old obligations are collapsing, and the sixth cycle will create a new sense of what the order of life will be like. And all of this connects to the main issues of the cycle: the decline of the birth rate and the extension of life expectancy. Our rituals were built around an early death and the urgency to reproduce rapidly. Death is no longer imminent, and reproduction is an option. Therefore, the traditional family will be redefined.

The United States will face this more deeply than other countries, because American wealth creates many possibilities and those possibilities become endless.

the rise of texting has superseded the prime purpose of the phone—a conversation hearing another person’s voice.

reductio ad absurdum.

Three things usually occur. First, moving technology beyond where finance and safety can take it. Second, using a technology you know and imagining that the whole world can be explained by it. Third, imagining a world that looks marvelous on paper but would be a nightmare in which to live.

The computer and Internet and cell phone will be here for a century, as the car has been.

A social and then political movement will arise toward this end. Loneliness is one of the most powerful forces in the world. People get sick, and I know who will take care of me if I do. As those who are in their thirties and have no children and maybe no partner grow older, and face half a century more of their lives, they will have to answer that question, and the discovery that there is no answer will be terrifying. Living a long life without anyone needing you, no one really caring if you live or die, is liberation, but the terrible implications of liberation emerge with time.

anomie,

There are dangers in growing old healthfully, as there were in dying too soon. The social upheaval of the sixth cycle will be about this.

The first generation of the sixth cycle, those we call millennials who will then be in their fifties, have an ideological aversion to lower taxes in order to facilitate private enrichment, at least those on the Left do. But these tax cuts would be to create capital investing in the treatments of diseases of an extended life. Self-interest will supersede ideology. Just as tax cuts drove the microchip economy, so they will, in the 2050s, drive the transformation of medical care.

The children of what are called millennials will be the ones who revolt against the previous generations’ rootlessness. They will be the ones who find computers and the Internet old-fashioned and creating powerful family ties modern. And they will also be asking the state to enforce whatever values emerge and are shared. The temptation to legislate moral ends transcends all cycles. Their elders will be appalled by the younger generations’ rejection of their attachment to microchips and horrified at a return to a degree of order and ritual in their lives. The older ones will be the remnant of the old technocracy that had been defeated in the 2020s, and the younger will be the ones who incorporate a range of formerly hostile groups to form their own party.

astride

The foundation of the American empire is not the military nor even the economy. It is rock and roll, T-shirts that say “Santa Barbara,” and New York Yankee baseball caps. It is going to a conference of people from twenty countries, with everyone speaking perfect English because it is the only language they have in common. It is above all the computer and programming languages that exist only in English. It is people resenting and even hating the United States yet hoping their children might attend an American university.

The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings. But more important than money or guns is the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary. All lasting empires are empires of the mind and soul, empires that cause others to crave to emulate them.

The United States was not founded to be an empire. Yet it is. “Empire” has been a term of approbation since the American Revolution. But there are two kinds of empires. One kind is strictly exploitative such as Hitler’s attempt at creating an empire. The second type of empire benefits from the empire but also creates a system of symbiotic relations that all benefit from. That empire is held together not only by imperial force but by the benefits the colonials obtain. So, the Roman Empire conquered other nations, yet the desire to be part of the Roman system, while not universal, was common. The same can be said for the Persian Empire. The empire moves from being a ...

“hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue,”

This era will last for at least a century, even though the United States has not become comfortable with the reality of its power nor developed a strategy that will support it.

Successful empires use as little military force as possible, depending on the regional tensions between nations to maintain their interests. Britain did not send hundreds of thousands of troops to control India. It used the balance of power in India.

Imperial wars exhaust the homeland when fought against forces that are not organized as regular armies and therefore cannot be defeated by superior forces.

Maturity is the foundation of empires, and the United States needs to achieve that stability.

prudence

It would make sense that the socioeconomic cycle will fail because it will confront the pressures created by the radical change in the length of life given the new technologies we see coming.

knowledge is essential to driving the cycles forward,

The extension of old age will have many consequences, and this may be the one on which the twenty-first century pivots.

This is what makes the United States unique from other countries. All nations contain some elements of wildness. None have institutionalized the chaos as has the United States.

At the heart of this is the culture of technology. It is not unique to America, but it still is quintessentially American.

The new technology that will exist will be one that extends healthy life expectancy. In a world of declining population, this is the problem to be solved, and it will be solved by science. But as I have said, this will create a new problem. A nation dominated by the elderly, however vigorous and healthy, is a nation dominated by the old. It is dominated by the wisdom needed to manage an empire, but that same wisdom would paralyze the cycles that move America along. Youthful ignorance makes the impossible possible, by not knowing what is impossible and not making reckless things impossible but making them real. And in that recklessness is the future.

Other countries will deal with this differently. The United States will deal with it as it always does, with its citizens going through a decade of intense political rage at each other, accompanied by an economic crisis and a social one: the old against the young, and the problem of innovation leading to instability. Finally, the political process will create a solution, with a failing president who worships the old cycle, followed by one who will claim credit for presiding over the new cycle and its solutions.

America is a country in which the storm is essential to clear the way for the calm.

American power in the world will sustain itself, because the power of a country like the United States, a vast economy and military and seductive culture, does not decline because it is hated. All empires are hated and envied. Power is not diminished by either.