PREDICTIONS
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Timeline of the 4 coming crisis
- Introduction
Here are some of my predictions, based on research and analysis.
I like making predictions because it forces me to step out of my comfort zone and extrapolate the future. It makes my point of view singular and polarising. A lot of people are afraid to take the risk of predicting a possible future outcome because they might look foolish in hindsight. I'm not, and I like to gamble and go out on a limb and make bold predictions.
As always, anyone predicting the future is making assumptions and looking into a crystal ball, so these are just my thoughts and visions, likely outcomes based on facts and trends over the last 10 to 40 years. Nobody can predict the future. I am just expressing some probable and likely scenarios.
- Timeline of the 4 coming crisis
My anticipated timeline of the 4 crises and my estimation of the period when our societies will collapse, slowly or abruptly:
End of cheap and abundant oil: 2060-2100. Given that the world's biggest consumers are the USA and Europe, and that their populations are declining, and that the growing populations are those that consume very little fossil fuel per capita (Africa and India), the availability of fossil fuels will be the last of our problems. Market arbitrage will compensate by replacing oil with gas and coal, which are more abundant than oil, whenever needed at the end of the century.
Climate change: 2050-2070. So far, life in northern Europe has not been affected at all by climate change. Only the summers are warmer and the winters less cold, which is nice. The negative effects of climate change in terms of natural disasters are currently felt only in limited regions of the world, near the equator, such as California, Florida, Bangladesh, etc. .... In a few decades, the effects of climate change will be felt by almost everyone on the planet, but we still have decades before the climate becomes an everyday burden.
National debt: 2040-2050. That's the period when the only way out of the debt trap is war, international default or massive inflation over several years.
Demographic impact on the health of society: 2035-2040 in Europe. This includes a slow free fall of social benefits such as pensions, medicare, health care. This will lead to massive protests, civil wars and riots, but neither politicians nor any law can deal with an ageing population demanding to keep its privileges when the outgoing social benefits compared to the incoming taxes from the taxpayers show wide gaps and the national budget situation is no longer sustainable.
And that's the priority and severity of the 4th major crisis to come:
Demography is the highest and most critical, followed by national debt, then climate change, and the lowest is our dependence on fossil fuels.
- Energy
Total energy and material consumption will plateau and decline over the next 30 years, driven by the demographics of industrialied civilisation. While per capita energy and material consumption will remain stable in the industrialied world and continue to increase in other developing countries, the world's top consumers (USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, etc...) will reduce their total energy and material consumption simply due to the rapidly shrinking working population, which is the consumer population. With less supply and less demand, predicting the price of energy and materials is a big guess and a lottery wheel: Nobody knows.
Total energy demand will continue to grow over the next decade as the population of industrialied civilisation remains stable and emerging economies strive to achieve western standards of living. But in 2 or 3 decades, as the last baby boomers die off, global energy consumption will decline along with the total population of the industrialied world.
We will not deliberately reduce our consumption or our standard of living, and therefore we will not reduce our environmental impact in a timely and significant manner before the forces of nature take over with irreversible climate change, environmental impact, and later this century with depletion of cheap fossil fuels.
US oil production will peak around 2030 and then decline, leaving other major producers such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, but also Brazil, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Argentina and the Emirates to catch up. These traditional oil producers will eventually peak and begin to decline, most likely before 2060. As the total population of the industrialied world declines, it will compensate for the lack of abundant oil, so we will avoid a major global recession and financial crisis due to the depletion of fossil fuels. US gas production is set to grow steadily over the next few decades to offset declining oil production. The next financial crisis will be caused by governments debt, not by the depletion of fossil fuels.
Europe will suffer most from the decline of conventional oil. Most of Europe's oil suppliers are past their peak production and as these countries' production declines, Europe will struggle to find new sources of supply. China and Europe are both the world's biggest oil importers at 10 million barrels per day each, but China will be less affected because it has a very positive trade balance to finance its hydrocarbons imports, and China is also further advanced in electrification via it's reliance on local coal consumption. China won't suffer from the decline of conventional oil. Europe will.
We will run out of cheap and abundant oil in the second half of the century, which will aggravate the inflation. Overall, the depletion of fossile fuel is not a real problem: Reducing population/demand and new technologies will adapt and shift to the use of natural gas and coal, as much as possible. Cars and trucks will be powered by electricity or gas (compressed or liquefied). For freight transport, all options are open. For aviation, jet fuel will remain the main energy source. Residential and industrial electrification is also a shift to more gas and coal use, by definition for electricity generation and equipment manufacturing. The remaining oil, which is less abundant and more expensive to extract, will be used for applications without substitutes: plastics, asphalt, grease and some remaining jet fuels and marine kerosene.
The electrification of things will increase the demand for specific raw materials like lithium and copper, and for electricity production, and so I predict gas-fired power plants first, and later coal-fired power plants and industrial coal (met coke), will boom over the next 20 years as cheap oil reserves slowly deplete, driven by mining activity and baseload compensation for intermittent power generation.
Electricity demand will increase in the coming decade, due to electric cars, AI data centres and other electrification of things. Nuclear power, which requires huge capital up front and about 10 years for the first return on investment, will unfortunately not be deployed fast enough and in sufficient quantities. We will have a bit of battery energy storage to meet peak demand, but mostly it will come from a massive increase in gas-fired power stations and some coal-fired ones, which is not such a bad thing if the source of supply is a traditional gas field via pipeline, but more of a bad thing if the source is LNG, fracking gas or coal, since gas burns cleaner than oil or coal, and natural gas reserves are much more abundant than oil reserves.
But the key message here is that new additional electricity supply from hydro, nuclear, wind and solar will not be enough to prevent the growth of new additional electricity supply from fossil fuels, as has been the case for the last 10 years. We will never deliberately get rid of fossil fuels, or even stop the growth in their use, either for electricity generation or for industrial purposes.
The rate of growth in the installation of solar panels and wind turbines, driven by the electrification of things, will cause recurring blackouts on the grids.
We will have an hourly electricity bill instead of the current flat rate of around 30 cents per kWh, with prices such as 5 cents per kWh in the middle of the day in the summer, but 80 cents per kWh in the evening in the winter.
Contrary to popular belief, the more intermittent sources you have on the grid (solar, wind), the more expensive the electricity will be for the end consumer on a yearly bill.
Most of the nuclear fleet will reach its 60-year lifespan before 2050, and won't be 100% replaced by new ones in the next 20 years, leading to massive construction of new coal and gas plants. In Europe we will have to go through blackouts and forced demand restrictions for the population to accept these new power plants and ignore the carbon emissions implications. Massive energy price inflation and the construction of more gas and coal plants will be the last resort to meet demand and keep the lights on 24/7.
Electrification of everything will be much slower than expected. Many areas simply cannot be electrified. The energy transition will not happen. We will add more green power sources, but we will also add more fossil fuel consumption. The 80% share of fossil fuels in primary energy consumption, which has been virtually unchanged for the last 20 years, will remain at about that level for the next 20 years. We will continue to emit CO2 and pollute our air and soil until humanity dies. Nothing can stop the consumption of fossil fuels except the depletion of resources or a plumetting population.
- Metals and minerals
The upcoming popularity of robots, the growing AI data centre sector and the rise of renewables energy and electrification of things means we will require an ever growing materials and mining, for a greater diversity of materials used in small quantities.
The mining industry will boom in the coming decades, but it will also fail to keep pace with demand as declining ore grades, labour shortages and ESG constraints slow its growth. Mines around the world are rapidly depleting and new mines take decades to build. As mines age, production slows, costs explode and new mines are not built due to the intensive capital requirements. This will lead to sporadic material shortages, price and volatility explosions some years. All kinds of commodities will be affected: Copper, lithium, coffee beans, gold, uranium, oil, iron ore, sand, etc. But mining and material companies are technology superpower and do wonders in terms of scaling up and deflating prices of commodity slowly over time.
- Debt
Accumulating more and more debt at all levels just to maintain our lifestyle without growth is a debt trap and will lead to sustained inflation over 10% in the next decades, causing rising interest rates, major social unrest, high criminality, civil wars and drastic cuts in all public spending such as unemployment benefits, pensions, health care and education.
Public infrastructure, land and resources will have to be sold to private investors in order to sustain or cancel debt and repay creditors, especially in Europe.
Inflation will rise faster than incomes, so people will lose purchasing power year after year. The middle class will be reduced to a poor working class. Only the top 10% will have a decent life at best, but the whole world will be plagued by insecurity, geopolitical wars and loss of purchasing power. As the petro-dollar comes to an end and more and more international oil and gas transactions are settled in another currency, the US and its overspending, overconsuming habits will be in deep trouble.
Whatever you can buy in 2025 with 100 dollars or 100 euros, you'll need 300 dollars or 300 euros in 2040 to buy the same thing, or maybe 500 dollars or 500 euros. Currencies are going to lose purchasing power very quickly due to high debt, debt servicing and money printing, because of the declining working population and high social welfare costs of the elderly population.
I believe that the next major financial crisis, on a par with 2008, will be triggered by Japan. It has a huge debt of 240% of GDP and an extremely ageing population. It was the first country to experience a permanent drop in birth rates below the replacement level of 2 children per woman, around 1960. This means it will be the first country to face a huge debt burden and social welfare costs that its shrinking working population can no longer support. Since the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, interest rates have skyrocketed due to high money printing, social deficits and rapid devaluation of the currency (Yen) due to the japanese central bank setting interest rate at zero for a decade, making borrowing cheap and unlimited. Poverty is starting to spread rapidly among the elderly, despite the strong work ethic and sense of collectiveness of the workforce. As Japan remains one of the top 20 economies, there will be no one able to finance a systemic rescue and financial bailout of the japanese economy size. Furthermore, because Japan holds significant foreign reserves and foreign bonds, and possesses key knowledge and activities in electronics, machinery, and other specialised domains across the industrial supply chain, its demise will affect the entire global economy.
- Climate change
We will neither solve the climate crisis nor prepare society to adapt to it. We will suffer the full force of it, slowly, a little more each year. Technology will not save us from a major crisis; on the contrary, it will accelerate the showdown with humanity and exacerbate environmental impacts and consequences. New technologies, efficiency, innovation and a sense of urgency have been strong themes and present in our minds and societies for decades, and yet for the last 40 years, every year, CO2 emissions and pollution have increased, fossil fuel consumption has risen, public debt has risen and fertility rates have fallen. So why would it voluntarily change course in the coming decades if it has not changed course in the last 40 years? Major changes will not happen unless we are forced to or unless we suffer from the changes imposed on us by nature.
We will feel the effects of the debt trap and the energy crisis, mainly inflation, social instability and loss of purchasing power in the next 20 years, long before we really feel the effects of global warming. Global warming will really start to affect us in 2040 and beyond. But the first real effects of climate change that we will face in the next 10 years will be the reducing access to fresh water due to electrification, increased mining, use of chemicals in the soil and polluting industrial waste dumped into our rivers. Rising temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions will cause major droughts and heat waves around the world, especially in the Mediterranean basin and in countries close to the equator (India, Indonesia, etc...), leading to forced mass climate migration and terrible water shortages.
- Demography
The fertility rate in most industrialised countries, currently around 1.3 to 1.6, will fall to between 0.7 and 1.1 within the next 10 to 20 years. Fertility rates in industrialised countries such as the USA, Europe, Brazil and Argentina will fall to 1 or below by 2040, perhaps even by 2035, due to Gen Z growing up as teenagers in the era of unregulated and uncontrolled social media. The combination of high expectations of living standards, the illusion of easy money, taking services for granted, reluctance to make an effort or persevere to achieve something, and the individualist and hedonist desire to fulfil one's potential will lead young adults to have fewer romantic relationships, make fewer commitments and sacrifices, and have fewer babies.
By 2100, 50% of the population will be black African and 30% muslim. only 10% will be white Christian and only 10% non-Indian Asian. White Caucasian Christians are a fast dying ethnic group.
On the basis of demographics alone and the emerging booming economies, the near future from 2030 to 2050 belongs to India and the far future from 2050 to 2080 belongs to sub-Saharan Africa.
The population of the current industrialied world will be three times smaller in 2100 than in 2020. The over-consumption of resources and all the pollution we generate will be drastically reduced by the sheer fact that our population of rich consumers will plummet. But before we reach 2100, we will have to go through a declining working population, which will cause great poverty, civil wars or riots, currency defaults and massive debasement, famine and rationing of goods, labour-intensive (social) job shortages and overall drastic loss of living standards.
By 2050, the ageing industrialised world population will be on the verge of collapse, carbon emissions will have been drastically reduced simply because there will be far fewer consumers (25-45 year olds), and in retrospect, the focus of the 2000s to 2020s on carbon emissions and climate change will look foolish and insane compared to the drastic and more pressing issue of an ageing and collapsing population.
As the working population in the industrialied world declines over the coming decades, there will be less supply and less demand. Depending on the area, we will see the price of some goods and services rise drastically, while others will fall. All social and human labour services, such as food in a restaurant, health care, care for the elderly, will become very expensive. Other goods like houses in small towns will become cheaper.
Rural areas, villages and small towns will become deserted, with only old rooted people staying there, and young adults will migrate to larger cities where life is more dynamic. Small towns and villages will be abandoned, exacerbating the ageing population and labour shortages in these rural areas. While many houses will remain empty in rural areas, there will be a shortage of houses and flats in large cities, pushing up rents.
In most European countries, the population group between the ages of 25 and 45 will be divided by 2 in the next 30 years. Who will buy things and consume goods and services to keep the economy going? How will Europe's small businesses be able to continue and grow in this environment? The only solution for Europe is a physical decline in the goods and services that Europeans consume, and to compensate for this decline by increasing prices and inflation, so that the monetary sum (called GDP) is still maintained or increased in absolute terms. And that's the only way to maintain a debt when you're technically shrinking: Currency devaluation and loss of purchasing power, but respecting the nominal debt service.
Within 10 years, no retiree will be able to live entirely on the public pension system and will either have to finance their own pension or move back in with their children to be cared for, if they have any.
Life expectancy will fall by 5 to 10 years in the next 30 years due to the collapse of the social, pension and health systems and the lack of manual labour.
Young adults will be kings in the coming decades, while old adults and pensioners will be miserable. Workers will have all the power to impose their conditions due to labor shortages, while pensioners will suffer loneliness and much less state support for pensions and health care. Due to the demographic ageing of the population and the debt burden, there will be very low quality public health care and care for the elderly, and limited public spending to support the over-60s. Meanwhile, companies will be desperate to find skilled young workers, jobs will be plentiful and young workers will be able to dictate their terms. In both cases, a very good reason to have children now, both because they will take care of us in our old age and because they will have a bright future themselves.
The pensioners of 2040 and beyond will suffer, while the young workers of 2040 and beyond will be treated like kings. Today's 40-50 year olds in Europe will be miserable in 20 years' time: Very low or no pension, extremely poor quality of health care, unaffordable elderly care center, etc. On the contrary, today's children under 15 will be kings in 20 years: plenty of job offers with attractive packages (house, car, job, etc...) to attract the young candidate, very good salary, bargaining power, power to choose what they do in their life under their conditions.
The public health system will collapse due to a lack of health workers and increased demand from the elderly, and only private insurance will cover the high costs. You will have to wait days or months for treatment, health workers will be overworked and the overall quality of health care will deteriorate. The government will be forced to open its borders to mass migration from younger, more populous countries to alleviate the labour imbalance, but this will create massive integration problems, leading to insecurity, loss of identity and the rise of far-right parties. Speaking of politics...
- Politics and Society
There will be an increasing number of far-right and far-left voters until extreme political parties hold power in every major industrialised country. People who are suffering from declining purchasing power and the impoverishment of the middle classes, and who are disgusted by the growing social inequalities, will vote far left. Those who are nostalgic for the 'good old times' of two or three decades ago, and who point to the loss of a nation's identity, values and culture (mainly due to immigration and the emancipation of society), will vote far right. The majority of people will vote for extreme parties — a trend promoted by social media, which encourages polarising content and divides the population.
We will be under much more state control and have less freedom. Democracy will slowly die for authoritarian regimes. Our property will be confiscated and regulated and our rights will be curtailed. We will be monitored for good citizenship, like big brother, to obey the authoritarian regime, be good civilians and avoid rebels. Countries with natural resources (the Middle East, Australia, Russia, the USA, Canada, China) will be the least affected by this drastic loss of wealth, but there will be no winners in this world.
Europe will be the biggest loser because it has almost no oil, very few and declining gas fields, limited coal resources, has decided to cut ties with its biggest neighbour Russia, is very NIMBY and refuses to mine on its own soil, does not want any polluting industry on the continent, believes in good morals and the utopia that the world can only be powered by solar panels and wind turbines. On top of that, Europe is a mix of over 20 countries with very different histories, cultures, habits and allies, which makes it extremely difficult for the EU to agree on regulations and common decisions. Europe will be the biggest idiot and loser in this coming end of prosperity, fooling itself with beliefs and policies based on morality and ideology rather than pragmatic painful reality. In the next decade, the far right and the far left will take over every country's government in Europe, leading to more authoritarian regimes and greater polarisation of society. Citizens will have to choose between two extremes and it will split and divide our society.
Within the next 15 years, the end of the Euro as a common currency and the end of the European Union institutions as a supranational law and policy maker over national governments. Only free trade of goods and open borders will remain.
GenZ and Generation Alpha, both born after 1995, who will have to deal with this mess, are unfortunately the least equipped, mentally and psychologically, to deal with this coming major crisis: They believe in good moral values, need a work-life balance, are heavily influenced by social media, are looking for a job that makes sense in their life, are discouraged by any obstacle, believe in entitlements, are used to getting everything they want right away, are not mentally ready to go the extra mile because they have grown up in a rich world of abundance. This generation is not at all ready to accept and cope with hard times, more work, forced tasks, restrictions, regulations and rationing. Good luck to them!
Over the next few decades, we will see a massive exodus of young educated adults from countries with ageing populations and high levels of taxation (typically in Europe) to countries with much lower levels of taxation and younger populations (India, Indonesia, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.). I can't see a scenario in which skilled young adults would remain in a country with high taxes, just so that the over-60s can receive public pensions and healthcare services, draining public funds to the detriment of workers and entrepreneurs.
The GenZ know that they are the scapegoats in this crooked system, they feel the financial burden of supporting a large elderly population, their financial unability to buy a home like the previous generation, the multiple constraints of having children and the bleak economic, geopolitical and environmental future of our societies, that's why most of them choose not to have children and that's why the majority of people under 35 vote for the far right or the far left: They know that the system is stacked against them, that the future is bleak, and they demand drastic change, and they are absolutely right to do so. The far right and the far left will have more and more voters over the next decade, and will ultimatly rule most of the countries within the next 2 decades. This is reflecting the malaise of our society.
Social inequalities will continue to grow, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, but also the older population will maintain its standard of living, while the younger population under 40 will feel the most the loss of purchasing power and the rise in the price of assets such as houses the most. Financial inequalities will widen and the middle class will become a struggling class. With the widespread adoption of AI, along with debt and financial instruments, a minority of super-rich tech entrepreneurs and oil and gas authoritarian regime leaders will control the world, have power over our data and influence our laws.
The middle class will shrink enormously and almost disappear in the industrialised world during the 21st century. Social welfare will always keep the lower income class out of extreme poverty, and the top 10% will always have a very decent life. But the current middle class will be squeezed out by loss of purchasing power, inflation, higher taxes to support an ageing population and unaffordable housing. The declining fertility rate will also affect the middle class the most: low-income people will continue to have children because they have lower ambitions and expectations of themselves, they are less influenced by social media and the goal of self-fulfilment, and these women are more likely to accept traditional gender roles while having several children as part of their family and social intergenerational model. The top earners and the ultra-rich can always hire a horde of nannies, assistants and childcare services so that both top earning parents can continue their successful careers while having children. The middle class will experience the fastest population decline because it is most affected by the key factors of childlessness: the cost of living, the preference for a childless adult lifestyle, individual goals and irrealistic visions for oneself, and the comparative pressure of social media. Because social determinism still exists today, with children of a given class ending up largely in the same class as adults, as the middle class stops having children, the next generation will be mostly lower wage and ultra-rich classes, with very few people in the middle.
There will be many more geopolitical wars like Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine that will affect global stability, supply chains and lead to a more polarizing political landscape, more propaganda from each and every country. Money, greed, power and access to natural resources will continue to drive this world.
Mass government surveillance is coming. We know that the big tech companies are already tracking us and influencing us on polarising issues. But as the quality of public services and public finances deteriorate, leading to more frequent and violent protests and social unrest, mass state control of the population will increase to silence protest and force people to obey: AI analysis of big data will make predictive behaviour to anticipate the decision-making patterns of bad citizens and criminals. CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) will allow the state to authorize or prohibit the consumption of some goods and services. Our savings will be indirectly confiscated and our spending dictated. If all our personal money is deposited in a single European account, the government will have a say in how it is spent and will suppress cash and prohibit the holding of multiple accounts in multiple banks.
- AI
AI will spread into everyone's daily life, like the internet and smartphones did. We will all have personal assistants to help us work and make decisions. Any job that generates digital content (music, videos, text, letter, presentations, etc...) will be done or assisted by AI, boosting our productivity in a much-needed way to address the ageing population and labour shortage. Drivers, teachers, lawyers, artists, etc... will have their jobs drastically changed, if not replaced. A large proportion of children will be home-schooled instead of going to public school because AI can provide the schedule you need 24/7, is always available and is 1000 times more competent than a personal teacher.
Jobs that require complex agility, such as football players, and social jobs will never be replaced by AI or humanoid robots: caregivers for the elderly (cleaning them, putting them to bed, etc...), babysitters and childcare workers, restaurant and hotel staff, the person who climbs onto the roof and installs solar panels, salespeople, plumbers and electricians, etc... If you're a junior accountant or lawyer, chances are that AI will take your job within the next 10 years. However, if you're a plumber, electrician, gardener or carer for the elderly, you'll probably still be in high demand for a long time.
The younger generation will have emotional relationships with AI bots, whether it is a personal assistant, best friend, personal psychologist, friendship or love relationship, virtual girlfriend/boyfriend. They will not distinguish between chatting with a real person on social media and chatting with an AI bot.
All AIs will be biased. If in five years, three to five AIs concentrate 90% of all AI demands, each AI will have its own bias based on its company culture and investors. You might have one AI with far-right conservative tendencies, another AI rateher pro-diversity, pro-gender equity, pro-green transition, etc. If Tesla sponsors or invests in one AI, then this AI will claim that EVs are a great transport solution and that a Tesla car is the best choice. In short, AI bots will not be neutral or impartial. All AIs will have their own biases, tendencies and preferences, which are scripted according to the interests of their developer company.
Unfortunately, AI comes at a price: the internet and the digital world will be flooded with AI-generated content that may be lies, false, misleading, fake news. We will not be able to tell the difference between human-generated content and AI-generated content. There will be major legal and jurisdictional issues around privacy, copyright and identity theft. No one will be sure what is true and what is false, what is human creation and what is machine creation. Getting reliable information will become very difficult and unreliable. We will trust even more the one-sided, polarising content generated by our social media platforms. This will kill AI generative ability over time because it will not be able to create new content based on true human content.
Another probable scenario is the cessation of new web input to feed the AI. The future of web pages will either be a mix of unreliable AI-created content, or the creation of new content will stop because people will stop browsing web pages and allow AI to generate content, thereby preventing the generation of ad revenue, which is the business model of internet browsing. Current AI models are trained using data created in the last 25 years. However, if AI is to remain up to date and performant, we need to continue feeding the internet with new information. Otherwise, the AI in 2040 will only see the world as it was in 2023. The advertising-based revenue model of many websites and apps will break down once users no longer browse the internet, but instead get what they want from their favourite AI bot.
Much as the discovery and high use of fossil fuels made us lazy and averse to physical effort because machines can do the mechanical work for us, AI will make us averse to intellectual effort and lazy at brain work because AI can generate human-like digital content effortlessly, quickly and cheaply. Humans will become averse to any kind of effort, sucking out any sense of joy, purpose or fulfilment in life.
- Bitcoin
I have no idea. Bitcoin could go to $10 million and be the only currency in use in the world that doesn't suffer from sanctions, bans and hyperinflation. Or it could go to zero because it's a Ponzi scheme, because governments will never accept a currency not owned by a single nation, or because we don't have enough power to secure the blockchain network. Both are plausible. Nobody knows. But I tend to believe in crypto, in blockchain and in decentralized finance. I think Bitcoin is the modern digital gold and has a fantastic potential to be an international exchange currency, a universal reserve currency and a storage of value, once its price stabilises in the long term. I am a bitcoin believer. I don't know enough about cryptos to talk about cryptos other than Bitcoin.
- Labor force and society
Skills will be more in demand than degrees. Certificates and degrees will become less important, more common and less difficult to obtain, and therefore less valuable. Talented people with very specific skills or with a wide range of diverse experience will be recruited rather than young people fresh out of a prestigious school.
Immigration will not be able to provide enough young adults to compensate for the declining working age population in the West.
Every decade since the 1950s, the industrialied world has enjoyed better living conditions, better standards of living, decades after decades. The 2020s will mark the end of this upward trend. It began with the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In the coming decades, our quality of life, our purchasing power and the quality of public services will begin to decline. The next decades will be worse than the last. The best time to live in Europe has been the last 20 years.
From the Second World War until the end of the 1970s, work was what paid. Labour was in demand and those who were skilled and willing to go the extra mile were rewarded with a great rise in living standards. From the 1980s to the 2020s, it was the wealthy people with capital who got richer, faster than the average person. Working hard or smart does not necessarily pay off. People lose their jobs due to globalisation and outsourcing, competing with lower labour costs.
But starting in the 2030s, for the next three decades, we will return to work paying off, due to the shortage of labour, the imbalance of older people retiring outnumbering those entering the labour force. Skilled workers will be able to negotiate an amazing bargaining power for companies fighting for young skilled workers. This is already happening in Japan and will soon spread to Europe and then to other industrialied countries. Saving money will not make you richer because the older generation has plenty of capital and money, and because inflation will eat up the purchasing power of your savings.
Developed countries with sharp inverted pyramid demographics will compete and fight hard for skilled immigrants. Young, bright, educated adults will be given massive incentives to emigrate to a country with an ageing population. The competition will be fierce. Any bright or motivated young adult today will have excellent job opportunities in the coming decades if that young person is willing to be flexible and move abroad.
The young people will mainly emigrate from countries with already poor demographics, such as Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe, to countries with better demographics, such as the USA, Switzerland, Singapore or India, so that the problem of ageing populations will be a self-reinforcing process.
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- THE LAST DECADE -
December 2025
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