My personal belief is the middle/late 2020s.
As far as the economy, because a 0% increase in net jobs were created from 1999-2009 we don’t have a cushion. From 1970-1980 the net jobs went up by 27%, and they went up by 20% or so in the 1980s. So the Reagan recession was livable because jobs were still created before and after.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html
We are facing this recession with a perfect storm. A trade deficit, a huge national debt, the collapse of the middle class before mass unemployment hit, no new jobs created, unaffordable healthcare, outsourcing, peak oil hitting, etc. Plus this one is bigger than the Reagan recession.
I think in total we lost about 10 million jobs in the recession (7 million jobs plus 3 million equivalents of full time jobs because people doing full time were bussed down to part time). Plus you need 100k a month in new jobs just to keep up. I think I heard it’d take 300k new jobs a month for 5 years to get back to 5% unemployment. We aren’t getting 300k new jobs a month. We will be lucky to get 100k new jobs a month to stabilize unemployment at 10% and the U6 at about 18%. An unemployment rate around 8% will be the norm, probably for a while.
On the ‘plus’ side, illegal immigration will go down. But only because there is no incentive to keep coming here.
I think the late 2020s because that is probably when the alternatives to oil hit the market hard and allow us to wean (it is supposed to take about 2 decades with a crash program for fossil fuel alternatives to bypass peak oil), when alternative energy will make up 40%+ of our grid energy, when the global middle class is huge (they add 80 million new members a year) and can afford US goods. Carbon scrubbing and capture tech, as well as geoengineering will be far more advanced.
I think in the developing world life is generally going to consistently get better between now and the 2020s. But I think in the US it’ll be 15 years before we are really optimistic again.
Yup, the late 2020s will be grand. Grand I tells ya. Wind and solar energy for a fraction of a penny a kilowatt hour. Cars that get 150mpg (when they run on gasoline). A global middle class of 3 billion people. The ability to engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change (I assume).
I think that is when things will be ‘good’ though. I’m guessing things will be ‘kindof okay’ before that but I don’t know when.
But people had shit lives from 1914-1945. In that period they had a world war followed by a massive flu epidemic that killed 3% of the human population. A decade after that was the great depression (before unemployment insurance, food stamps and affordable food), and after that was world war 2. But people survived.
However in the interm there will still be advances. There will still be advances in renewable energy, energy efficiency, medical technology, communication technology, global poverty, etc.