Many see similarities with the 1920s and they think we will live through the Roaring Twenties again. Is this true or will we get the Whimpering Twenties instead?
When we were in the middle of the pandemic, some people saw the parallelisms with what happened at the beginning of the 1920s and proclaimed we were entering again the “Roaring Twenties”.
In 1920 the world was recovering from World War I, back then still called The Great War, and the Spanish Flu pandemic, which caused around 50 million dead, or possibly more. Once the world recovered, a decade of breakneck economic growth ensued, full of innovations and inventions, an economic boom that finished with the crash of 29, and plenty of parties with a soundtrack formed of new music genres such as charleston, foxtrot, and jazz.
After the tragedies of the previous years, people were happy to be alive and they wanted to live life to the full. Similar booms have happened throughout history after deadly pandemics, big wars, and other mass destruction events. Some historians ascribe the end of serfdom in Europe to the Black Plague of the 14th century that had killed between a third and a half of the population of the continent.
Some people believe something similar will happen in the 2020s. We will also have our Roaring Twenties. We will recover from the covid pandemic and people will start consuming again, traveling abroad, and a golden age of innovation and growth will follow.
Some people believe something similar will happen in the 2020s. We will also have our Roaring Twenties. We will recover from the covid pandemic and people will start consuming again, traveling abroad, and a golden age of innovation and growth will follow.
Is this true or just wishful thinking? How does the decade we started a couple of years ago look? Will they be the Roaring or the Whimpering Twenties?
Our current situation…
Pestilence
Let’s look at where we are today, in April 2022. Two years of this decade have already passed, and we are still far from being in a roaring state, or anything close to it. The pandemic is far from being over, even if in some countries we would like to think that is already gone.
Look at Hong Kong and China for example, where they are having again thousands of cases per day and millions of citizens are locked down in their homes and even workplaces. Vaccines and other measures have helped us fight the virus, but it is still around and it could still mutate into a more infectious and deadlier variant. In many places of the world, we are suffering pandemic fatigue and we think we are done with the virus, but the virus might not be done with us yet.
War
Then we have the war. Last century it was the other way around: first, we had a massive world war with millions of people killed, then a pandemic with even more deaths. This time it seems to be going the other way around. The Russia-Ukraine war is still a local war, and let’s hope it continues being so and that it ends quickly, but there is the possibility that it could escalate into a regional or even global war. That would definitely dampen the idea of any roaring decade. It would be devastating.
Even if the war doesn’t escalate, there seems to be a new cold war simmering on the surface, between liberal democracies and authoritarian states, pitting the West (plus Japan, South Korea, and others), against China, Russia, and others. These are different worldviews and government models that don’t look each other in the eye. Will they clash and will we have a hot war? Right now it seems unlikely, but these things escalate quickly and the war in Ukraine might be the first stage of a global war. Let’s hope it isn’t.
Trade and relations
All this means that globalisation is receding. The world economy is deglobalizing. After the issues we suffered during the pandemic, many countries and companies want to strengthen their supply chains and make them more reliable, so they are repatriating some of the processes back home. The pandemic has also closed many countries for fear of letting contagious people in. Many airways have cancelled flights and reduced the number of itineraries. If you have tried to book a flight recently you may have noticed that flight tickets have gone through the roof. Add to this the recent isolation of Russia and the trade war between China and the US and globalisation seems to have peaked and is now receding.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it reduces trade between countries and makes it easier to raise walls between countries. It also raises the risks of confrontations. It makes the world more parochial and it somewhat increases the distance between countries. This is not necessarily bad and many people will be happy with this state of affairs, but personally, I think we’ll be the worse for it.
Climate change
And then we have the huge elephant in the room nobody likes to talk about: climate change. This is the biggest threat of our generation, but we seem to be unable to do much about it. As the latest IPCC report showed, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) is beyond reach”.
All countries have pledged reductions in carbon emissions by specific dates, but if we continue with the same track record we have shown to date, we will do too little, too late. As I wrote here, we’ll definitely live in a warmer planet in 2100, but a big part of how much warmer we’ll be by the end of the century will be decided in this decade, just in the next few years. We better hurry up, because we are already late and we are running out of options.
Work
Finally, let’s focus on the world of work. Many will argue that the Future of Work is already here. The pandemic has wreaked havoc in many areas, but one of the only silver linings has been how it has accelerated our ways of working. Hybrid working, distributed work, and more flexible working arrangements are here to stay. AI has advanced a lot in the last decade and it promises to keep doing so in the next one. Bitcoin, web 3.0, and the metaverse promise to transform the world of work even more. Baby boomers are retiring and the size of Gen Z in the workforce is growing every year. Exciting times lie ahead.
Hybrid working, distributed work, and more flexible working arrangements are here to stay. AI has advanced a lot in the last decade and it promises to keep doing so in the next one. Bitcoin, web 3.0, and the metaverse promise to transform the world of work even more. Baby boomers are retiring and the size of Gen Z in the workforce is growing every year. Exciting times lie ahead.
… and where we are going
We seem to be in the middle of a paradigm shift. A new global order is being built and we still don’t know what it will look like, technology is changing faster than ever, the world of work is being transformed and the climate is getting increasingly warmer.
The old paradigm of how the world worked is being replaced by something completely new. All this means two things. Firstly, the 2020s will be convulsive, disruptive, and full of change. Second, the world will be very different in 2030, and although we can look at some trends and see where we are going, nobody knows exactly what the world will look like at the end of this decade.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Change doesn’t necessarily mean going for the worse, it can be for the better, and crises and change usually bring with them the best opportunities for growth and improvement.
Last year, The Economist dedicated one of their leader articles to what they thought could be the start of the Roaring Twenties. They thought there was enough evidence to talk about technological optimism, and they cited advances in the mRNA vaccine, which were out so quickly and have saved thousands if not millions of lives, among others. They also wrote about the increased spending and investment in research and innovation.
The exponential age
I agree with them. We are living in an exponential age and technological advances are not getting slower, they are accelerating. This means we can expect to see great advances in artificial intelligence, treatment against cancer and other diseases, renewables energy, carbon capture and other innovations to fight against climate change, robotics, 3D printing, and a long et cetera. These changes in technology will be disruptive, but they will also bring improvements to our quality of life and life standards.
The new global order
Regarding geopolitics, I am not sure what will happen. Nobody is. The war in Ukraine is already changing the global order in a way and it may change it even more before it finishes. We are having a war between countries in Europe for the first time in decades, and this is frightening, but there are also positive aspects of it.
Russia hasn’t performed in this war as well as most people expected, and the West has been more united and has shown a more robust and resolute response than most analysts, including in the West itself, expected. It will still depend on how this war ends and we are still far from it being over, but I think it has made China attacking Taiwan less likely, not more.
The war has also given new impetus to NATO, the EU, and the West, and it has made them realise that they can fight all they want about culture wars and have a polarised society, but the high standards of living they have achieved are not guaranteed and they can all disappear if another country decides to attack them and enter a war.
Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part, but I believe this war could somehow be the beginning of the retreat of authoritarianism in the world. Democracy as a governance model and a value to aspire for has been decreasing in the world in the last couple of decades. There has been a feeling of a decline in the values of the West lately, but the Ukrainian resistance may have endowed these values with a renewed force. It has shown liberal democracies that they shouldn’t take their way of life for granted and these are values worth fighting for.
Culture
Let’s move now from geopolitics to culture. The Roaring Twenties of the last century were famous for the parties, the blooming of new music genres, the relaxation of stifling and strict gender roles, and the reawakening of the social and cultural lives after years of misery induced by war and illness. I think something similar might happen soon.
Human beings are social animals. We seek and thrive with human contact. We like meeting people, talking to others, gathering around a meal, dancing, enjoying music in a group… This is who we are. After a few years locked down, it is likely that eventually, we will come back to our old ways. The first few years we’ll do so with a vengeance and we will go out more than before. This trend has already started in many places!
We live our lives increasingly online, that’s true, and the pandemic has definitely accelerated this process. The metaverse proponents argue that we won’t need to physically go out to satisfy our socialising needs, as we will be able to fulfil them virtually. I am a bit sceptic about that, but maybe that’s me. We will spend more and more time online and the metaverse will be a thing someday, but I don’t think we are there yet. VR and AR need still some development, and a virtual world will not replace the real world outside any time soon.
Will we spend more time than now in virtual worlds by 2030? Definitely. Will we stop socialising outside and instead meet our friends via holograms and virtual parties without leaving our bedrooms? I am not so sure.
Work
I do believe the metaverse and the decentralisation brought by web 3.0 will have a deeper impact on the world of work. Virtual meetings via advanced VR and holograms will be much better than the current videoconferences, and I don’t think we’ll have to wait until the end of the decade for these virtual meetings to become quite common. Videoconferencing has saved us during the pandemic, but as a technology, it leaves a lot to desire and it has still a lot of room for improvement. Virtual and Augmented reality is probably the next phase of it.
Decentralised organisations via DAOs and similar governance models will coexist with the traditional centralised corporations we are used to living with.
We are living through a paradigm shift also in the way we organise our work. Remote, hybrid, and distributed working models are here to stay and we are seeing the organisations of the future taking shape in front of our eyes. I suspect these changes will accelerate in the next few years and, by the end of the decade, the organisational landscape and the way we work will have transformed in such a way to be almost unrecognisable from the ones we had just a few years ago.
So, roaring or whimpering twenties?
Human beings (and journalists in particular) like to find parallelisms with other times and places. We seek comfort in the known and the familiar, so it is always easy to fall back on the past when trying to predict what will happen in the future. So, will the 2020s be again the Roaring 20’s as they were a hundred years ago?
It’s easy to see similarities and to think this will again be a decade of growth, and a crazy economic, technological, social, and cultural boom. The thing is, each decade is different and it has its own peculiarities. There will be some similarities with the 1920s, but also stark differences.
The 2020s will be convulsive and disruptive. We will see many changes to our society happening very quickly, but this has been the main trend for the last few decades already. As Heraclitus said, more than two millennia ago, “the only constant is change”.
The 2020s will be convulsive and disruptive. We will see many changes to our society happening very quickly, but this has been the main trend for the last few decades already. As Heraclitus said, more than two millennia ago, “the only constant is change”.
All changes and disruptions can be uncomfortable for those who have to live through them, and they have the potential to harm many people. They also open doors to new worlds full of opportunities and excitement.
Some food for Hope
As people like Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now) and Hans Rosling (Factfulness) have argued, despite all the problems we still undeniable have, the world is a better place today than a hundred years ago, and it is improving all the time. Things are getting better, not worse, and this will continue to be so also in the future. That’s a good hope to have, but hope is a double-edged sword and isn’t always justified.
We build our future in the present. We build our tomorrow today. We are the ones building it, nobody else. The 2020s will be as we make them be, but as a society, we have the right tools to make it a fantastic decade and to finish it off better than how we started it (which isn’t that hard if you think we kicked it off with a global pandemic). The 2020s will have a bit of roaring, and a bit of whimpering, and they will be unique and special in their own way.
Let’s talk again in 2030 and see how it went, shall we?
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