What if the COVID epidemic doesn't end in this decade? The US continues to have about half a million dead per year, and a lot of lost productivity due to long COVID. This is the most likely scenario.
What if the war in Europe doesn't end in this decade? The optimistic scenario is that Russia bites off some of Ukraine and we go back to a cold war, with everybody in Europe building up serious military power to keep Russian expansion at bay. There are worse outcomes.
What if global warming starts to produce mass starvation in many areas of the world? This is looking likely, and it's already started.
What if supply chain problems don't go away? It's become clear that the incentives of the free market no longer insure abundance across the board. Americans could once deride the USSR's "short-blanket economy", where stores were always out of something. Now that's the norm in America.
For the past half century, large scale trouble in the US has been mostly about the business cycle. But this time, the business cycle doesn't dominate the other problems.
What if the war in Europe doesn't end in this decade? The optimistic scenario is that Russia bites off some of Ukraine and we go back to a cold war, with everybody in Europe building up serious military power to keep Russian expansion at bay. There are worse outcomes.
What if global warming starts to produce mass starvation in many areas of the world? This is looking likely, and it's already started.
What if supply chain problems don't go away? It's become clear that the incentives of the free market no longer insure abundance across the board. Americans could once deride the USSR's "short-blanket economy", where stores were always out of something. Now that's the norm in America.
For the past half century, large scale trouble in the US has been mostly about the business cycle. But this time, the business cycle doesn't dominate the other problems.