Predictions for the year 2054

Some friends recently asked each other for our predictions about the future thirty years from now, globally and locally. I was feeling pretty optimistic, and here is the picture I painted.

To stave off secessionist movements on both the right and the left, we will see a Constitutional Amendment underscoring regional autonomy. This will happen in the late 2030s. The amendment’s authors will draw heavily for inspiration from the Swiss canton system. Federal spending and taxation will be severely limited, federal spending and tax rates will decline, state spending and tax rates will go up. With representatives and bureaucrats closer to their constituents, service quality will improve and waste will decline.

Environmentalists and property rights advocates will find common ground and press our lawmakers and courts to more aggressively treat pollution in all its forms as contamination. Plaintiffs will prevail in suits claiming damages from environmental contamination of microplastics and pharmaceuticals in our soil and water, and the national manufacturers who are unable to change what they produce and how they produce it will go out of business or leave the United States market.

With some synthetic fertilizers also getting labeled as contaminants and erosion damage stemming from soil depletion being treated as an actionable negative externality, industrial agriculture will take a huge hit. Legal recognition of the negative externalities associated with BigAg will be one of the significant changes that returns small, local, regenerative farmers to their dominant position in our food system.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s disgust over constant and inescapable surveillance will give rise to popular support for a revision to how the law treats digital footprints. One’s ownership and rights to their own likeness will broaden, empowering individuals to materially withdraw their digital footprint from the public view. This will effectively end the panopticon in America.

Building on their generally distrustful-of-big-anything sentiment, today’s youngsters will mature into a politically powerful generation that will target cronyism and bureaucratic sclerosis in all its forms, which will reverse the trend we’ve seen toward more waste, fewer small businesses, and greater industry consolidation.

Young people will be seeking meaning in something other than their political affiliation, and, without becoming insular, provincial, or radical, they’ll turn back toward family, community, and faith. That will also mean marriage, and marriage at younger ages than we’ve seen in many decades. Stronger communities, broadly shared optimism, and greater autonomy and prosperity will lead to a new baby boom. Demographers will continue to predict human population decline, but during the boom, they will begin pushing back their date. In 2054, they will have pushed the global flatlining back to around 2075 (from 2060 right now) and the United States’ flatlining will be pushed back to around 2150 (from around 2080 right now). Rather than becoming ever older, our population distribution will start to look a little younger every year.

The era of institutionalized schooling that began in the mid 1800s will finally come to a close, with technology and undeniably disastrous results having hastened its decline. Flexible hyperlocal microschools will be the preferred path most families follow, but children and their parents will come to view an education as something that happens everywhere, all the time, for as long as one lives.

As companies come to recognize the fat-tailed fragility of lengthy supply chains, North American manufacturing will boom, with different regions developing (or redeveloping) different specialities. Zoning will be deemed unconstitutional, and federal spending on internal improvements will cease, thus obviating the need to reverse the 1907 Wilson v Shaw Supreme Court decision that pulled the federal government into the infrastructure business. This will result in an explosion in robust local economies and tight knit communities.

An increasingly regionalistic United States will lose its appetite for foreign intervention. Just prior to the Regionalism Amendment, we will exit NATO and it will dissolve almost immediately thereafter. By the end of the following decade, we will have phased out all of our military presence abroad, including and especially in the Middle East. Related, the government of Israel will have negotiated a peace with Palestinians that involves the cooperation of the surrounding predominantly Muslim nations. Without a great enemy, and with the rising influence of a liberalized and anti-Islamist UAE, militant Islamism will be rapidly dissipating.

Facing insurmountable debt and demographic disaster, the Chinese Communist Party will collapse, leading to a federation of Chinese regions loosely connected by a new, weaker national government.

As people recognize what makes for a truly healthy diet and come to better understand the connection between diet and mental health, and as subsidies for processed calorie manufacturing evaporate, health and wellness will dramatically improve. Imagine what life will be like with all of our advances in medical science, tobacco use being a rarity, and a population who enjoy great metabolic health!

Energy production will continue to be an enormous area of focus and investment. Nuclear will become the dominant source, but it will mostly be via distributed nuclear technologies—such as small molten salt reactors that power single towns or neighborhoods—rather than large nuclear power plants designed to power entire regions. This will be yet one more among many things that intensifies people’s increasingly localist disposition. Solar and wind will be common, but only on a small scale, such as for one’s own house.

Much digital ink will have been spilled about how we might find productivity and economic gains from innovation, and we will certainly get some of that—particularly in robotics, AI, and energy—but our most enormous gains will come from the elimination of the institutional sclerosis that results from our renewed appreciation for subsidiarity.

The period from the early 1900s to the early 2000s will come to be viewed as a period in which Americans radically departed from human-scaled settlements and community in favor of a sort of dehumanizing institutionalization. By 2054, we’ll be slowly reclaiming the beauty of past built and natural environments, and we’ll be slowly claiming a sort of civility and broadly shared prosperity that we had not previously known.