In the midst of this possibly one-in-a-lifetime shock, I’ve been very interested in thinking about and imagining what life will look like moving forward. As input to that thinking, I’ve been summarizing interesting essays and interviews of others, including Raoul Pal’s gloomy economic forecast and Ray Dalio’s socioeconomic outlook.
Today, I’ve come across a fantastic speculative vision put forward by Joe McCann, entitled The New, New World Order. I absolutely encourage you to read it beginning to end, but for the attention-challenged, I’ve tried to summarize the key themes below:
- Self-suffiency — Self-sufficiency will become a national security interest. Whereas profitability and lower product costs drove manufacturing abroad, this crisis has exposed the risk of moving any critical link in the supply chain outside the country. Expect to see domestic manufacturing, in some areas, return to the US.
- Socialism — It has started with the direct deposit of $1,200 in to everyone’s bank account, and will not stop, as it would be political suicide for any politician to terminate people’s “stimulus checks”.
- QE ∞ — In the Quantitative Easing post-2008, the Federal Reserve started buying stuff like mortgage-backed securities. Today, it’s buying junk bonds, and in “unlimited amounts”, meaning we now have “unlimited quantitative easing”. This will completely distort markets, as natural price discovery is no longer possible.
- Indirect nationalization — By propping up industries financially through bailouts, like the airlines, we are nationalizing them indirectly.
- National healthcare — The crisis has exposed the US healthcare system as a vulnerability in national defense, and this will now be addressed as a national security issue. We will see regulation stripped away and mountains moved to advance this industry technologically.
- Proof of health — Just as proof-of-identity is required of so many things, we’ll begin to see proof-of-health (immunity, antibodies, etc.) become a thing, for entering large events, boarding planes, etc. Expect to see technology advancements in this area, including public blockchains to solve the global standards and trust issues.
- New working-class divide — Remote working will persist, and grow dramatically. This will have impacts everywhere, including real estate. But most importantly, it will create a new social divide, between those whose work happens virtually, and those that happen on land.
- Education — Online education will grow and thrive. The Ivy’s will remain, but expect to see closures of many of the second tier (and lower) universities. Expect to see vocational training surge, as training related to the repatriation of manufacturing will be in demand. Also expect to see the nature of that training change, as the nature of human involvement in manufacturing won’t look like it did in the 1960s, given automation.
- eSports and eEntertainment — Expect to see less Hollywood productions, and less live sports, and more user-created content, eSports, distribution channels, video and streaming.