The Next Ten Years
The Club of Rome told my generation a clean story. Too many people. Too little planet. Therefore: plan, ration, feel guilty, and put experts in charge of the future.
I believed versions of that story. Limits felt serious. Collapse felt adult. Optimism felt like a sales pitch.
Then the children stopped arriving.
Fertility has fallen below replacement across almost every country that still writes the rules. The young shoulders the welfare state was built on are not being born. We are angry about immigration because we can see the neighborhood change. We are less willing to say the quieter sentence underneath: we are shrinking, and a shrinking people must import labor, import machines, or accept decline.
At the same time the other half of the old sermon is dying. Tony Seba and RethinkX spent a decade looking at cost curves while incumbents looked at the current fleet. Solar, batteries, electric miles, autonomy, precision fermentation, software, humanoids. Each doubling of volume hits the price again. Then the S-curve. Then the incumbent dies faster than he thought possible.
You cannot vote against a cost curve.
That is the next ten years. Not Club of Rome. Not a culture war with better slogans. A decade in which material scarcity starts to crack while political power tries to grow in the rubble.
George Friedman’s long cycle is useful here if you refuse to treat it as scripture. America does not end in the 2020s. It rewrites the relationship between federal machinery and a living society. Europe does not rewrite itself. It administers. China must robotize or grow old in place. The map is not mysterious. The institutions are.
I am not offering a forecast with dates you can take to a bank. I am offering a shape.
Scarcity dies in the technology.
Freedom can still die in the institution.
Those two sentences are the spine of this series.
The first death is already visible. Midday electricity in Spain and Greece has started to go worthless on sunny hours. That is not a bust. That is Super Power with nowhere to go yet. In April 2026 the Dutch RDW approved Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving first in Europe, and the car began threading cyclists and canal streets that American test videos never contained. Software got cheaper and, for a while, the demand for people who can make systems work went up. That is Jevons, not the death of the horse. GLP-1 drugs are already changing what a meal is. Precision fermentation is still early, but if the S-curve holds, the cow becomes the next horse, and a country like the Netherlands discovers that its nitrogen war was a demand problem wearing a moral costume.
The second death is quieter. Left and right both enlarge the state. One does it as care. One does it as order. The European Union does it as procedure detached from a people. Emergency rooms become ministries. Digital identity becomes the door to the surplus. Universal income arrives with a card that can be switched off. Abundance, if it is only allowed through a counter, is not abundance. It is a ration with better branding.
Libertarianism still has the most merit as a diagnosis of power. It does not yet have a complete answer to the empty crib, the lonely old, or the soldier who is not born. Hayek remains the adult in the room: the human being is not an execution point in a plan. He is a local, responsible, feeling knowledge system. The decade will tempt every party to organize meaning, children, and virtue the way they organized carbon and viruses. That temptation is the banality of emergency in a new dress.
So the series has a job.
The opening essay is this one: invert the old fear, name the real movement, and refuse both the magician and the preacher-state.
Then five rooms.
Electrons: Super Power arrives first where the sun and the permits are. Texas feels it as industry. Southern Europe can feel it as a second youth. Northern Europe cannot copy the physics. It can finance and connect.
Miles: the perception of the car dies in a city, not in a white paper. I now think that city can be Amsterdam, and that the Nine Streets are not the final boss. They are the demonstration. A mayor who wants fewer parked cars may discover she wants robot miles more than she wants taxi nostalgia.
Hands: we are not the horses yet. Cheap cognition creates more software, more products, more need for judgment. The horse comes later, when the task itself is too cheap to assign to a person. Poland and, if the war settles, Ukraine can take the first European growth from that turn. Spain can only do it after surplus power creates new demand.
Protein: GLP-1 shrinks the stomach. Precision fermentation can detach protein from the animal. The Netherlands has too many cows per hectare and a twenty-billion plan to manage the smell. If demand falls, land comes back and the ceiling eases without another priesthood.
Meaning: Texas already sells God, family, border, and the Musk stack in one jurisdiction. Greg Abbott is not Hayek. He is proof that Christianity plus builders can still win a large country. Europe will try to organize the same hunger as policy. Spain’s dual healthcare is the more European clue: a public floor and a private door beside it. Choice as counterpower. Not the abolition of the floor.
The close returns to the only political question that matters once the curves have spoken. Will the surplus land as a private fact, or as a permission? There is still no clean catalyst for a smaller state. Fiscal walls, failed counters, and internal exit are the ugly candidates. Awe and not-knowing are the human ones. A civilization that cannot make children will import migrants or machines. A civilization that cannot tolerate uncertainty will turn both into instruments.
I live in the middle of this. I have driven the supervised system through Dutch streets. I have watched software get cheaper and the work get larger. I have taken the first generation of the drugs that change appetite. I have chosen Austin as a working answer if jurisdiction becomes a life decision rather than an opinion. None of that makes me a prophet. It makes me unwilling to keep telling the Club of Rome story after the facts have changed.
The next ten years will look messy. Politics will get harder before it gets clearer. The objects around us will get cheaper, quieter, more electric, more automatic. People will look for a soul in the leftover space. Some will find a church. Some will find a feed. A few will keep the harder discipline: we do not know, therefore we do not hand the decade to magicians.
Abundance is becoming inevitable.
Our reaction to it is not.
That is the series.
That is the bet.
That is the work.
