😨 How the Crisis Decade set the stage for an Up Wing 21st Century

There was more to the 2010s than the aftermath of a banking and housing collapse

Now this is the sort of policy debate I can get behind: “Could the Trump-Musk bromance force a NASA pivot to Mars?”

You can add it to other emerging issues, such as regulating advanced artificial intelligence and the nuclear energy revival, as signs that important technological advances are happening to such that policymakers need to think hard and make decisions about them. These are good problems to have, and ones that didn’t seem likely back in the gloomy 2010s — or, to be precise, the decade from 2007 through 2017. Call it the Crisis Decade.

Apparently the phrase, “It is always darkest before the dawn” comes from the 1650 book “A Pisgah Sight Of Palestine And The Confines Thereof” by Thomas Fuller: “'It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.” The “Pisgah” in the title refers to one Old Testament translation of the name of the summit where God showed Moses the Promised Land but told him, “you will not cross over into it."

The Terrible Tenties

Turns out that “It is always darkest before the dawn” neatly captures recent history of technological progress and economic growth. Think about that Crisis Decade, the period beginning with the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession in 2007–2009 then continuing through Not-So-Great Recovery until the US unemployment rate returned to pre-crisis levels in 2017. It was a period of considerable (and understandable) gloom about America’s future with lots of talk about “late capitalism,” “secular stagnation,” The Great Stagnation, and the overall death of the American Dream. Oh, and Peak Oil. Remember that? And to top it all off, the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, closing off American access to low-Earth orbit without Russian help.   

But beneath the decade-long doom, the ingredients for a long-term, Up Wing upturn were starting to come together: