2030, revisited (2015–2026)

Eleven years ago, I wrote a short text about the year 2030. Revisiting it after a snowy hike with Eddie, is an oddly disorienting experience. On the one hand, much of what I worried about in 2015 has come to pass with depressing predictability: political fragmentation, the resurgence of reactionary identity politics, and a deepening scepticism toward both globalization and growth. On the other hand, several of the assumptions underpinning my optimism about how these trends might be countered have turned out to be more fragile than I then appreciated.

The sense of an intellectual vacuum that I described – the absence of compelling, forward-looking visions capable of mobilizing mass politics – has, if anything, become more acute. The academic dominance of Malthusian framings has not receded. Degrowth, once a marginal critique, is now a respectable and increasingly institutionalized position, even as it remains politically implausible at scale. What I perhaps underestimated in 2015 was not the persistence of these ideas, but their ability to colonize moral language: austerity rebranded as virtue and resignation as responsibility.

At the same time, my critique of “ecological elites” now reads as prescient in a way I did not fully intend. The gap between the rhetoric of sacrifice and the lived realities of those doing the preaching has widened considerably. Climate politics has become ever more performative, ever more obsessed with symbolic consumption choices, while structural questions of energy abundance, industrial capacity, and technological risk-taking remain conspicuously under-addressed. In that sense, the wine tastings have multiplied.

Where I was too optimistic, however, was in my confidence that growth – once politically reclaimed – would function as a relatively straightforward solvent for social and political pathologies. The 2010s and early 2020s have shown that growth alone is neither sufficient nor politically neutral. Even where growth has occurred, it has often been uneven, financialized, and decoupled from the lived experience of security and dignity for large parts of the population. The promise that rising wages and bottom-up growth would naturally restore optimism has been undercut by housing crises, platform economies, and a pervasive sense that institutions no longer work for anyone in particular.

My faith in the EU as a delayed but ultimately disciplining force for necessary reform also looks more ambivalent in hindsight. If anything, we have seen a politics of permanent crisis management, in which long-term investment is crowded out by short-term stabilization and moralized disputes over responsibility. What I failed to anticipate was how exhaustion itself would become a governing condition.

Perhaps the most striking thing, rereading this today, is how much of my argument hinges on agency: the belief that societies could still choose boldness over caution, ambition over restraint, and expansion over retrenchment. In the intervening years, we have instead seen the normalization of risk aversion as a political virtue. The Apollo metaphor now feels almost scandalous in its confidence. Yet I am less convinced than ever that this confidence was misplaced. If anything, the succession of overlapping crises – financial, pandemic, geopolitical, climatic – has demonstrated that risk is always unavoidable. The only real question is whether we confront it deliberately or stumble into it unprepared.

The sections on retirement systems, demographic pressure, and intergenerational conflict have aged uncomfortably well. These issues now dominate political agendas across much of the OECD, often crowding out precisely the long-term investments I argued were necessary. The dynamic I warned about – scapegoating immigrants or other countries rather than seeking structural reform – has become routine rather than exceptional.

Finally, the most speculative part of the original text – the appeal to space, planetary limits, and the necessity of thinking beyond a single finite Earth – now feels less like science-fictional excess and more like an unresolved provocation. While we are still far from becoming a multi-planetary species in any meaningful sense, the underlying point remains intact: a politics that frames human aspiration itself as the problem is ultimately incompatible with survival, let alone justice.