[wave46]

While I consider QAnon dumb, I don't think it'll have a lasting impact on the rest of the decade. Conspiracy theories burn themselves out fairly quickly. The cards are stacked against these things demographically, too.

A decade is a long time - the narrative of Islamic terror everywhere had faded by 2011, even though it had much more dramatic entrance into the minds of the Western world a decade earlier.

I think we'll see the gradual decline of the West. It'll be a slow rot - we'll never quite get back to the "good old days", just like the West never quite fully recovered from the late-2000s crash. The demographic winds that aided us for the last few decades became doldrums, and now will start to become headwinds. Instead of technological revolution, we'll be squeezing fewer gains out at more cost.

The world will be more multipolar and less predictable. I'm not sure if that'll be a good thing or not. Hard to say.

If I had to make a call on certain trends:

- Italy's debt, demographic and economic decline force it out of the Euro. A nation that was wobbly before COVID now devolves into a full-scale mess. Frugal Germany still doesn't want to guarantee debt by foreign nations - the experiment of a currency not backed by a single nation starts falling apart.
- The United States sails merrily along borrowing to pay its expenses. Domestic politics mostly becomes a wealth transfer to the Baby Boom, everybody else will be left holding the bag. But the bill isn't due now and angering such a large contingent of voters is electoral suicide in this decade.

I can't really call the rest of the world as I don't really know enough to do a thorough analysis.