George Friedman
The United States is in the middle of a storm, the tempest from which it will not emerge until the end of the decade. It’s part of a cycle that has defined the U.S. body politic since the American Revolution. The remaining question, from my point of view, is the nature of the next cycle, in terms of both institutional change and socio-economic change, that will usher in the next 50 or so years.
I wrote about these cyclical processes at length in my previous books and readers may recall I forecast that the next cycle will be determined largely by demography. The average life expectancy in the 18th century was 35 years. In the 19th century, it was 40 years. By the 21st, it has reached 78 years. Birth rates, meanwhile, have trended in the opposite direction. In the 19th century, the average fertility rate was 7.0 children per woman. In the early 20th century, it was 4.0. And today, it is roughly 1.7. Last week, The Washington Post published an article showing that, in some states, the number of total deaths outnumbered the number of total births.
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