Atlas Shrugs Again -- in April 2061

April 15, 2061 (Harrison, Wisconsin) -- As I approach my 110th birthday, I have time and reason to reflect on my life as well as the world around me. Forty years ago I would have said that the world had made incredible progress in the preceding two hundred years, eliminating poverty and hunger, increasing life expectancy, reducing deaths from natural disasters, reducing first fires, improving overall wellness, and more. Suffice it to say that forty years ago, I also would not have expected to live this long, to not only see my first grandchild, but also great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.

Until the last five years, much of that progress had been reversed. Between 2025 and 2055, the world experienced a lengthy economic and emotional depression. The early 21st efforts to reduce carbon and create a 'green economy' by government fiat reduced innovation and economic activity, with increased restrictions and regulations and the abandonment of many of the tools and methods that had helped to create a highly prosperous if somewhat unequally distributed world economy by 2020. While the 'greenies' loathed the condition of relative poverty, they ignored the general eradication of absolute poverty, creating a global sense of envy and anger that had vile political ramifications, as politicians worked to take from the 'rich' and gave to the 'poor'. And the result? By 2040, there were billions of people living near or below the absolute poverty level, creating a lethal form of shared misery that the social justice warriors (SJWs) called 'equity.' Global travel had declined about 85% in those thirty-five years, first from carbon restrictions, then by regulation, then by border controls, and then by the prohibitive cost. In the 2040's, ecological solutions had become a disaster to the environment, with billions of tons of dead lithium batteries polluting water and soil, rusted wind turbines that became to expensive to operate and too expensive to tear down, and only after reducing the migratory bird population by 75%. Used and inefficient solar panels filled dumps, waste centers, and the seas, as countries ran out of places to dispose of the once-promoted and prized energy generating devices that had become very expensive dead weight.

While the minimum wage in once-developed countries jumped first to $15 a hour and then, later, to over $40 an hour, few people were employed at the minimum wage. Instead, tens of millions of people under the age of thirty remained out of the workforce. In one respect, society saved a lot of money. By 2040, the public education system had become so ineffective and the universities had become so expensive, that more than 80% of the schools and universities closed. Governments continued to pay teachers and professors to NOT teach, but saved trillions by closing the schools.

Also by 2035, the earliest and latest ages to start collecting Social Security had jumped from 62 and 70, respectively, to 75 and 80, respectively. Medicare expenditures were capped and a once-huge 'nursing home' industry collapsed, replaced in some part by huge hospices, places where people wen to die without any medical intervention to extend lives. A new type of business, suicide centers, started, where desperately poor and discouraged people could receive a humane death administered in a variety of fashions, preceded by a week or month of luxurious living that ended with their demise.

Most professional sports leagues had collapsed by 2035, too expensive to pay (the athletes), too expensive to play, and too expensive for fans to watch. A plethora of semi-pro, local and amateur sports grew at a grassroots level that began a few years earlier where, out of desperation, colleges abandoned all intercollegiate athletics.

As bad as things were, a revolution of sorts emerged from the hinterlands, starting around 2055. Gasoline and other carbon fuels provided essential energy. Recycled automobiles from the first third of the century were back on the roads. Villages, communities and even small cities first formed home-schooling collectives. Farmers focused on nutritious foods and foods that did not require extensive packaging, processing or transporting. In northern climes, greenhouses sprouted up, a new form of the 'victory gardens' of the World War II era (1939-1945). Churches began to fill again and vocations tripled in three tears and tripled again in the following three years. Ostentatious living and consumption were shamed out of existence as people embraced a frugal, essential lifestyle. Many of the frivolities that had peaked early in the 21st century -- professionals ports, movies and music, celebrity millionaires, MacMansions and more -- fell out of favor, not by law or regulation, but out of necessity. Most of the suicide centers closed, as short-lived as Blockbusters, RedBox, and CB radio stores. The vast majority of households returned first to a more traditional model -- two parents, two kids -- and evolved to become households of three and four generations living together 'under one roof.' Singe-parent households declined rapidly, with fewer divorces, less pre-marital and extra-marital sex, and a return to once-belittled traditions such as courting, dating and kissing.