Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 4

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As usual, I’m going to get right down to business. While I’ll try to have this post function as a standalone, You’ll get a lot more out of it if you have already read Chapter 8.1, Chapter 8.2, and Chapter 8.3 before continuing.
The Digital Age, Fifth Period 2010s-2020: The decade of fallout
The most recent decade to conclude was, in many respects, all about the fallout and legacy of the traumas that punctuated the period just concluded. And yet, it’s possible to more or less ignore all of that, giving rise to a revised perception of the period without that high fever masking the reality.
I’ve often found that time lends clarity and perspective. Without that, events often seem disjointed, and the interconnections that form the cohesive outlines of a bigger picture are that much harder to put together.
Careful study of the analyses of isolated events can get you part of the way there, but that takes additional time and effort, and quite a lot of it. The alternative is simply to apply a liberal layer of fuzziness – I know (as does everyone reading this) what happened, and even has some idea of why. If the big picture is a little faded and vague, so what?
The fundamental assumption – that everything that was already happening would continue, unless noted otherwise – holds true.
Beginning: Recovery
I ended the previous period with the beginnings of economic recovery from the GFC, and that recovery persisted almost all the way through to the end of the decade. With life getting better on a daily basis, it was easy to lapse into a casual daze, and simply drift along.
The problem with this sort of attitude is that it becomes habit forming, harder and harder to break. Mountainous problems seemed to have the foundations excavated from under them, and it was possible to ignore them in favor of minutia that seemed oh-so-important at the time.
Domestic Australian Political Turmoil
Australia started the decade with political turmoil to spare.
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and was a very popular figure at the time Unbeknownst to the Australian public, there was considerable division behind the scenes, Rudd’s autocratic manner putting more and more people offside.
During his first two years in office, Rudd set records for popularity in Newspoll opinion polling, maintaining very high approval ratings. By 2010 … Rudd’s approval ratings had begun to drop significantly, with controversies arising over the management of the financial crisis, the Senate refusal to pass the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, policies on asylum seekers and a debate over a proposed “super profits” tax on the mining industry.
— Wikipedia, Kevin Rudd
The opposition drew political blood over each of these issues. It nevertheless came as a complete shock to the public when his deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, overthrew Rudd in a party room spill on June 23. There had been ongoing speculation about some sort of image reform for months, all of it concluding that there would be no challenge for the leadership.
Julia Gillard
Gillard seemed to breathe new life into the Labor party, enough to at least stem the erosion of popular support. She sought to take advantage of this honeymoon period, calling the next Federal Election just 23 days after taking office.
This resulted in her government being returned to power but in a minority capacity, but she was able to reach agreement on confidence and supply with four members of the Greens party, the price being a carbon emissions trading scheme which directly contradicted the policies she had taken to the public during the election.
Nevertheless, life seems to steady down and the Gillard government made some significant achievements during this term of government. But once again, the opposition began to score body blows against the government.
Rudd Returns
By 2013, it was becoming clear to the labor leadership that unless something changed radically, the Labor government was going to lose the next election. In some desperation, they turned to a familiar figure: Kevin Rudd, who remained publicly popular because none of the behind-the-scenes complaints had been seen in public. One attempt to return the former Prime Minister to power had already failed. In March of 2013, there was a second attempt, aborted when Rudd refused to stand against Gillard.
Clearly, this was a government in turmoil. That never plays well to the Australian electorate, and the polls continued their unfavorable trends. On 26 June, Rudd was returned to power to lead the party to the polls in early 2014.
Although the policies promised by Rudd in the 20144 campaign appealed to a lot of traditional labor supporters, there was very little confidence in his ability to deliver on his promises.
As a result, Tony Abbott of the Liberal-National coalition became Prime Minister in 2013.
Tony Abbott
Anyone who thought that this would usher in a period of stability was about to receive a rude shock. Although his policies were disliked by many, there were also many who supported them, and him, in a fashion reminiscent of the adoration of President Trump in more recent times.
The first hint at what lay ahead came in March, when Abbott announced that without telling anyone in his cabinet, he had advised the Queen to reinstate the knight and dame system of honors in Australia, a wildly unpopular move with the public. The nation had been flirting with becoming a Republic for years, and although the model put forward by the pro-monarchy Prime Minister of the time had been defeated, many of the trappings of Monarchy had been removed, and the nation as a whole were comfortable with the half-way house at which it had arrived. This one autocratic decision upset this comfortable apple-cart, threatening to steer the nation back towards the Monarchy.
People were still digesting this when the 2014 Budget was announced. Harsh and austere to the point of being bleak, it contained measures that were condemned as “Un-Australian” (the harshest criticism one can make of an Aussie), measures that publicly broke election promises despite the polls informing Abbott prior to the election that they were “deal-breakers” with the Australian Public – some went so far as to claim the budget broke all his election promises.
The Abbott government plunged precipitously in public approval – Australians will forgive a lot, but broken promises on this grand a scale were seen as intolerable. The reality was that Abbott was following the usual electoral budget cycle – a very harsh first budget, one or two moderate budgets, and then a generous budget as the next election approached, paid for (essentially) by the first, harsh, budget. Abbott and his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, simply went too far too fast.
From the point of that misstep on, it seemed the Abbott government could not go two weeks without some fresh public policy disaster. From February 2015, Abbott had made one too many authoritarian decisions for even his own party to tolerate, and there was a leadership spill that he only narrowly won. He promised to do better, consult more widely, and reduce the role of his unpopular chief-of-staff.
The government limped on until September, setting new records for unpopularity amongst the voting public. Opinion poll after opinion poll painted the government as rancid. It came as no surprise that a second spill motion ousted Abbott from the top job in September of 2015.
By the time he was removed from premiership, Abbott was one of the most unpopular world leaders, and he has been regarded [since] by critics and political experts as one of Australia’s worst prime ministers.
— Wikipedia, Tony Abbott
Malcolm Turnbull
In his place, a moderate who was hopelessly compromised by the extremists in his own party, who actively undercut his authority and government on a number of occasions over a number of policies, notable energy supply and climate change.
Within some policy areas, he was viewed as weak; in others, he was seen as opinionated. He had won a lot of popular support for his role in the Spycatcher trial (Wikipedia, Spycatcher), and in some policy areas he was more liberal-left (in US terminology) than he was right-wing. (In Australia, politically Left and Right are reversed – the right are progressive and the left conservative).
The Liberal Party had always aspired to be, claimed to be, fiscally conservative but socially progressive, but the decades since the Whitlam government of 1972-75 had eroded that position. There were many who hoped that Turnbull was the beginning of a return to that position, one that had made Liberal Coalition federal governments the norm for many decades (from 1932-1941, and 1949-1972, and 1975-1983, and 1996-2007, Australia had conservative governments).
The problem was too many extremists in his own ranks who were unwilling to toe a new party line, and who actively sought to undermine and back-stab the new leader – our fifth since the start of the decade, if anyone’s keeping count.
These hopes, coupled with a honeymoon period and a repudiation of some of his predecessors more controversial policies, were enough to secure an extremely narrow victory in the 2016 Federal Election – by a single seat. They were quickly dashed, however, as the radical elements of the coalition continued their efforts to undermine his leadership, already threatened by the wearing off of the honeymoon period.
Throughout 2018, it felt as though the leadership was under siege – one spill attempt had taken place, and more had been threatened or expected without materializing. It was seen as a question of when, not if, there would be a successful move to oust him, probably to be replaced with the unpopular and controversial Peter Dutton (sometimes characterized as the Lord Voldemort of Australian Politics).
A preemptive move was initiated in August of 2018 that installed another seeming moderate (though one that leaned a little further to the Australian Left than Turnbull had), Scott Morrison.
Scott Morrison
Time has not been kind to the public perception of the Reign of Morrison. His honeymoon period, however, was lengthy and again proved enough to lead to a victory and improved coalition position within parliament than that achieved by Turnbull. This was considered an unwinnable election for the coalition, so Morrison was perceived by his party to have walked on water.
It’s possible that this license to do as he willed went to his head, but from a relatively controversy-free first term, Morrison’s second term was anything but. There was a widespread perception of corruption, of religious-based favoritism, of ideological extremism, and long-standing problems within the party of Misogyny repeatedly surfaced.
The second term got off to a bad start during the 2019-20 horror Bushfire season (Wikipedia), now known as the Black Summer.
In Intensity, Size, Duration, and Impact – whole communities being wiped out – this was the first murmur of what would become the end of the era. Morrison was on holidays with his family in Hawaii (no-one begrudged him that) when the fires broke out; but his office lied about where he was, and when exposed, he refused to return, offering a cavalier comment that showed him to be completely out of touch with the community.
Crisis after crisis followed. Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, a high-profile and still-controversial Rape allegation, another lukewarm response to the 2022 eastern Australia Flooding (Wikipedia) and the emerging Robodebt scandal were just the headlines; there were dozens of smaller crises along the way to see out the decade.
It didn’t help that these once-in-a-century floods then occurred again in 2023; even though Morrison was no longer in office, this cemented the popular zeitgeist for many.
Nevertheless, Morrison – the sixth Prime Minister of the decade – was still in power when this sub-period, and this era, came to an end, and he got a lot of credit at the time for his response to the Covid epidemic. More on that later.
Six Prime Ministers had seen Australia through from 1971 to 2007 (28 years). Six more (plus a 1-week caretaker PM) had been in charge from 1941 to 1971. That really puts into perspective how turbulent the 2010-20 decade was here, politically.
Consequences
For the most part, the economy trucked on without problems. Despite being controversial amongst the coalition, the rapid response with stimulus cheques to the lowest members of society economically (who spent almost all of it) had prevented a recession here during the GFC, or at least, that was the popular narrative.
That criticism shaped the response to Covid, by the way – something I’ll deal with, later.
It was the cost of those stimulus payments that had prompted the horror budget of 2014.
It might seem that this economic bloom contradicts the basic assertion of this article series, that the economy of a time reflects the social and political state leading up to that time and drives changes in those social and political realities in the years that follow.
The reality is that a mining sector boom, fueled by the growth in China, masked everything else that was going on; without that, this era would have been far more economically turbulent.
If you read Part 7 of this series, Economic Realities, you will realize that two things affect just about everything else in an economy – energy costs (especially electricity) and fuel costs. There is also a significant overlap between the spheres of consequence in which these factors play out. Something I don’t remember pointing out is that electricity costs increase the expense of refining crude oil…
The electricity price in Australia was unstable throughout the decade in question, a consequence of not only the political turbulence but the massive too-ing-and-fro-ing on how to address the climate change problem.
Another of those factors that have an octopus-like reach into multiple economic and social sectors is public and business confidence – in stability and prosperity, specifically – and that also experienced a roller-coaster ride in those years.
A superficial glance from the outside, and all looked rosy – but the reality was quite different for those caught in the middle.
The UK / Europe
I have to admit to not paying as much attention to the politics and economy of the UK as, perhaps, I should have. They started the decade with Gordon Brown and ended it with Boris Johnson, having experienced David Cameron and Theresa May in the middle.
Brown never made much of an impression here. Cameron was respected and viewed as a “typical” English Prime Minister, whatever that means! Theresa May was more controversial, but had little impact here. And Johnson was a maverick, good for entertainment value if nothing else; a huge part of the local impression stemmed from his appearance on Top Gear (UK) when he was Mayor of London, when he gave a very good impression.
But it was Cameron who promised a vote on what would become Brexit during the election campaign of 2015, after a 5-year buildup on the issue. That referendum took place in 2016, and implementation took effect on 31 January, 2020. So this was the decade in which Brexit went from a minor grumble to public policy to reality.
This instability may not have manifested in the high turnover of leaders that was experienced in Australia, but they did have a far more dire experience with the GFC, and then the Brexit economic debate to navigate. I suspect that the experienced reality on the ground was no less turbulent there than it was here – it simply manifested in a different form.
The United States
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s first term ran from 2009 to 2013, and is considered part of the previous sub-era because it was dominated by recovery from the GFC. His second term was about building on that foundation, restoring the economy to full health.
In 2016, the American Public voted Donald Trump into office.
It doesn’t matter what side you are on, politically – no-one can dispute that the four years of Trump presidency were beset by controversy after controversy, a revolving door of staff in key positions, and a dramatic economic downturn even before Covid.
To about 1/3 of 42% of Americans, he is the greatest political leader the world has ever seen. To about the same number, he is personally distasteful as a leader, but they will vote for him anyway; Everyone else holds various shades of negative opinion about his Presidency.
If the Australian experience is described as turbulent, the Trump Presidency was white-water rafting while wearing a blindfold. The economy reflected that chaos and confusion and resulting lack of confidence in the future. Even without Covid, it was on a steep downward trend throughout the four years.
There are some who consider Trump to have been the worst President in US History; there are others who don’t quite rank him that poorly. And then, there are his fanatically-loyal followers.
In summary, then, if there was a dominant theme to the economic reality of the decade, a deathly economic illness (the GFC) had been thrown off, but in its wake was instability being masked by prosperity.
Beginning: Social Media
There’s a long trail of predecessors that lead to the rise of what we would recognize as social media. We had bulletin boards and chat rooms well before the start of this decade.
GeoCities was a precursor to the modern micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now “X”). I used it pretty much exactly the same way that I use Campaign Mastery these days, and have even recycled some of my old posts.(which I carefully archived at the time) for articles here.
Arguably, the first social media platform to make a splash in a very big way was Myspace, which started in 2003, but it was still focused on being a delivery system for whatever interested the account holder, and so closer to a traditional website.
Facebook was created in 2004, Twitter in 2006. Neither was an overnight success.
Facebook opened to public users in 2006, available to anyone 13 years of age (or more) with an email address.
By late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 pages on which companies promoted themselves.
— Wikipedia, Facebook
Between 2007 and 2008, developers created 33,000 applications to run on the platform, and there were more than 400,000 registered developers.
What we would recognize as “Facebook” came into existence with a significant redesign of the user interface dubbed “Facebook Beta” in July 2008. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.
The company announced 500 million users in July 2010. Half of the site’s membership used Facebook daily, for an average of 34 minutes, while 150 million users accessed the site from mobile devices.
— Same source
The creator, Mark Zuckerburg,
…announced at the start of October 2012 that Facebook had one billion monthly active users, including 600 million mobile users, 219 billion photo uploads and 140 billion friend connections.
— Same source
The decade of the 2010s was therefore one in which Facebook became a ubiquitous platform, and various users spent the decade learning just what that meant for society.
Twitter also got off to a slow start. Created at about the same time as Facebook went public, it was not until 2007 that it really got noticed.
A key turning point was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference.
During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. “The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,” remarked Newsweek’s Steven Levy. “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it.”
— Wikipedia, Twitter
From this beginning, growth was massive and continual. Over its first three years, Twitter rose from ranking 22nd amongst ‘social networking’ sites to be number 2, and it was still surging forward.
On November 29, 2009, Twitter was named the Word of the Year by the Global Language Monitor, declaring it “a new form of social interaction”. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily.
— Same source
Twitter’s usage spikes during prominent events. … A record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010.
The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan’s victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second.
The record was [re-]set again during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published.
When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words “Michael Jackson” at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.
The current record as of August 3, 2013, was set in Japan, with 143,199 tweets per second during a television screening of the movie Castle in the Sky (beating the previous record of 33,388, also set by Japan for the television screening of the same movie).
— Same source
From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out “New Twitter”, an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites.<./em>
— Same source
Like Facebook, the 2010s would be a period of Twitter dominance, then. Putting the two events together made this the decade of social media in the eyes of many.
Consequences
A lot of what follows are personal impressions, with which others may disagree.
Facebook always seemed to be a platform for more deliberate posts, while Twitter was more casual, more in-the-moment, more ephemeral.
Facebook largely killed email as a means of staying in contact with family and friends; the capacity to painlessly share photos and videos being an initial snare. To be clear, there were (and are) other solutions to that problem, but they require users to all have the same software just for that purpose; Facebook does all the heavy lifting for you.
Another difference between the two is the longevity of posts, which remain accessible for days after they are posted, even without you or anyone you know, adding to the discussion thread. Again, twitter seems far more immediate and ephemeral.
Event Organization
Protests and even attempted Revolutions have been organized through Social Media. Based on what I’ve written above, it should come as no surprise that events which demand spontaneity for security reasons are more oriented toward Twitter, while those which are deemed more publicly acceptable and hence can organize publicly, tend to be more Facebook oriented – at least until the event begins.
I can never think about such events without remembering the 1973 novella by Larry Niven, Flash Crowd. This looked at the social impacts of instant, practically free, teleportation:
One consequence not foreseen by the builders of the system was that with the almost immediate reporting of newsworthy events, tens of thousands of people worldwide – along with criminals – would teleport to the scene of anything interesting, thus creating disorder and confusion.
— Wikipedia, Flash Crowd
Instant transport is not necessary for such events; near-instant crowd-derived mass communications is sufficient. The resulting social activity can be pre-planned, or spontaneous, and has become known as a flash mob (clearly a tip of the hat to Niven’s story, IMO, though I am hardly the first to draw a connection between the two).
Here in Australia, the concept went largely unnoticed until a private party was gatecrashed by over 1000 party-goers, doing the sort of damage that such a large group of drunken revelers naturally commits. The host of the event, who had tweeted out an “all welcome”, had no expectation of the response. His parents home was largely destroyed, neighbors homes were damaged, there were noise and disturbance complaints for the entire street; when police arrived, some attempted to riot. He went to jail (I think for 24 months) as a consequence, and interviews following his release made it clear that his life had been forever changed by one thoughtless public tweet.
Echo Chambers & Political Polarization
Social media are built around the concept of interacting with a chosen social circle, but – unlike real life – social media users can choose to block or inhibit the display of content from sources with whom they disagree.
Studies have shown that, without contradiction, people become more prone to accept fringe reasoning that accords with their existing prejudices as factual, reorienting their belief structures to accommodate the new ‘truths’ that have been revealed to them. Once fringe content is accepted as factual, a new fringe opens for the user, and the process begins again.
This is what is meant by a social media “Echo Chamber” – someone posts a controversial opinion, and if they only get positive responses because they have curated those who receive the message to only those who support such thinking, it reinforces the original opinion.
Conspiracy theories, paranoia, and delusions are inevitable outgrowths if one is not careful. I’ve often described this as a rabbit hole down which rationality can vanish, never to be seen again – which is probably a little too strong on the hyperbole, but gets the point across.
Up until they embrace provable misinformation as fact, people in the grip of this particular form of mental aberration can be reasoned with, I have found; once that line is crossed, a form of induced psychosis takes hold, and the person becomes an adherent of a cult-like mentality. Outside their delusions, such people can be warm and friendly, opening the door for strangers, helping the elderly, being nice to dogs, you name it – but they have certain triggers that engage a break with reality.
It was quite rare for things to go that far until the latter end of the decade; it must be noted. The impact of the phenomenon is that political and social viewpoints become increasingly dogmatic and polarized.
In part to combat this, I wrote my 2019 article, The Olympian Perspective: Personal Opinions, Fake News, and the GM. The basic contention is that, as a GM, you need to be able to create rational characters who do not share your personal opinions and make them plausible to the wider audience (normally just your players, but some have greater reach).
Misinformation Manipulation
How much worse can the echo chamber effect get when it’s not just opinion and flawed reasoning being shared, but falsehoods deliberately designed to fog beliefs and promote social and political agendas?
That’s the difference between pre- and post- QAnon, when the flaws in rationalism began to be deliberately exploited, either for personal affirmation, or for entertainment purposes, or for political influence. That makes this extreme outcome of the social media experience a development that starts in 2017.
Things took an even more serious turn with the interference by Russia (and others) in the 2016 US elections, but this was not recognized until considerably later in history, with the publication of the Mueller Investigation report. I find it fascinating that there were no serious suggestions of similar interference in the 2020 presidential election or the 2018 and 2022 mid-terms, though it’s more understandable in the latter case – the Ukrainian Invasion and related disinformation efforts were clearly more essential.
But that’s getting ahead of myself.
Social Media: A box of matches?
I didn’t want to end this section on such a negative note. I’m well aware that I have focused hard on the problems of social media without giving equal emphasis to the positive aspects of the technology.
I can only really report these on a personal basis – I have made friends from all over the world through social media. I have regular readers and supporters who I would never have encountered, otherwise. I’ve complained elsewhere about the impact of social media on blog comments (Social Media, SEO, and the dying of comments, written all the way back in 2013), but for the most part, at least until recently, the social contributions of Social Media have been positive for the most part. Fire is useful too, we wouldn’t have a civilization without it.
Social Media is a box of matches. Used properly, it can enhance our lives and society. Mishandled, it can burn the house down. And no-one had read an instruction manual; we were all just figuring it out as we go.
I have tried very hard to separate recent events from this discussion. Everything that I’ve written about is relevant up to the point where Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Beyond that point… the jury is still out, but there’s a lot of yelling coming from the room where they deliberate.
Beginning: Wearable Tech
There was a time, at the start of the decade, when wearable tech looked like it was going to be The Next Big Thing. And then, for the most part, it went away, squashed flat by the smartphone.
Slowly, a decade later, it has started to reemerge – as data monitoring devices that feed to a smartphone. In particular, devices that continuously monitor blood sugar levels look set to take diabetes management into the 21st century.
But this tech doesn’t need to stop there. Consider the possibilities of wearable devices that monitor blood for reduced concentrations of chemotherapy drugs and release targeted medications in consequence. Or anti-psychotics, or dementia preventatives. Doses can be smaller and more targeted, reducing side effects while increasing efficacy. It’s not here yet, but we could be at the thin end of a medical revolution, one which changes the very concept of medication. Time will tell.
Beginning: Death Of A Visionary
Steve Jobs was controversial at times, treating apple more as a vehicle for his personal games with technological possibility than as a corporation seeking to make profits for its shareholders.
But those very qualities are what led to his second coming as Apple CEO, and the development of the iPad, iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone.
Jobs died in 2011, about 8 years after being diagnosed with a far less aggressive variety of pancreatic cancer. While he initially refused conventional treatments in favor of alternatives, ultimately he underwent surgery in mid-2004 that appeared to successfully remove the tumor..
18 months later, his cancer had returned. Over the next three years, his health seemed to decline and his medical issues become more complex, and he began stepping back into the shadows.
A lot of people in the Tech community, and its more public fringes, treated Jobs’ passing as the death of innovation itself, and the decade seemed determined to justify that reaction. Certainly, Jobs had discovered a rare knack for uncovering technological innovations that would receive public favor and mass adoption.
That simply meant that it would take time for people to emerge to replace him, and to find the right niches for their talents. It seemed to me as unlikely that anyone would become so messianically-percieved for many years as it was that innovation would actually cease.
But it would slow for a while, and this contributed to the placidity of the early decade in a business and social sense.
Middle: The New Entrepreneurs
The middle of the decade seemed to invalidate that assessment, though, as a brand of entrepreneurs emerged to match those of past eras. Zuckerburg with Facebook; Jeff Bezos with Amazon; Elon Musk with Tesla, all promised revolutionary change to the way people lived their lives, and grew wealthy persuading others of their technological visions.
Many of these got their start well before this decade; Tesla was incorporated in 2003, Amazon in the 1990s. Arguably, though, it was in the 2010-20 decade that their times came and they delivered on the promises recognized a decade or more earlier.
As with most overnight successes, people paid little attention to the decades of preparative work involved.
Like their early 20th-century and 19th century forebears – see Section 6. Locomotives & Robber Barons in Part 4 of this series, The Age Of Steam – some of those individuals felt beholden to share their success with the broader community, while others did so for more cynical PR purposes.
Either way, and following the trail blazed by modern entrepreneurial archetype Bill Gates (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and was reported in 2020 to be the second largest charitable foundation on earth, holding $69 billion in assets), they became modern philanthropists.
(For the record, the largest is the Novo Nordisk Foundation of Copenhagen, with $120.2 billion USD in its coffers).
These identities were regularly prominent through the decade sometimes due to controversies, sometimes due to their business operations, and sometimes for their charitable works, though the extent to which they embrace such publicity varies. Bezos, for example, it known to prefer to operate behind the scenes, while Musk is always willing to self-promote.
Climate Change: A Decade Of Lip Service
There are two events in recent times that have yielded a different experience in every nation on earth. One, quite obviously, is the Covid pandemic and policy reactions to same; and the other is Climate Change and the policy responses to that challenge.
Australia
Here in Australia, redneck refusals to acknowledge the danger caused attempts to derail public policies aimed at addressing the threat when there was a Prime Minister who wanted to act, and a willingness to pay lip service but little more when there was a Prime Minister who did not.
The Morrison government, in particular, tried to use clever bookkeeping to “meet” the carbon-emissions international commitments of others despite warnings that it posed an existential threat in the minds of many outside the home territories of those rednecks.
Furthermore, the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 and the flood emergencies of 2022 in the Eastern states. Remember the controversy of the Hawaiian holiday discussed earlier? Proving that he had learned nothing, Morrison campaigned in Western Australia while communities were ravaged by unprecedented flooding, which in turn caused a federal relief package for those affected to be delayed. There was strong public belief that both emergencies were either triggered by, or worsened by, climate change.
The fact that the Coalition Government, over its six year reign, had (1) dismantled an unpopular but effective carbon-tax system, and then (2) offered up no less than 22 energy policies, none of which it had succeeded in enacting, left his ‘climate credibility’ in complete tatters.
In the course of the catastrophic 2022 elections, the Liberal-National coalition was savaged at the ballot-box. winning just 58 seats – their lowest representation in government since first forming in 1946.
Six formerly safe Liberal seats in urban and suburban areas, most held by the party and its predecessors for decades, were won by “teal independents”.
— Wikipedia, 2022 Australian Federal Election
The Liberals also suffered large swings in a number of suburban seats that had long been reckoned as Liberal heartland. The Greens increased their vote share and won four seats, gaining three seats in inner-city Brisbane, the first time in the party’s history it won more than one seat in the lower house.
— Same source
All that, of course, falls on the far side of the pandemic, but it’s simply a measure of the ill-will and resentment that Morrison experienced on the environmental front, an arrogance which was duly punished at the post-Pandemic election.
The media had, of course, been dutifully reporting on the pronouncements of the various climate authorities, and the Bushfire/Flood/Flood trilogy created a sense that the Government had wasted a decade on inaction, or on actions that were subsequently undone.
Elsewhere
But, of course, everywhere else had its own distractions and problems. The US had been a world leader in the fight against carbon emissions under Barack Obama, but Donald Trump undid all that. Europe had Brexit on its plate. Both had the GFC demanding priority. The causes were different, though related, but the end result was the same – a decade came and went with no substantial progress to show for it.
End: Stirrings Of Alarm
The beginning of the end of the era was signaled by news reports in November and December 2019 of an outbreak of a new illness in China. These continued into January 2020, but caused no panic.
Past Epidemics
In part, the world was a victim of its own past successes. Scares like Bird Flu and had come and gone without a major international ripple. Lots of hand-wringing and moaning about how bad things could be, in the worst-case outcome – but those dire warnings never seemed to actually materialize.
Perceived Non-events
By 31 January, Italy indicated its first confirmed infections had occurred, in two tourists from China. But still, this was viewed as a minor incident – there might need to be some restrictions placed on travel from China, but there was little cause for panic.
In general, this was seen as a local Chinese problem, and a non-event elsewhere.
On 23 January 2020, bio-security officials began screening arrivals on flights from Wuhan to Sydney. Two days later the first case of a SARS-CoV-2 infection was reported, that of a Chinese citizen who arrived from Guangzhou on 19 January. The patient was tested and received treatment in Melbourne. On the same day, three other patients tested positive in Sydney after returning from Wuhan.
— Wikipedia, COVID-19 Pandemic in Australia
This Time It’s Real
And then that perception changed, and bodies began to pile up in New York and Italy. By now it was March. Too little, too late, serious travel restrictions were slammed into place.
The Pandemic changed everything. Anyone who thought we could just reopen and life would go back to normal had rocks in their heads.
The next part of this series will look at the two years of Pandemic and the years that have followed, and – to the best of my ability – consider what’s likely to happen over the next decade or so, at least in economic terms.
- Economics In RPGs 1: The Early Medieval
- Economics In RPGs 2: The Later Medieval
- Economics In RPGs 3: Pre-Industrial Eras
- Economics In RPGs 4: The Age Of Steam
- Economics In RPGs 5a: Electric Age Ch. 1
- Economics In RPGs 5b: Electric Age Ch. 2
- Economics In RPGs 6a: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 1
- Economics In RPGs 6b: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 2
- Economics In RPGs 6c: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 3
- Economics In RPGs 7: Economic Realities
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 1
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 2
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 3
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 4
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 5
- Economics In RPGs 9: In-Game Economics
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