The world as known in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s ended around the 2008 global financial crisis and will never return to that configuration.

The freedom ideology underlying neoliberalism (free markets, deregulation, minimal government) had ironic consequences: baby boomers who sought to shrink government in fact became increasingly reliant on government intervention via central banks and fiscal policy to maintain the asset values they had accumulated, the opposite of their stated intent.

Neoliberalism as an ideology is theoretically sound when modeled but does not reflect how real societies and real economies actually function, because it assumes perfect markets, perfect information, complete free trade, and populations willing to accept unemployment and wage degradation—conditions that do not exist in practice.

The information age began in the early 1970s but did not become significantly disruptive until the late 1990s, and disruption has increased through subsequent stages of the information revolution, fundamentally altering the role of capital and labor.

In the 1937 book 'Planned Societies and Economies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,' economists, sociologists, and anthropologists from Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and the New Deal United States reached broad consensus that free market philosophy had created catastrophic consequences and the key question was not whether to plan economies but rather how much planning and how much freedom to preserve.

Financialization creates a sugar effect early on (bringing forward consumption and growth through borrowing) but becomes toxic over time, because those closest to the fountain of capital become richer while ordinary wage-earners become poorer, massively accelerating inequality.

The rise of neoliberalism from the late 1970s through 2000s had five major consequences: massive acceleration of technological disintermediation, rise of deep financialization, increasing dependence on assets rather than income, massive increase in inequalities and inequities, climate degradation, and a preoccupation with growth and wealth at the expense of everything else.

Politics and national security were treated as externalities by neoliberal theory, which either did not believe society existed at all or treated it as merely a construct of politics that impeded market functioning, when in fact economics is always embedded in politics and when they are separated, people revolt and mobilize against the system.

The government's role in economic regulation of monopolies, trusts, and anti-competitive behavior substantially atrophied from the 1950s-70s through the 2000s, such that antitrust law was not adapted to new technological contexts where harm comes not from price gouging but from usage of consumer data and behavioral manipulation.

CEO compensation rose from 40-50 times average earnings in the 1970s to 300 times average earnings by the 2000s, reflecting neoliberal belief in executive freedom to set their own pay rather than government oversight of corporate compensation structures.

The 1930s and today share fundamental structural similarities: technology-driven labor disruption, severe financial crises and high financialization, climate disruption, pandemics, inequality comparable to the Gilded Age, and loss of confidence in the system leading to proliferation of alternative political ideologies.

The Federal Reserve prevented a full depression equivalent to the 1930s by intervening in 2008-2010 and during COVID, but by avoiding the pain of deep recession, governments also avoided the recovery and deleveraging that would normally follow, settling instead for 'circular stagnation' with chronic dependence on monetary and fiscal support.

The Fujiwara effect describes a meteorological phenomenon where multiple hurricanes converge and either merge or strengthen, used metaphorically to explain how multiple historical crises (technology, finance, climate, pandemics) converge simultaneously to create supertorms that are far more disruptive than any single crisis.

Technology is fundamentally a manifestation of human curiosity (present since human origins) but the speed of technological progress depends on capital availability; abundant cheap capital in post-1980s financialization accelerated information-age disruption like 'pouring kerosene on a bonfire.'

The information age is changing not just the importance of human muscle (as industrial revolution did) but human cognitive capacity itself, approaching technological singularity where humans and machines become indistinguishable within 15-20 years, creating an existential challenge to human purpose and value.

In 1970s, the pendulum of government regulation swung too far toward overbearing control, creating stagflation, demonstrating that excessive government intervention is also destructive—but this does not prove the neoliberal extreme of minimal intervention is correct either.

No major economist in the 1960s believed the private sector was better at capital allocation than the public sector, because they had empirical evidence from 1920s-30s of private sector failures in capital allocation, reversing the burden of proof that neoliberals later assumed.

The objective of corporations in the 1950s-70s (producing quality products, satisfying customers, supporting national economic development) was replaced by Milton Friedman's profit maximization doctrine in the 1980s, which became the only criterion for corporate behavior, enabling massive compensation and buyback expansion.

The annual volume of share buybacks in the United States reached approximately $1 trillion per year, representing roughly half of what capital expenditures are, meaning corporations are increasingly engaging in self-liquidation to inflate stock prices rather than investing in productive capacity.

Suppression of economic and capital market cycles led to shallower growth rates, accumulation of inefficiencies, lack of clearances, accelerated technological disintermediation, increasing dependence on asset appreciation rather than earnings, and ultimately systemic inefficiency that younger generations reject.