Some thoughts and predictions
I’ve started writing down some predictions about the US in 2030, as a way to generate startup ideas. About half is based on today’s facts and trends, and the other half are just my guesses.
I will write a follow-up article on how this translates into concrete opportunities. I’d love to hear other predictions — particularly the unconventional ones!
Geography and housing: Major urban and peri-urban areas will continue to grow and become more expensive
The rural-urban migration will continue full-force. Americans will continue to move towards the top 20 US cities (the usual suspects plus cities like Austin, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Pittsburgh), where wealth will continue to concentrate. Baby Boomers selling their homes will put downward pressure on real estate, but overall home prices will continue to increase in urban and peri-urban areas.
Rentals will become more popular; nearly 70% of population under the age of 45 (Millennials and younger) will be renters rather than buyers. This is driven by a mix of financial challenges, convenience, and not wanting to commit.
Suburbs within 30–60 min of cities will also continue to grow, as more people want to live in areas that have access to cities… and self-driving cars will make these suburbs more accessible.
Population: Gen Z will drive interesting new trends, including a move to “asset light” living — not owning homes, cars, or even furniture
Gen Z and Millennials already account for 64% of the global population in 2019, and their share as major consumers and members of the workforce will only grow. Both Gen Z and Millennials are interested in flexibility — they don’t want to commit to a company, or a place to live. The “new American dream” is being able to pack two suitcases and move to a new city — not to own cars, homes, and other heavy assets. Services such as furniture rental and furnished apartments will increase in popularity.
Gen Z is already moving away from mass social-platforms like Facebook, and towards secret or private networks like Snapchat and private group chat (including on Whatsapp and Instagram). Unfortunately, cyber-bullying can still happen via private chat, and suicide and mental health issues are sharply on the rise for children and teens. Demand will continue to grow for mental health solutions to serve this population.
Healthcare: Lack of insurance coverage will result in more patients seeking cost-effective treatments directly from providers. AI should be able to handle most basic healthcare diagnoses
A growing percentage of medical procedures will be paid for out-of-pocket and without insurance coverage, due to high deductibles. Consumers interested in saving money will increasingly shop around for lower prices on healthcare.
AI-driven doctor tools should dramatically improve the accuracy of medical diagnoses. Consumer-facing AI chatbots will be able to answer basic medical questions, but regulatory challenges will remain.
When consumers need to get prescriptions, their common approach will be to connect with online services that provide telemedicine-driven solutions and prescriptions for dermatology, birth control, mental health, and other common conditions. Services like Hims, Nurx, and others have exploded in popularity and will likely continue to grow (despite very legitimate concerns from the medical community).
Many patients will continue to want to see health care providers in person, but many will lack regular primary care physicians. Private, largely for-profit “walk-in clinics” will continue to be a popular choice for a large segment of the population, and I expect the dental industry to follow a similar trend.
Medicare will be largely outsourced to private companies via Medicare Advantage, and will continue to be the major cash cow for most insurance companies.
Mental health and therapy will continue to increase in popularity, particularly driven by Millennials and Gen Z and an increasingly connected, and stressed world.
Biotech: New engineering methods will drive new drug discoveries
Synthetic biology will transform drug discovery; many new drugs, particularly gene and cell therapies, will be discovered using new engineering methods.
Increasing resistance to antibiotics, and increasing infectious disease burdens due to climate change (e.g., sharp increase in Lyme disease) will cause urgent need for new medicines.
Population: There will be massive growth in the older population, but questions remain on who will pay for health and caregiving
At the same time, the US will experience significant growth in the older population — by 2030, the US will be home to nearly 72M people over the age of 65. Demographically, over 80% of this population will be white. The majority will not have saved enough for retirement; people will try to continue working for as long as possible to generate income.
A significant number of Americans will leave the workforce early to care for parents without pay, and over 10 million people will be employed full-time as caregivers (up from 5 million today). Caregiving will continue to be a low-paying job, as the majority will be paid via Medicaid reimbursement, and middle class Americans will often pay for care with under-the-table cash payments that will average $12 to $15 per hour.
One of the most difficult and unresolved policy issues will be the question of who will pay for health and caregiving for our aging population.
Shopping: Consumers will obsessively look for online reviews they can trust
E-commerce will continue to grow — consumers are now willing to do effectively everything online. However, trusted brick and mortar brands that sell marquee goods at prices competitive with online vendors (e.g., Whole Foods, Best Buy) will continue to thrive.
Consumers will do a ridiculous amount of online research (“commerce content”) before purchasing products — new companies will use AI to make this research process more seamless.
US has more retail space per capita than any other country, and many of the shopping malls, strip malls, and middle-tier stores will not survive in their current form; there will be significant commercial space that will need to be converted to other uses.
Weather: Climate shocks will continue around the country, leading to huge financial damages
Climate shocks will continue, meaning heavy damage to coastal areas due to tornados (Southeast US and the Gulf, but also Baltimore and New York), and California will suffer from increasingly violent wildfires that sustain major property damage.
Insurance companies will refuse to insure these areas, resulting in financial damages to real estate owners.
Financials: Tech will remain a major growth engine for the US economy
Despite a market correction in early 2020, equities will recover back to pre-correction levels within 2 years. Innovative tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft will continue to capture enormous amounts of value. In addition, emerging markets investments which were battered in 2018 will be top performers.
Agriculture + Food: There will be increasing interest in reducing meat consumption, and avoiding endocrine disruptors such as pesticides. Fast casual restaurant chains will continue to grow
The food supply will undergo major shocks due to climate change — wildfires and droughts will dramatically decrease agricultural output.
Fish stocks will decrease worldwide, leading to increased demand for farmed fish. Meat consumption will remain high, despite environmental impacts, due to population growth. At the same time, Gen Z will drive significant growth in “flexitarian” diets — already, 79% of Gen Z is interested in going meatless once or twice a week. 12% of people age 18–29 say they follow a vegan or vegetarian diet mostly or always; only 5% of people over the age of 50 say the same. This creates an opportunity to provide new plant-based food options.
There will be increased awareness of the long-term impacts of pesticides and other endocrine disruptors in food and personal care products. Demand for organic products will remain strong, and major companies will continue to aggressively acquiring natural and organic food companies.
Fast-casual chains will continue to be popular — they are a lower-cost alternative to restaurants, but higher quality than traditional fast food. Improved efficiencies in logistics will decrease the cost of food delivery, leading consumer to order even more delivery.
Politics: Deadlock will largely remain, but Gen Z will drive change on gun violence and global warming
There will continue to be deadlock in American politics, as structural issues prevent widespread change (e.g., California has 2 Senate seats for 39 million people, while Wyoming also has 2 Senate seats for 570,000 people. The former will remain staunchly Democratic while the latter will remain staunchly Republican).
Online discourse will continue to get more toxic, further polarizing Americans.
Gen Z will lead the change in public opinion on two topics that disproportionately impact them — gun violence and global warming.
Electricity: Solar and wind will continue to grow, primarily from utility rather than consumer procurement. Energy storage will quickly become the limiting factor for renewables
Solar and wind will continue to grow, primarily through direct procurement from utilities.
However, once there is 20 to 40% penetration of renewables we will reach a point where “energy supply at sunny or windy times meets demand or even overtakes it.” Willingness to pay for wind or solar in those moments will fall to zero.
This creates an urgent need for cheap energy storage that can transform wind and solar from intermittent power to firm power. To break out beyond 20–40% penetration, the price of wind / solar + storage will have to fall below the price of energy generation from a natural gas plant. This will likely require implementation of a carbon tax or other mechanism.
In the short-term nuclear power plants will be blocked, as nobody wants nuclear in their backyard. However as 2030 approaches, I believe there will be breakthroughs in nuclear fusion and reactor design that will make it possible to cost-effectively build nuclear plants.
Environment: Gen Z will demand higher standards for sustainability. However, strong government action will be required to truly make a dent on de-carbonization
Gen Z consumers will demand more environmental sustainability from companies, and companies in turn will try to satisfy consumers by doing the minimum amount possible. However, this will not be nearly enough to make a big-picture difference; in order to truly make a dent on plastics pollution, climate change, etc. — the government will need to take action.
Transportation: full autonomy and full electricity will be a reality by 2030
By 2030 we will have widespread Level 4 autonomous vehicles for applications like trucking, agriculture, and urban ride-hailing in major metropolitan areas. Autonomous highway driving will come online sooner than urban driving applications.
The vast majority of vehicles will be electric.
Charging points will be set up across all major cities for scooters, and Level 2 electric car chargers will be widely available at home, parking garages, retail (e.g., Wal-Marts and Best Buys) and most office buildings.
Electric scooters and bikes will be widely available in major cities, provided by Uber, Lyft, and multiple scooter companies. Cities will finally get their act together, and will get rid of street parking to increase space for electric bikes and scooters.
Media: A handful of major publishers will dominate the media landscape. Outside of major publishers, fake news will continue to proliferate and be hard to combat
A handful of major publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post will thrive. They will successfully move away from ad-based models, and capture the vast majority of subscription revenues. News aggregators such as Apple News will struggle to gain traction, since major publishers should not cannibalize their business by joining the platform.
Digital news will continue to be a tough business. Local news will continue to get decimated — extremely staff-light models like Patch might be the only survivors.
Misinformation will continue to spread, and it will be increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction — particularly as technology will be used to modify audio and video.
AI will not accurately be able to detect fake news, but can be used to identify who the original source of information was — this might be the primary filter for validating whether information is coming from legitimate media sources.
Podcasting will continue to increase in popularity, and marketers will start doing programmatic ads.
E-Sports / gaming: Gaming is already mainstream, but will continue to grow in popularity and will drive most of the advances in AR and VR
Already, video game releases have bigger “opening weekends” than major movies, and already Twitch has more viewership than Netflix.
Games will drive the majority of sales of AR and VR hardware.
An increasing number of people will be playing e-sports for money, including casual gamers.
Education: Income Share Agreements will become a mass-market competitor to student loans
Currently over 44 million borrowers hold $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. For many, it’s a crushing financial burden.
Income Share Agreements (ISAs) will explode in popularity, as many students want to take educational courses without having to pay money upfront.
The early iterations of ISAs were too greedy, asking for 15%+ of incomes for 3+ years, with no upper limit on how large the repayment will be. The new ISAs look more like deferred tuition payments that align the incentives of the school and the student — the student only has to pay IF they find a job that pays a minimum salary. Further, many ISAs guarantee that a student will never have to pay more than 2.5x the sticker price of the tuition.
ISAs are now enjoying wide bipartisan support, and new education companies such as Lambda School are scaling fast.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
As I’ve started looking at trends, it has become apparent that Gen Z will shape many unexpected and interesting new trends — and will require a separate post with some bolder predictions!
I hope you enjoyed reading some of my thoughts / predictions — I’d love to hear your comments, criticisms, and hear more about what YOU think! Contact me on Twitter or at andy@vas.ventures.
