My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with the crying baby on the cover.
While we’re on the topic of the cover, I should mention that Andy Serwer’s cover story on The Decade From Hell is not purely an exercise in looking through the rearview mirror. Well, actually, it is mostly an exercise in looking through the rearview mirror, but I also have a distinct memory of Andy, at some point in 2001 or 2002 (it couldn’t have been 2000, when he was still bullish), going on one of his trademark rants about what a crummy decade the 2000s were going to be. “It’s the ’70s all over again,” he said. Pollyanna that I am, I doubted him. And he was wrong: It wasn’t the ’70s all over again. It was worse.
So when Andy says the next decade is going to be better, as he does in his essay, I believe him. Although of course Nassim Taleb would say I’m a fool for doing so.