Optimist’s Guide to 2020

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By John Fraher, Drew Armstrong, Jeremy Scott Diamond and Sam Dodge

December 18, 2019, 12:00 AM EST

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Populism. War. Pollution. Since 2014, Bloomberg’s Pessimist’s Guide has imagined a roadmap of the world’s coming worries. But this year, you can open up the newspaper on any given day and get all the negative news you need.

Are things really that bad?

We don’t think so. This year, we’ve decided to take a different approach. Science, technology and changing social attitudes can plant the seeds for a brighter world. So instead of looking at what could go wrong, we’re asking you to look at what could go right.

Take a deep breath and get ready for the Optimist's Guide to 2020.

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The Share Button Gets Deleted

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a Senate Commerce

Online Infection

The Problem | The 2016 election was just the start of Facebook and Twitter’s problems. New entities, foreign and domestic, used Russia’s example to perfect the art of viral misinformation in 2020. The steps the companies took changed little about how the social sites worked—after all, online outrage added up to a lot of clicks.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks outside the White House

Missile Hoax

The Trigger | The @realdonaldtrump account inadvertently retweets a fake video of a nuclear missile launch aimed at Washington. The video proves impossible to scrub from the internet. Something has to change, platforms realize—and Twitter, Facebook and other social networks announce that their retweet and reshare functions will disappear, in an effort to stop the flow of fake news.

Three young women laughing while looking at a mobile phone outside

Better Sharing

A Better World | The social media giants survive: Turned-off users return to the platforms as the emphasis shifts to original, more thoughtful social content. Eventually, outrage culture moderates, and the spread of falsehoods slows down. Pockets of conspiracy still exist but recede to fringes or private groups and chat rooms, and trust in democratic institutions and media slowly rises back to levels not seen since the 1990s.

New Dads Get Sent Home

Italy's 2013 Member of the European Parliament Licia Ronzulli takes part with her daughter Victoria in a vote during a plenary session of the European parliament

Not Closing the Gap

The Problem | After narrowing for decades, the pay gap between men and women is stuck, and research points to one thing—motherhood. Well-intentioned firms try to help by extending maternity leave to four months or more, but as a result high-achieving women stay away from the office even longer while men are furthering their careers. The data back up the problem: At the beginning of their careers, men and women make almost equal amounts. By their 40s, women make 55% as much.

The 'Fearless Girl' statue stands across from the New York Stock Exchange

Stay Home, Dad

The Trigger | One of the major Wall Street banks announces that not only will men get equal parental leave to their female colleagues, it’ll be mandatory. In Silicon Valley, tech companies realize they’re falling behind in the race to implement market-leading benefits and quickly match the policy. Other giant firms—JPMorgan, General Motors, Oracle—follow.

Smiling baby crawling on living room floor with parents watching in the background, out of focus

Equality

A Better World | There’s culture shock at first, as hundreds of thousands of new dads figure out how to make themselves more useful at home during (and after) leave. Sociologists call the effect “the great leveling” as Gen Z’s female workers experience greater wage parity than any generation previously. By 2035, economists studying wages find that women under 45 are making 96% of what their male peers do. Wage equality finally happens when men experience parenthood at work in the same way as women.

Birth Control for All

Five women dressed as characters from The Handmaiden’s Tale supporting Planned Parenthood at a rally outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC

Underprotected

The Problem | Around the world, women’s access to birth control varies widely. In some countries the pill is hard to get and intrauterine devices are unavailable, and condoms and other single-use methods aren’t as effective as they could be. The effects are significant: Women participate in the labor force at lower rates, are more likely to die in childbirth and face a persistent gender wage gap.

Getting Control

The Trigger | In 2020, government, health and religious leaders in more than 180 countries announce an accord to provide free birth control to their female citizens. The 232 million women who say they want the ability to decide when to become pregnant will now be able to.

Three women standing in an office, facing forward and smiling

Working Women

A Better World | Health benefits arrive first: Fewer babies are born with HIV, since infected mothers can control pregnancy. Maternal mortality declines and more children live to adulthood as women space out births. Pregnancy-related healthcare costs decrease. The economic effects have a sweeping effect in developing countries: GDP rises as more female workers can join—and stay in—jobs; there’s less competition for government programs, easing the pressure on budgets. Two decades later, female reproductive empowerment is hailed as a major milestone in the catchup by developing nations.

HIV Is Defeated

A grandmother poses with her grandchildren she adopted after their parents died of AIDS

Decades of Deaths

The Problem | Decades after the start of the HIV epidemic, the statistics are still horrifying: More than 150,000 dead children a year, many born to infected mothers. In Africa, the virus kills 160,000 people a year in Nigeria, another 100,000 in South Africa and another 62,000 in Mozambique. The virus costs the globe billions of dollars a year, and holds back the economies of some African regions.

A laboratory technician picks up a test tube with a human blood sample at the Maccabi Health Services HMO central laboratory

Shot at a Miracle

The Trigger | In 2020, a major drugmaker announces that its experimental vaccine prevents about half of infections, the first hope against a virus that has spread death for decades by outwitting the immune system. The company rushes the vaccine into production as competitors work on ways to develop their own, better versions.

Video cameras pointing at a doctor giving a woman a vaccine

Eliminating HIV

A Better World | In high-risk countries, public health workers go city by city, inoculating whole populations. There are still almost 40 million people with HIV, but the 1.7 million new infections a year are cut by as much as 70%. Global treatment costs, estimated to reach $35 billion a year by 2031, level off and then fall. In Africa, life expectancy trends in some countries tick up as working-age people are spared, and economic growth increases by several percentage points. With the virus in retreat, parts of the continent experience a medical and economic miracle.

Swine Fever Turns a Billion People on to Fake Meat

Two butchers selling fresh outside their street market stall at night

The Real Cost of Pork

The Problem | China’s expanding economy has made the middle class richer—and hungrier than ever for meat. But all that livestock means more greenhouse gases, more deforestation and more pollution of air, waterways and land, just as climate change is accelerating.

Aerial view of Pigs infected with African swine fever being segregated by workers in full body suits

Fake Meat Fills In

The Trigger | African Swine Fever has torn through Asia and infected herds of pigs that are a crucial food staple. In China, half of its herd of 200 million pigs has been culled or died, and pork prices are high. With an empty spot on a billion-plus Chinese dinner plates, fake meat takes off. Investment pours into manufacturing technologies and capacity to meet the new global tastes.

Pork Gets Chopped

A Better World | In 2022, with U.S. pork exports falling thanks to new taste for plant substitutes, American political leaders join hands to declare soy- and pea-based meat an economic imperative, to the befuddled cheers of American environmentalists. China and the U.S. compete to push plant-based “meat” exports, stopping the growth of animal consumption—and its attendant costs—in developing markets around the globe. The meatless food revolution ends up slashing carbon emissions and feeds hundreds of millions of people at the same time.

A Global Green Deal

Flames rise from a forest fire that firefighters struggle to contain

Too Hot

The Problem | The planet is accelerating into a climate crisis. Super-storms, flooding, fire and drought threaten lives and force migration. Solutions have fallen short: Countries that signed the Paris Agreement are already set to miss their commitments.

The Losse river floods the city of Kaufungen, central Germany

The Climate Recession

The Trigger | A global economic slowdown materializes in mid-2020, when floods in Northern Europe and a drought in the south tip the continent—then the world—into a dramatic recession. European central bankers devise a plan: “Green QE.” German chancellor Angela Merkel sets up her party’s future by allying with the Greens and abandoning the country’s obsession with balanced budgets. The package promises to buy hundreds of billions of euros in green bonds and the European Investment Bank funds climate projects with more or less a blank check.

Golden retriever dog playing with stick on a flower meadow outdoors

Green Boom

A Better World | Climate-shaming had limited success, but economic envy works. In 2024, Europe is the first to pull out of the recession thanks to the stimulus plan. By 2026, America has followed suit with investment at home and abroad to boost the green manufacturing and energy sectors. Slowly, the climate crisis abates. Future historians credit the so-called Global Green Deal with changing the world.

China’s Combustion Ban Supercharges the EV Revolution

Cars drive on the road which is enveloped by heavy smog in China

Running Out of Gas

The Problem | Consumers are buying more and more electric cars. But adoption is nowhere near the pace needed to keep transport emissions—about 14% of global carbon output—from pushing the world way beyond the Paris Agreement’s targets. While China says it will eventually phase out gasoline cars, analysts say it won’t happen before 2040.

Baojun E100 electric vehicles sit parked in the parking lot of the SAIC-GM-Wuling

Turn the Key

The Trigger | In 2020, President Xi Jinping, under continued pressure at home to cut pollution and stimulate the Chinese economy, changes course on EV policy with a dramatic acceleration of China’s plans to eliminate conventional cars. Starting in 2025, no combustion-engine cars can be sold in the country.

Drive On

A Better World | As production ramps up, battery prices go lower and lower. That drives another, off-road revolution: Old power plants begin to be replaced by giant electricity storage centers that can store excess power production from renewables. Within a few short years, the economics of electric car manufacturing are transformed, not just in China but around the globe. Soon, new gasoline-fueled cars are as rare as vinyl records or VHS video-cassettes. China proves that a total transition to electric vehicles can be done, and the rest of the world follows suit.

The Big Liftoff

A reporter takes a smart phone photo of a mock up of the Crew Dragon spacecraft

Space Race

The Problem | The space race has been at full thrust for years, with billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson planning to fly wealthy joy-riders into orbit in 2020. More commercial rockets are launching than ever before. But to make Mars a destination for anyone besides NASA, or to seriously consider industry in space, the new rocketeers will need a significant reduction in launch costs.

A prototype of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft, against a blue sky with dramatic clouds

Big Rocket

The Trigger | In 2020, SpaceX’s starship—a 160-foot tall stainless-steel craft sitting on top of a massive booster—makes its first orbital test flight. As the ground in Texas rumbles under the massive ship’s dozens of engines, it’s proof that humanity will soon be able to truck 100 tons into orbit at a time, and on the cheap.

Father and daughter stargazing, rear view

...And Beyond

A Better World | The huge SpaceX rocket sets the terms for industry and exploration. On Earth (or just off of it), a ballistic passenger service turns travel from Hong Kong to London into a 30-minute hop. By 2030, huge, reusable rockets are hauling caches of fuel, gear and modules for a long-distance ship that will be aimed for Mars. A decade later, it no longers costs millions to buy a space tourism ticket, but thousands—subsidized by dozens of industrial flights that launch each week. Space becomes a place where people work and play.

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The Share Button Gets Deleted

By Sarah Frier

Photography: mkToy; JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Maskot

Data Sources: New Knowledge, SSCI Research Summary, December 1, 2018; Gallup
New Dads Get Sent Home

By Rebecca Greenfield

Photography: xijian; FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP via Getty Images; Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Tetra Images

Data Sources: Child Penalties Across Countries: Evidence and Explanations, March 2019; United States Census Bureau
Birth Control for All

By Emily Biuso

Photography: Redshift-Blueshift; SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images; KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images; MoMo Productions

Data Sources: 2018 data from the International Labour Organization compiled by the World Bank; IMF
HIV Is Defeated

By John Lauerman

Photography: Just2shutter; Brent Stirton/Getty Images; David Silverman/Getty Images; The Times / Contributor

Data Sources: UNAIDS
Swine Fever Turns a Billion People on to Fake Meat

By Deena Shanker

Photography: EvgeniyShkolenko; Alex Robertson; Yelim LEE / AFP; Lane Oatey/Blue Jean Images

Data Sources: USDA
A Global Green Deal

By Katia Dmitrieva and Enda Curran

Photography: BBC News; ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images; Uwe Zucchi/DPA; Maya Karkalicheva

Data Sources: Climate Action Tracker; BloombergNEF
China’s Combustion Ban Supercharges the EV Revolution

By Matthew Campbell and David R. Baker

Photography: 2Dwork; Visual China Group via Getty Images; Qilai Shen/Bloomberg; Justin Chin/Bloomberg

Data Sources: BloombergNEF
The Big Liftoff

By Justin Bachman

Photography: Faithfulshot; David McNew / Stringer; Loren Elliott / Stringer; Phil Banko

Data Sources: Federal Aviation Association "The Annual Compendium Of Commercial Space Transportation: 2018"

Contributors: Ben Holland, Katia Dmitrieva, Enda Curran, John Lauerman, Rebecca Greenfield, Matthew Campbell, David R. Baker, Deena Shanker, Sarah Frier, Justin Bachman and Emily Biuso