The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

How to Think About the Future (Part 2): Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades | Frankly 139

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Apr 24, 2026

A tour of four economic futures mapped on a growth-versus-overshoot grid, from green growth to Great Simplification and darker outcomes. Power dynamics are layered next, exploring concentrated versus distributed authority and who captures the gains. Geopolitics is framed around cooperation versus adversarial relations and interdependence. Earth system limits and climate stress are added as boundary conditions that shape every scenario.

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INSIGHT

Four Sources Of Power Matter

Power is multifaceted: military, political, financial, and technological forces each shape societal outcomes.
Nate treats technological power as its own growing source distinct from money, noting its rising dominance in some domains.

INSIGHT

Power Concentration Changes With Contraction

Power can be mapped by decision-making concentration and who captures gains, yielding four political-economy quadrants.
During contraction the stakes shift from fairness to basic survival, making concentrated-capture arrangements far more volatile.

ADVICE

Plan For Geopolitics On Two Axes

Assess geopolitics along cooperation versus adversarial and interdependence versus self-sufficiency axes when planning for energy and supply risk.
Nate argues cooperative self-sufficient regional blocs may be most stable under energy contraction.

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This week's Frankly is part two of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, Nate expands on the case for holding a distribution of possible futures rather than a single preferred one, and walks through a structured scenario-building exercise. He begins with the two-by-two grid that he has used for years, which indicates whether the economy will expand or contract and whether this happens within ecological limits or in overshoot. The four quadrants this produces represent possible directions toward the future: toward green growth, Mordor, Mad Max, or the Great Simplification.

From there, Nate layers three more grids on top of this economic foundation. A grid focused on power – military, political, financial, and technological – asks how concentrated each is and where the gains flow. A grid regarding geopolitics maps cooperation and adversarial relations against interdependence and self-sufficiency, using the Strait of Hormuz closure as a live example of an adversarial and interdependent geopolitical makeup. Finally, an Earth systems grid tracks climate stress and biosphere integrity, taking into account that we are operating from an already compromised baseline. Nate also describes the role of technology as a modifier across all these grids, which amplifies whatever direction the surrounding system is already moving. He emphasizes that the real future will always come as a composite across these layers, and that the same economic headline produces radically different lived realities depending on the power, geopolitical, and ecological conditions it sits inside.

Where do you find yourself already settled on a particular view of the future, and what gets filtered out when you are? Of the four grids Nate lays out, which feels most defining in your thinking, and which do you tend to underweight? What other grids might matter for anticipating the future, and how might they interact with the ones here?

(Recorded April 20th, 2026)

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