How The 2010s Changed The World

As we say goodbye to the 2010s, I want to reflect on what is perhaps the first decade that I remember in its entirety, and look back on an eventful and consequential 10 years.

This is the decade smartphones went mainstream, taking over our lives and facilitating massive social movements such as the Arab Spring and #MeToo. In 2011, only 35% of Americans in a poll by Pew Research owned a smartphone; today that number is closer to 81%. Smartphones almost universally adopted touch screen during this past decade and started rivaling PCs for processing power. In fact, the smartphone in your pocket has several thousand times the processing power of the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969. At the start of the decade in 2010, a little known photo-sharing app called Instagram hit the App Store; the rest as they say is history. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion in what has to be one of the best acquisition deals of all time, considering today the app is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion with over 1 billion active monthly users, with 50% of those checking their feed daily. For every dollar they spent on Instagram in 2012, Facebook now has an active user... not bad, right? Surely we're worth more than a dollar! Elsewhere, ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft forever changed the transportation industry, Slack is on its way to perhaps revolutionize communication in the workspace, and online dating is more accessible and socially-accepted than ever before in the era of swiping on Tinder and Bumble.

Millions of us cut the cord in favor of curating our own personalized streaming channels, playing content on YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and others at the press of a button. Leichtman Research Group says that about 50% of households in the U.S. with Internet access now stream video content daily, up from just 16% in 2009. Gone are the days of having to watch whatever was on TV that night and having to listen to whatever the radio was playing; today all of us are the proud owners of our own personal streaming stations that play what we want when we want. In case you're wondering what's on the Barik Chaudry Channel (also known as the BCC, not to be confused with the BBC) these days: HBO's Succession (highly recommend), some James Bond flicks from the 90s, and music from Billie Eilish.

In pop culture, a staggering 40 of the 50 highest grossing movies of all time (unadjusted for inflation) came out during this decade, featuring several entries from The Walt Disney Company and their franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars, including Avengers: Endgame at the very top, raking in a massive $2.79 billion in 2019. One explanation as to why franchises dominated the box office during this time is because movie studios are reliant upon them to bring people into movie theaters at a time when streaming movies at home is easier than ever before. HBO's Game of Thrones started and finished during the 2010s, sweeping the world into a collective medieval madness. In the video-game industry, Minecraft came out in 2011 and became the best-selling video game of all time, having sold more than 180 million copies.

In sports, it likely isn't a coincidence that so many athletes cemented themselves as some of the best to ever play during the 2010s; the rise of sports science along with better medical research and training methods than ever before has helped create some truly dominant athletes with incredible longevity. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi traded blows throughout the decade for the crown of the world's best soccer player. "The Decision" in 2010 kicked off the decade when LeBron James infamously announced that he would be joining the Miami Heat, later going on to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, perhaps only second to Michael Jordan. Serena Williams and Roger Federer added to their illustrious tennis careers with more titles well into their 30s during this decade, and Tiger Woods completed one of the greatest sporting comebacks in recent memory when he won the Masters in 2019 at the age of 43 after 11 years without a major championship. At the same time, eSports exploded in growth, having an audience of more than 450 million with excess of $1 billion in annual revenue by 2019.

The 2010s were a record-breaking decade for the stock market: the ongoing bull run that started in March 2009 is now the longest in American history, with the S&P 500 now up more than 450% since that time. During this incredible and unprecedented run, Apple became the first publicly traded company to achieve a $1 trillion valuation in August 2018, followed closely by Microsoft in June 2019. The close of the decade saw the biggest IPO in history, with Saudi Aramco raising $25.6 billion in December 2019, outpacing a record set by Alibaba earlier in the decade in 2014. Who could've predicted such a decade after the Great Recession of 2008-09 was the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression? As an Economics major, discussions about when, if, or why we may see the "next recession" are often part of my conversations with peers. Though the economy seems to be doing well at the moment with unemployment at a 50 year low around 3.6%, likely candidates that could instigate a recession in the 2020s include the ongoing student debt crisis and trade policy, but only time will tell. I almost feel as though the unexpected nature of the last recession was a major factor in how bad it was (hardly anyone could see a subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. housing market, let alone one that would cause a global recession), and that alarmist warnings about the "next recession" that dominate headlines in business and financial literature these days somehow make it less likely to actually happen, at least with the severity and length of 2008-9.

Unfortunately, not everything in the 2010s resulted progress and prosperity; climate change led to 2014-2018 (data from 2019 pending) being the 5 hottest years scientists have on record. Rising amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere combined with increasing sea levels and other factors contributed to extreme weather patterns all over the world. Scientists think climate change may even be worsening earthquakes. From the 2010 Haiti earthquake at the beginning of the decade to devastating hurricanes and wildfires, natural disasters worsened by the weather effects of climate change were impossible to ignore. In my hometown of Houston, we saw three "500 year floods" in the span of three years during this decade including the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey, which is tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest cyclone in U.S. history, causing over $125 billion in damage. These numbers simply don't add up and point to a much deeper problem. If historians ever look back at when climate change became perhaps the defining social issue of a generation, they will look back at the late 2010s, when roughly 4 million protestors (many of them children) took to the streets in 150 countries during the September 2019 climate strikes, thus far the largest climate strikes in history. A major figure in the climate strike movement, 16 year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was honored as TIME's Person of the Year in 2019 for her efforts in bringing awareness to global climate change. While both the public and private sector will need to work in tandem to reduce the world's carbon footprint in the 2020s and beyond, the 2010s were not without strides. In 2017, renewable energy was creating jobs 12x faster than the rest of the economy, representing how the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy is also an immense economic opportunity. Perhaps no company in this space dominated headlines in the 2010s like Tesla did, growing from being worth about $1 billion at the start of the decade to $75 billion at the end of the decade under the helm of eccentric mad genius Elon Musk. Surprisingly, despite his and the company's highs and lows, you may be surprised to learn he is currently the longest-tenured CEO of any automotive manufacturer in the world. His company has helped shift the entire automobile industry towards clean and renewable energy, a trend visible with offerings such as the Porsche Taycan, Audi e-tron, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E all hitting the market soon to try and compete with vehicles from Tesla. As an automotive enthusiast, if these impressive vehicles are any indication, the future is bright.

Progress made by the world in the 2010s goes well beyond clean energy; the rate of extreme poverty in the world was actually cut in half during this decade, from 15.7% in 2010 to 7.7% now. A major factor in this was the rise of China as a potential global superpower, resulting in economic growth that has all but eradicated extreme poverty in the country. Childhood mortality for children under 5 fell from 5.6% in 2008 to 3.9% in 2018, according to the U.N. Significant medical progress was made in cancer immunotherapy, the treatment of Hepatitis C, and cell therapy, among others. SpaceX successfully launched the re-usable Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful launch vehicle by payload capacity, into space three times between 2018-2019, famously sending Elon Musk's 2008 Tesla Roadster into space orbit with a launch dummy (remember when I called him an eccentric mad genius?), and inching humanity one step closer towards a manned mission to Mars and other places in our solar system. Fellow astronomy nerds will have surely already seen the first ever image of a black hole that was taken in 2019, with more to come in the 2020s.

I saved some of the "progress" we've made in the 2010s for last with the optimism that we'll continue to build on it and make further advancements in eradicating poverty, technology, green energy, medicine, and exploring the final frontier of space among other fields in the 2020s.

On a personal level, I enter the new decade with a hint of anxiety as a fresh college graduate, considering the 2020s will quite possibly be filled with a lot of important milestones: my first job, hopefully somewhere I can use my passion of using data to solve problems, my first apartment, starting a family, etc. But more than anything, I begin the 2020s with a great deal of excitement for the progress that we still have to make.

Here's to the Streaming 20's!