Peak in the 2020s? Wow, you missed the 1970s entirely. You would have loved it.
Gas was 28 cents. When you tromped on the pedal, the car just took off. Not as safe as now if you wrecked it though.
Rent on a nice apartment with a pool in a coastal southern California city was $175. You could buy a 3 bedroom house in a new community for less than $200,000 and loans were easy to get. And values increased by about $1000 a month on most good ones. But interest rates were higher.
No AIDS, but Vietnam was still a mess. No Middle East terrorists, North Korea was an empty spot on the map with no activity. But people still thought atomic power plants were the next good thing. No cell phones, thank God. You actually had to have a cord between you and the other person. No personal computers, but they were not needed that much. Investments were understandable and few got burned. The stock market actually grew at a fairly stable and predictable rate.
NASA seemed actually exciting, with moon landings every few months and really big plans for the future.
How far we have tumbled in a half century!
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Very nearly like what's it's like now, barring a global natural catastrophe. 2020's close. There's a good novel by Albert Brooks called "2030" that paints a totally plausible picture of what the world could be like at the end of the next decade. In broad-strokes:
-America is no longer the world's economic super-power (China is)
-Life will become increasingly more difficult for young people, because...
-The increased life-span of all people due to medical advances, coupled with a stalled economy, will create real resentment for the elderly
-For Americans, the world after 2030 will be very unlike the one we have now. The 2020s will be a period of tectonic shifts in our relationship to the world as a whole