The World in the Year 2000

Podcast Transcript

The year 2000 was a milestone year. It was the end of a century and of a millennium.

It was one of the rare years that was divisible by 100 and was a leap year.

In the previous 25 years, the world had radically changed. Empires fell, superpowers emerged, and technology had changed civilization.

…and that year, a whole lot of people thought the world would end due to a computer bug.

Learn more about the world in the year 2000 on episode 2000 of Everything Everywhere Daily.

500 episodes ago, I began looking at the state of the world every century, every 100 episodes.

We have now reached the end of the 20th century and the end of the millennium. Most importantly, we’ve reached a point where the vast majority of the show’s audience were alive.

Because most of you were there, I don’t need to rehash the news. So, I’m going to zoom way out and look at the macro events that shaped the world between 1975 and 2000.

Someone who entered a coma in 1975 and woke up in 2000 would have found the world a very different place.

Politically, 1975 was defined by a relatively stable Cold War bipolar world. The United States and the Soviet Union dominated global affairs, each at the head of a military alliance, NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was still shaped by postcolonial struggles, military dictatorships, and proxy conflicts.

By 2000, that structure had been dismantled. The Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991 after internal economic decay, political reform, and nationalist movements tore it apart. Its fifteen successor states, most notably the Russian Federation, were still struggling in 2000 to define their political and economic systems.

The Warsaw Pact no longer existed, and several of its former members had joined or were preparing to join NATO and the European Union. The United States emerged from the end of the Cold War as the single military superpower, with unmatched global reach and a network of alliances that seemed to confirm it as the world’s hegemon.

Almost no one in 1975 could have predicted how rapidly the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc would fall apart. If you look at fictional movies and books from the period, everyone assumed that the Soviet Union would exist well into the 21st century.

Europe itself was transformed. In 1975, the European Economic Community was still primarily a trade arrangement among a small group of Western European states. Over the next quarter century, it deepened and widened. The Maastricht Treaty in 1992 created the European Union, introduced the concept of European citizenship, and laid the groundwork for a single currency.

By 2000, the euro existed as an electronic currency for financial transactions, with notes and coins scheduled to enter circulation in 2002.

Institutional integration grew as well, with the European Parliament gaining more influence and supranational law increasingly shaping EU member states. At the same time, the map of Europe had been redrawn. Germany was reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the peaceful collapse of the East German state.

Yugoslavia had disintegrated through violent wars in the 1990s, leaving behind a patchwork of new states and unresolved ethnic and political tensions. The Soviet collapse created new countries from the Baltics to Central Asia. Europe in 2000 was more democratic, more prosperous, more integrated, and yet also more complex.

Other regions also saw dramatic political change. Latin America in 1975 was ruled mainly by military regimes in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, often justified in the name of anti-communism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, these regimes gave way to elected governments in a broad wave of democratization, even as economic crises and structural adjustment programs reshaped daily life.

In East and Southeast Asia, several authoritarian regimes, notably South Korea and Taiwan, transitioned to competitive democracies while maintaining rapid economic growth.

In Africa, the late 1970s and 1980s were marked by coups, one-party states, Cold War meddling, and economic hardship. The 1990s brought multiparty elections to many countries and the formal end to apartheid in South Africa in 1994, with the election of Nelson Mandela symbolizing a significant shift in African politics.

At the same time, the Rwandan genocide, civil wars in West and Central Africa, and the long legacy of colonial borders and economic dependence kept the continent politically fragile.

The Middle East and the broader Islamic world had also changed significantly. In 1975, many Arab states were authoritarian but secular, and Iran was ruled by the shah, a pro-Western monarch.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 replaced him with an Islamic Republic, transforming the geopolitical balance in the region and providing a model for political Islam.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the same year, the subsequent jihad against it, and the rise of militant Islamist networks would later feed into new forms of terrorism.

The Arab Israeli conflict remained unresolved, although by 2000, Egypt and Jordan had signed peace treaties with Israel, and the Oslo process had created the Palestinian Authority.

The Gulf region, enriched by oil, experienced war and upheaval, particularly the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which led to the US-led Gulf War and a long period of sanctions and containment. By 2000, the region was a central focus of global politics because of its energy resources and unresolved conflicts.

Technological change between 1975 and 2000 was so profound that it almost amounted to a shift in our civilization’s operating system. In 1975, microprocessors were new, computers were large and rare, telephones were landline devices, media consisted of a handful of broadcast channels, and the idea of a global digital network was mostly speculative.

By 2000, personal computers were standard in homes and workplaces across the developed world and were spreading rapidly in emerging economies.

The microelectronics revolution had made computing cheaper, smaller, and more powerful each year. The early internet, born out of research and military networks, had grown in the 1990s into the World Wide Web, a publicly accessible platform that allowed ordinary people to publish, communicate, and access information globally.

In 1975, email was an obscure, specialized tool. By 2000, it had become a primary mode of professional communication. Commercial websites, online news, search engines, and early forms of online commerce had begun to transform how people shopped, learned, and conducted business.

Telecommunications experienced similar leaps. In 1975, long-distance calls were expensive and often unreliable, and very few people had access to any sort of mobile device. By 2000, digital mobile phone networks covered much of the world, and in many countries, mobile phone penetration was approaching or surpassing fixed-line telephone coverage.

Satellite communication, fiber optic cables, and digital switching made international communication faster and cheaper. Television expanded from a few broadcast channels to hundreds of cable and satellite stations, many of them 24-hour news, sports, or entertainment.

This created a real-time global media environment in which events in one corner of the world could be seen almost immediately everywhere else.

Other scientific and technical fields advanced in parallel. Biotechnology and medicine saw the development and spread of techniques like in vitro fertilization, the production of recombinant insulin, and the growth of genetically modified crops.

The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and by 2000 had essentially completed a first draft of the human genetic blueprint, pointing toward a future of genetic medicine that was still mostly speculative at that time.

In health, the most devastating new development was the HIV AIDS pandemic, first recognized in the early 1980s. By 2000, it had infected tens of millions of people, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and had reshaped global public health priorities.

In transportation and infrastructure, containerization of shipping, which was still gaining ground in 1975, had by 2000 completely transformed global trade, making it possible to move goods around the world much more cheaply and efficiently.

Commercial aviation expanded dramatically, with wide-body jets making long-distance travel routine and affordable for an expanding global middle class. High-speed rail networks were developed in Japan and later in Europe and parts of Asia.

Navigation and positioning benefited from the deployment of satellite systems such as the American GPS, which, once opened for civilian use, allowed precise location tracking and would soon underpin everything from logistics to consumer devices.

Economically, the period from 1975 to 2000 was defined by globalization, financial liberalization, and the shift of manufacturing and some services to new centers.

In 1975, the world economy was still reeling from the oil shocks of the early 1970s, which had ended the postwar boom in advanced countries and introduced stagflation. Many developing countries were heavily indebted and dependent on commodity exports.

By 2000, although crises had not disappeared, the structure of the global economy looked very different. Trade, as a share of global output, had risen significantly. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade evolved into the World Trade Organization in 1995, giving trade rules a stronger institutional backing.

Regional trade agreements such as the European single market and NAFTA tied together large trading blocs. Many countries adopted policies associated with the Washington Consensus, including deregulation, privatization of state enterprises, and openness to foreign capital, although the results varied and were often contested.

The center of gravity of manufacturing shifted toward East Asia. Japan became a major economic power, although its asset price bubble collapsed in the early 1990s, leading to a prolonged period of stagnation.

Newly industrialized economies like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore moved rapidly up the value chain.

China, which in 1975 was poor, isolated, and centrally planned, initiated economic reforms in 1978 that gradually opened it to foreign investment and market mechanisms. By 2000, it had become a fast-growing export powerhouse and a central node in global supply chains, even though its per capita income remained relatively low and it had not yet formally joined the WTO.

India also began liberalizing its economy in the 1990s, leading to rapid growth in the services and information technology sectors.

Demographically, the world’s population grew from roughly four billion in the mid-1970s to just over six billion by the year 2000. This expansion, however, was uneven.

Most of the growth occurred in developing countries, especially in Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Middle East. Many wealthy countries, along with some middle-income ones, underwent a demographic transition, with fertility rates dropping to at or below replacement levels and populations beginning to age.

I have to close the episode by addressing one of the biggest concerns people had just before the year 2000: the Y2K bug.

The origins of the problem were legitimate. Many computer systems used a two-digit number for years to save space on storage. Systems recorded 1999 as “99,” so when the year 2000 arrived, many computers risked reading “00” as 1900 instead of 2000.

That confusion could break calculations for dates, schedules, interest rates, inventory systems, and more, potentially causing errors or failures in everything from financial records to infrastructure controls.

Many people were concerned that this would cause all the computer systems to crash on January 1, 2000.

While there was a grain of truth to the concern, the fears that many people had turned out to be overblown. Some literally thought that it would be the end of modern civilization.

In the end, it turned out to be nothing, as most of the major systems had been updated. A handful of computer systems around the world stopped working, but most weren’t vital and could be fixed relatively quickly.

Every time I do one of these episodes, I come to the conclusion that the amount of change the world has seen since the previous episode was the greatest in history.

I think that applies to the 25 years from 1975 to 2000 as well. We may downplay the changes that took place simply because many of us lived through them, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the world changed profoundly during this period.

However, the year 2000 was not the end of the changes, as another quarter-century of change followed, which created the modern world we live in today.