The Roaring Twenties

The economy isn't ending. It's auditioning new winners.

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
May 04, 2026

The Roaring Twenties

This is a time of great change. It need not be a time of fear.

The AI doom narrative has a problem: the data won't cooperate. While Citrini Research's "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" memo went viral and had executives drafting severance packages, Citadel Securities quietly demolished it with the most disorienting weapon in macro: present-day facts. Unemployment sits at 4.3%. Software engineering job postings are up 11% year over year. Nearly 2,800 data centers are on the drawing board. The workforce isn't disappearing; it's recomposing.

History rhymes here, loudly. In 1930, Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek. He nailed the productivity curve. Indeed, back then, AT&T's mechanical switching displaced hundreds of thousands of phone operators. But he missed the most important point of industrial automation: rising productivity didn't shrink work. Instead, it expanded the consumption frontier. As a result, the broader economy (in industrialized nations) boomed as labor migrated to higher-value tasks no one had imagined the decade prior.

Smash-cut to today: as coding gets cheaper, demand for software is rising, not contracting. The engineers thriving today aren't competing with AI; they're conducting it. Those with two or more AI skills earn 43% more than peers without them. The tools changed. The premium on judgment didn't.

So yes, this could be the new Roaring Twenties: economically, technologically, and (let’s hope) even culturally. But the personal version matters more. For executives and operators willing to rotate their skills toward orchestrating intelligence rather than performing routine cognition, this can become your roaring 20s. 

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And one more thing…

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