Long term thinking is pretty bad too tbh when you dig in at what the different schools of thought imagine about the drivers of politics.

The electoral constituencies for the antinomianism, authoritarianism and victim-complex revanchism in the West that has prevented friendship between the world powers are all comprised of the same alliance between two groups repeated hundreds of times: moderately impoverished populist masses facing more of the same and industry oligarchs looking to return the west to feudal plantation economies as reprisal for any cultural slights they feel the public has given them.

The latter group always exists to some extent but the former group only exists because disposable energy (joules, watts, BTU, etc) per capita has been steadily falling since 1973. The golden age of shale exploitation bucked this trend but that has ended too. You can fiddle about with using different financial or interest rates proxies for this if you want but going into joules per person after extraction is the heart of the matter.

If this decline did not exist, we would not be in the world we're in by a long shot. But if you look at the predictions they're all off. The media, academia, popular culture and business culture expected continuous growth to put fusion power plants on Mars. The UN, IEA, DoE, Long Now people expected moderate growth to sustainable replacement of gas turbines with optimistic greentech buildout figures that use more lithium and copper than can ever be mined. The economic counterculture like NakedCapitalism and The Oil Drum expected Mad Max.

Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases. Some of the predictors even imagined that the importance of Pennsylvania Avenue would slowly vanish without anybody minding.