After the free-market binge, sobered Pacific Northwest citizens are seeking practical solutions

"It's tough to make predictions," observed Yogi Berra, "particularly about the future."

How many people thought, two years ago, that a half-black freshman senator with the crippling political name of Barack Hussein Obama had a realistic shot at the presidency?

Remember when dot-com stocks would always rise? House prices couldn't fall? And America was going to export democratic capitalism to the Middle East with a blitzkrieg shock-and-awe campaign so swift and accurate that war would be over in days?

So don't hold us to anything.

Yes, 2008 may have been one of those transformative elections that change not just politics but culture, such as Reagan's in 1980, Kennedy's in 1960 and FDR's in 1932. Even in bad times, those guys had a knack for projecting optimism and hope, and Obama may do the same.

But we're pretty sure things will still be a mess, because they're always a mess. And that we'll muddle through, because we always muddle through. Reform will prevail, until corruption overtakes it. Seattle will bust, until its booms again. And someday, somehow, our big-league sports teams will be competitive. OK, just maybe on that one.

Here at Pacific Northwest magazine, we try to track how our region is changing.

We've written about how Seattle's blue-collar, bungalow, flannel-shirt homeyness has given way to a new urbanism of the professional elite and condo high-rises cheek-by-jowl with McMansions. We've gone trendy, by crikey!

A predominantly white city with defined ethnic neighborhoods like the Central District and Chinatown International District has become a rainbow of races thrown scattershot across the metropolitan area by the hunt for affordable housing. Obama's chestnut hue? Yawn. It's just a reflection of census reality.

And the growing gap between rich and poor that has been accelerating since 1980 has been magnified here in Seattle by the computer and biotech revolutions. That's meant profound impacts for retail, art and philanthropy — and resentment about an ever-more-frenetic, cutthroat world. A state that could once pretend, like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, that everyone was above-average — or at least had a stable, union- and pension-girded job — is now more a jungle of winners and losers.

What's ahead? New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, who first pointed out how the world has "flattened," or become more intertwined with the rise of a global middle class, now calls the globe "Hot, Flat and Crowded" in his recent best-seller. He predicts that population growth and global warming are going to force a green economic revolution — which is just the kind of thing our region should be primed for.

A thousand years hence, few will remember our presidents or wars, but they will call our explosive growth of population one of the primary oddities of our time. Thanks to the scientific and technological discoveries that have curbed disease and increased food, human numbers have doubled since 1965, to more than 6.7 billion, and have tripled since 1940. By 2050, demographers predict nearly 3 billion more of us, including a 50 percent population increase in the United States and Puget Sound: up to 100,000 more people each year in this state.

The U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change has meanwhile projected average temperature increases this century of somewhere between 2 and 11 degrees.

Friedman sees this not just as crisis but opportunity, an excuse to renew our economy by going green. "We are the first generation of Americans in the energy-climate era," he writes. "This is not about the whales anymore. It's about us." If we respond with ingenuity, he promises, we'll "not only survive but thrive."

An even cheerier view comes from pollster John Zogby, whose book "The Way We'll Be," published just before the election, predicts that the culture wars will soften, that Americans are going to become less materialistic, and that values will be driven by a younger generation more global than its parents.

"We will have gotten comfortable with the limitations on us and embraced the Zen of more minimal lifestyles and consumption patterns. Hype, hokum and hooey — in politics, in advertising, wherever it appears — will be punished."

In an interview, Zogby also predicted Obama will usher in a reform era comparable to Woodrow Wilson in 1913-14, FDR in the Great Depression, or LBJ and his Great Society. It will be reform propelled not just by aging liberals but what he calls "First Globals," or a generation of young Americans more tolerant, well-traveled and innovative than their elders.

"There was a lot of talk in the election of the white working class and Joe the Plumber, but in the final analysis (Obama) is the first 'First-Global' president," the pollster said.

The old politics failed. "If negative attacks worked, we'd have seen Hillary versus Romney," Zogby said. Nor does he interpret the result as a mandate for big government. Instead, he thinks voters are looking for consensus, cooperation and practical problem-solving that goes beyond liberal-conservative ideology.

The flight this year from gas-guzzlers and the bargain-hunting of Christmas shopping are signs of a new, hardheaded practicality, he forecast.

We've got our own predictions, arrived at by staring firmly in the rearview mirror. Our forecast is girded by the conviction that 2008, in main, sucked. Housing collapse. Stock-market meltdown. Gas-price shock. Shrill and endless political campaigning that seemed aimed at morons. Layoffs, scandal, hurricanes, strikes, deficits, wars, Sonics, Mariners, Seahawks, Huskies, Cougars ...

It can't get any worse. Can it? Here's our crystal ball:

• If it seems too good to be true, it is. Remember back in 1999 how the dot-com boom was going to make 401(k) investors so wealthy that everyone would retire early? Right. Remember in 2006 how everyone's house price could double and someone — pixies? Saudi Arabians? — was magically going to keep the balloon inflated by buying homes no one could afford? Yes, some people profit in bubbles, but when everyone's floating on them, it's past time to expect the pop.

Prediction: We've all sobered up — until the next sucker pyramid scheme comes along to suck the life out of your retirement.

• The smartest guy in the room isn't. Isn't wise, that is. Yeah, they're smarter than you and me: Washington Mutual CEO Kerry Killinger pulled in $36 million over three years before leading his bank to collapse; Richard Fuld milked Lehman Brothers for an estimated $186.5 million before it failed; James Cayne drained Bear Stearns of $42.3 million for himself before being forced to sell to J.P. Morgan Chase. And Angelo Mozilo pocketed $361.7 million in three years from Countrywide Mortgage before its forced sale to Bank of America. Nice work, if you can get it.

But they're also "greed simple," a play off the movie title "Blood Simple" about how murderers, in their frenzied passion, do dumb things. Greed-simple guys make loans to people who can't pay them back, so long as they pocket a fee.

Prediction: Corporate boards will finally (maybe?) ask hard questions of the fast-talking water-walkers they've overpaid. (The average Fortune 500 CEO made $8.4 million in 2007, The Associated Press calculated, while 50 percent of U.S. taxpayers make less than $32,000.)

• Life is a science-fiction movie. In sci-fi movies, some well-meaning but hubristic mad scientist foists a cancer cure or cloned dinosaurs on the world and accidentally unleashes a Manhattan-emptying plague or Tyrannosaurus rex. In real life, Wall Street technocrats invent financial gobbledygook nobody really understands and erase half the world's savings in a matter of days.

Prediction: Government regulation makes a comeback in 2009.

• Credit is not the same as cash. In the past eight years, federal debt went from $5.7 trillion to nearly $11 trillion, and consumer debt climbed 24 percent since 2003 while the nation's savings rate dipped to near zero. For those who think putting life on plastic works forever, check out the October stock crash.

Prediction: Frugality is the new sexy.

• Life is junior high. Former news anchor Tom Brokaw said this, in a speech on Sept. 25, about how the strivers still jockey to be with the cool crowd and get the best banquet seats. Wasn't Sarah Palin, after all, the ultimate junior-high candidate?

Prediction: This maxim will always be true, from the queues for lifeboats on the Titanic to the elite Davos summit in Switzerland.

• News frenzy is here to stay. Unfortunately. The two-year presidential marathon showed the growing dominance of the insatiable 24-hour news cycle and blogosphere. The latest political gaffes were pounced on like lion feed, chewed by ideological commentary, and discarded like bones when the next meat sailed into the media cage.

Meanwhile, the more traditional part of the media zoo is atrophying. About 75,000 newspaper, magazine and television jobs have disappeared since 2000, IWantMedia.com estimates, and the pace has been accelerating. The Seattle Times has cut approximately 400 employees this year alone. News gatherers are out — by the count of one Web site, Papercuts, more than 13,000 newsroom jobs were lost nationwide in 2008 — and Web-based news commentators are in. Why pay for reporting when loud, cranky opinions sell more ads?

Prediction: 18 million Internet analysts will ceaselessly gnaw on missives sent from the last real reporter left in America, a minimum-wage courthouse scribe named Dwayne, posting from Twin Falls, Idaho.

• It's hard to be the Roman Empire. Back in the good old days, only rich people could afford horses, armor and swords, and pretty much kept everyone else in their place. British imperialists fought spears with Maxim machine guns.

Nowadays, there are 640 million guns in the world, by the estimate of the International Action Network on Small Arms, and the total grows by 8 million a year. That means riding herd with even the best high-tech army is hard, because the poorest nations are fantastically armed with cheap assault rifles and burgeoning, unemployed populations of bored young men.

Prediction: For a USA trying to control other nations while avoiding a draft and enjoying tax cuts, negotiation and persuasion are looking better all the time.

• Old people are a drag. Here was the deal: Go to school until you're 25, work like hell until you're 55, retire, and live to 80. Sweet! Someone supports you for more than half your life!

This works great if hordes of young people are propping up Social Security and pensions with their contributions, but boomers just didn't hatch enough kids. The number of Americans 65 and older is expected to double from 35 million in 2000 to 71 million by 2030. Social Security's age of full retirement has already been pushed back two years, pensions are disappearing, and your 401(k) just tanked.

Prediction: The AARP is about to become a boomer-fueled monster, graybeards will demand universal health care, and you're spending your golden years as a Wal-Mart greeter, dude.

• Winner-take-all loses. Remember the trickle-down theory that if you let society's most successful workers have outsized rewards, everyone else will be spurred to try to keep up, working harder and increasing total wealth? Sure you're miserable, but you're rich!

Unfortunately, as Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay has increased 10 times since 1970 while average hourly wages have actually declined. People have kept pace primarily by having Mom go to work, and credit. Consumer Reports calculated that consumer credit, approaching a trillion dollars, increased by $125 billion in just the past three years. Henry Ford knew what everyone else has forgotten: If you don't pay the workers, they can't buy your cars.

Prediction: "Sharing the wealth" is moving from epithet to self-interest. If you don't believe us, check the recent election results.

• Hypocrisy is getting a bad name. Let's see, a crime-busting New York governor is caught spending $1,000 a throw on hookers. A hockey-mom Alaska governor somehow blows more than $150,000 on clothes at Saks and Neiman Marcus. A conservative Idaho senator is nailed for alleged homosexual advances in a Minneapolis airport men's room. A liberal Democratic presidential candidate cheats on his terminally-ill wife. An Alaska senator is found guilty of seven felony counts for corruption and runs for re-election anyway.

Prediction: Sin may never decline, but holier-than-thou posturing is wearing thin.

• Sometimes there's hope. This nation has survived civil war, global war, at least 20 depressions and recessions, sneak attacks, epidemics, natural disasters and the leisure suit. It's when things are worst that we get a Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt.

Now we got this new guy, and the first day of the rest of American history. What do we predict? What we've just seen: That this country can go from enslaving black people to elevating one to the White House, from prohibiting women from voting to putting them in play with the biggest of the big boys, from trashing the environment to greening it.

The worst? This, too, shall pass.

And the future? We're going to cinch in our belt, get back to work — and predict that the best, at the dawn of 2009, is yet to come.

William Dietrich is a former Pacific Northwest magazine staff reporter. Tom Reese is a former Seattle Times staff photographer now working as a freelancer. Susan Jouflas is The Times' assistant art director/features.