In 100 years (my predictions)

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta is editing a volume, In 100 Years, inspired by Keynes' 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren."

Here is my contribution: In 100 Years, and its opening and concluding paragraphs (to tempt you to read the paragraphs in between, or to save you the trouble...).

"For those of you reading this in 2112, let me introduce myself by saying that in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries I studied the design of matching markets, which are markets in which price alone doesn’t clear the market, and so participants can’t just choose what they want (even if they can afford it), they also have to be chosen. These are markets that involve application or selection processes or other forms of courtship. Matching markets determine some of the most important events of our lives: where we go to school, who we marry, what jobs we get, even whether we get a lifesaving organ for transplant if we should happen to need one (see Roth 2002, 2008 for overviews). So I’ll concentrate my predictions on these things, namely schools, jobs, marriage and family, and medicine, along with some thoughts about the possible state of economic expertise, i.e. the things that economists produce and sell. 
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"I’ve also spent some time studying how some kinds of transactions are regarded as repugnant, in some times and places, and how this constrains what markets we see... 

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"To summarize the predictions I’ve made here about 100 years from now, I think that the trend of increasing prosperity will continue, but that it will not necessarily (as Keynes predicted in 1930) bring us all lives of leisure.  Many will work harder than ever, and some of the things some of us will do to work more efficiently—like taking performance enhancing drugs--will go from being repugnant today to ordinary in the future. Other things we do eagerly today, like use computers for access to more and more data, may become repugnant in some respects, as privacy of personal data moves to the forefront of civil rights issues. And while medical advances will continue on all fronts, and advances in preventive medicine will make medical care and long-lived good health more widely available, some kinds of medicine, including reproductive medicine along with other aspects of reproduction, will become commoditized, while others, such as genetic manipulation of various sorts, may become repugnant. Some kinds of education will become commoditized, but among the matching markets that we see today, selective admissions to elite universities will remain, as will networking and matchmaking for family formation (under a wider variety of marital forms) and perhaps increasingly, for research collaborators and other kinds of business partners.  And there will still be economists, and economic mysteries to unravel, including those that will arise from the increased computerization of markets and marketplaces. Much of market design that we struggle to understand today will have become commoditized and be found in off the shelf software, but understanding how to design novel markets and fix market failures will remain an active concern of our economist grandchildren.

"Keynes, in writing about the future of economics, said “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!” Perhaps if we replace “dentists” with “engineers,” that is still a good goal for the next hundred years."