Fiedler's Four Rules of Forecasting:
1. It is very difficult to predict, especially the future.
2. Every time you make a prediction, you know you are wrong, but don't know in which direction.
3. He who lives by the crystal ball learns to eat ground glass.
4. If you ever hit it on the nose; don't let them ever forget!
Thirty years is awfully far out. Five years is long term and the only places that go substantially beyond that are CBO budget forecasts (10 years), and forecasts involving demographics.
With Fiedler and the above caveat in mind, here is my response.
The chance of a downturn that would reduce the employment-to-working age population ratio more than 20% is remote for any time scale. The chance of a downturn in the next five years that would reduce this ratio 5% (which is a pretty massive downturn) is maybe 40%. This would put the U-3 unemployment rate at somewhere near 12%.
The longer the time frame, the more probable any unlikely event is to occur. In thirty years I will be pushing the Keynesian long run.
