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At 7:32pm on Christmas Day 1991, the red hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned half an hour earlier. The next morning, the Soviet Union no longer existed. It was the start of an era many now look back on as the best of their lives.

The Cold War was over and the West had won. The economy, for most at least, was ticking along just fine. The War on Terror, the financial crisis, the pandemic, and the smartphone were all yet to come. For a while, it looked like we’d cracked it. 

Wind of Change

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay argued liberal democracy and market economics had won the battle of ideas. First rough drafts of history would continue to be written, but the big ideological question that had preoccupied the world for the past hundred or so years – how to run societies – was settled. We could all finally get on with our lives and start shopping.

The headlines kept proving Fukuyama right. In 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in its first fully democratic election. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement largely ended decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1999, the euro launched, the boldest step yet in European integration. Former Eastern Bloc states queued up to join NATO and the EU. With the Big Bad out of the picture, Western governments slashed defence budgets. US military spending fell from around 5% of GDP to roughly 3% over the decade, the so-called peace dividend.

Things Can Only Get Better

Economists later dubbed the era the Great Moderation. Growth was steady, inflation was tame, and recessions were short and shallow. After a brief downturn at the start of the decade, the US enjoyed what was then the longest expansion in its history, running from March 1991 to March 2001. Unemployment sank to 3.8% in April 2000, a three-decade low. Inflation fell to around 2% by the late 90s. And from 1998 to 2001, the federal government ran a budget surplus, peaking at about $236bn in 2000. That hasn’t happened since.

Americans still believed in the Dream. Gallup has asked Americans whether they’re satisfied with the way things are going in the country since 1979. The all-time high, 71%, came in February 1999. By December 2025 it was 24%.

Mo Money Mo Problems

Between 1990 and 1999, the US stock market boomed, but much of that boom came from expanding valuations investors were willing to pay for the same profits. One popular measure, the Shiller CAPE ratio, compares share prices with average company earnings over the previous ten years. It started the decade in the high teens. By December 1999 it hit 44.2, the highest since 1881. Investors were paying more than twice as much for every dollar of profit. Valuations stayed at bubble levels until the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000. 

In December 1996, Fed chair Alan Greenspan wondered whether “irrational exuberance” had pushed asset prices too high. But the market kept climbing for another three years.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Pop culture-wise, the decade is unmatched. Grunge, Britpop, golden-age hip-hop, and the rave scene provided the soundtrack. Television had The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Friends, and The Sopranos (just, in 1999). Cinema had its last great decade before the franchise era. Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Trainspotting, and The Matrix. Jurassic Park and Toy Story reimagined what films could look like.

In Britain, politics, culture, and business were packaged as Cool Britannia. Spice Girl Geri Halliwell dazzled in a Union Jack dress at the Brit Awards in 1997. That same year, Tony Blair swept to power at 43, the youngest prime minister since 1812, promising a fresh start after 18 years of Tory rule. By the late 90s, there was plenty of cash sloshing around. The City boomed. After losing an empire, we seemed to have found our place in the world. It was all so bloody exciting. It felt good to believe in Britain. To have a precious few of those years back…

Virtual Insanity

It was also the last decade of the monoculture. People watched the same channels, bought the same singles, and argued over the same movies and shows. We didn’t know it then, but that was all about to change. Something called the World Wide Web promised to connect the Global Village, and set information free. Of course, it didn’t quite turn out like that.

Around 16 million people were online in 1995. By 2000 it was roughly 360 million. It was dial-up, chat rooms, and GeoCities pages. Facebook wouldn’t arrive until 2004, the iPhone until 2007. The horrors of social media, the algorithm, and the doomscroll were years away.

Everybody Hurts

While the 90s were peaceful and prosperous for most Westerners, war and suffering didn’t end. In 1994, around 800,000 people were killed in 100 days in Rwanda. Yugoslavia tore itself apart in a series of wars that brought ethnic cleansing back to Europe. At Srebrenica in July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered, the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

The economist Branko Milanovic tracked global incomes from 1988 to 2008, in what became known as the “elephant curve”. The emerging middle classes, mostly in Asia, saw huge gains. So did the global 1%. But Western working and lower-middle classes saw their incomes stall. Manufacturing moved east, and the communities around it hollowed out. It’s partly why the backlash, from Brexit to Trump, came where it did.

...Baby One More Time

On 12 September 2001, the columnist George Will gave the decade its epitaph. America's “holiday from history” was over. Many of the problems that have defined the decades since were planted during the good years. In 1999, the US repealed the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking. A year later it chose not to regulate over-the-counter derivatives. Both feature heavily in post-mortems of 2008.

The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, as bubbles do. The optimists were right about the technology. Many just paid far too much for it. And yet humanity is much better off now than in the 90s. More than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, much of it in China and India. Markets did a lot of the heavy lifting. Add in cancer survival rates, HIV treatment, and a computer in every pocket, and it’s hard to argue we peaked in 1995.

So why does it feel that way? Our most vivid memories come from between roughly age 10 and 30. For Gen X and older millennials, that window lands squarely on the 90s. They are also, not coincidentally, the people now running newsrooms, commissioning reboots, and writing Saturday morning newsletters.

Ray of Light

In 1931, the historian Herbert Butterfield warned against the Whig interpretation of history, the habit of reading the past as a march towards some inevitable present. In reality, progress arrives in fits and starts. Every peak has its trough, but each new peak tends to sit higher than the last.

For a Western, middle-class twentysomething with no student debt, a home they could afford, and Jurassic Park on date night, the 90s were peak civ. For humanity as a whole, not so much. The world has become richer and healthier. No sane person would dial that clock back.

What the 90s had was confidence, a certain swagger. History had a clear direction of travel, the West was steering, and there was a belief tomorrow would be better than today. The new millennium was just round the corner, promising more peace, more prosperity, more freedom. That optimism, now in short supply, is what we’re really nostalgic for.