Robert Heinlein's Crazy Years

From Wikipedia.

The Future History, by Robert A. Heinlein, describes a projected future of the human race from the middle of the 20th century through the early 23rd century. The term Future History was coined by John W. Campbell, Jr. in the February 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell published an early draft of Heinlein's chart of the series in the March 1941 issue.

Heinlein wrote most of the Future History stories early in his career, between 1939 and 1941 and between 1945 and 1950. Most of the Future History stories written prior to 1967 are collected in The Past Through Tomorrow, which also contains the final version of the chart. That collection does not include Universe and Common Sense; they were published separately as Orphans of the Sky.

Groff Conklin called Future History "the greatest of all histories of tomorrow". It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966, along with the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Lensman series by E. E. Smith, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, and The Lord of the Rings series by J. R. R. Tolkien, but lost to Asimov's Foundation series.

This is the timeline for Heinlein's Future History.

Click to enlarge.

You can see the notes in the upper right, describing the period closest to Heinlein in time (basically the second half of the 20th century) as The Crazy Years, described as:

Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum.

Sounds pretty accurate though the Crazy Years are lasting longer than Heinlein anticipated. I am not sure that we are yet at the stage of mass psychoses but certainly perhaps a quarter of the population is manifesting some fairly persistent manifestations of derangement.