There's a massive Catastrophe that occurs some time around 2020 that wipes out a large percentage of the population and almost all the animals, and it sets technology back by decades and all manner of data and records are lost (hence why we don't know exactly when/what happened). We eventually catch up to where we should have been, surpass it, and now most of humanity in the United States live in cities along the coasts, run by megacorporations. Nueva York is run by Alchemax, although Stark-Fujikawa are trying to take over, and Doom ran the country for a while.
If you're rich, it's a pretty good life. If you're poor, it's terrible.