Notes on Zeihan the End of the World is Just Beginning

[rufuspollock]

Status: summary plus excerpts. Not yet edited (eg quotes not formatted, unorganized headings etc)

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Strengths are its weaknesses

• Geography driven approach at macro scale both physically and temporally
• that means all explanations come down to physical location, demography and technology - and flowing from that power, and especially military power.
• institutions and structure don't really show up
• and culture barely at all except as casual asides eg "the Italians are Italians so ..."
• baked in is also a view of human nature and civilization that is pretty Hobbesian and Darwinian: life in old days (and until very recently) was nasty brutish and short and competition between groups was constant, vicious and essential to progress
• I love macro approaches and think they have a lot going for them.
• but you do have to be careful. They are very attractive because of their simplicity and that sense of "aha that's why that happens". This is amplified in the hands of a master explainer like zeihan who has wit and informality combined with a seeming command of immense amounts of material and ability to weave it into a richly textured tapestry of argument.
• But this very simplicity and fluidity is a risk: reality isn't like that. Simplicity easily becomes over simplification and reductionism. To put it crudely, everything becomes about how much waterway you have.
• a minor related point: the lack of footnotes. Pretty sure key facts and figures are at least approx correct. However, larger theses and claims would really benefit from seeing evidence and researchers.

Nasty, British and short autocorrect

Things that bugged me at points

• annoying informal irreverent tone (for me). Though it grew on me and often adds memorability or humor or both eg "Or simply more dudes with guns so they could better protect themselves . . . or take other people’s stuff."

So many examples of over simplification and geo or econo-reductionism that hard to count. here are a few examples, more below.

and then the arrival of industrial technologies to this world tore the delicate balance apart at every level ...

China’s process centralized power so firmly in so few hands that it unleashed the bleak horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

China already had had incredibly centralised power for two millennia. Is t that perhaps more relevant than upheavals of modernity?

Excerpts and commentary

How the beginning began

Transport was so tough that there was little trade

Until deepwater navigation, tyrannies of distance proved so consistently overwhelming that trade was exceedingly rare. Roads only existed within a culture and within most cultures there wasn’t a wide enough variety of goods to justify much trade in the first place. (Places lucky enough to have navigable rivers were the exceptions, and as such tended to be the richest cultures.) Items ripe for trading tended to be limited to the exotic: spices, gold, porcelain—items that had to compete with foodstuffs in the would-be trader’s cargo.

This is a good example of techno primacy Vs cultural primacy. See Heinrich ontological explanations of difficulty of trade in weirdest people.

Deep water sailing reduced markups on trade by 90%

Deepwater navigation sailed around the entire problem.

The new ships could not just sail out of sight of land for months at a time, reducing exposure to threats; their cavernous holds limited their need to stop for supplies. Their fearsome arsenals meant that when they did need to stop, the locals tended to not wander by and see what they could steal. The lack of middlemen reduced the cost of luxury goods by an excess of 90 percent—and that was before the powers backing the new deepwater traders started dispatching troops to directly take over the sources of the spices and silks and porcelain that the world found so valuable.

Would live to know data and sources for this.

This did more than give rise to the world’s first megacities. It created urban centers where no one was involved in agriculture. Where everyone was engaged in value-added labor. The resultant explosion in urbanization and skilled labor supplies accelerated the technological curve even more. Less than two centuries into its deepwater era, London—a city as far away from the trade hubs of the Silk Roads as is possible in Eurasia—became the world’s largest, richest, and best-educated city.

Such a massive concentration of wealth and technical skills in one place quickly reached critical mass. All by themselves, the English generated sufficient new technologies to launch their own civilizational transformation.

Massive over simplification with far too much emphasis on the geographic aspects. Why the west and why England is much more nuanced I cluding much cultural and other factors.

Fossil fuel revolution ended institutionalized slavery

Advances in medicine didn’t just improve health, they doubled life spans. Concrete didn’t just allow for real roads, it gave us high-rises.* The development of dyes didn’t just spawn a chemicals industry, it directly led to fertilizers that increased agricultural output by a factor of four. Steel—stronger, lighter, less brittle, and more corrosion-resistant than iron—provided every industry that used metal with a quantum leap in capacity, whether that industry be transport or manufacturing or war. Anything that made muscle power less necessary helped build a coffin for institutionalized slavery. Similarly, electricity didn’t just expand worker productivity, it generated light, which manufactured time. In pushing back the night, people had more hours to (learn to) read, expanding literacy to the masses. It granted women the possibility of a life not utterly committed to garden-, house-, and child-care. No electricity, no women’s rights movements.

Decent and aphoristic points ... and also incredibly geo-techno reductionist. This is plain wrong in crude form though like all aphoristic simplifications it contains grains of truth.

Almost classic Marxist in economic substructure to socio cultural superstructure.

Enter the accidental superpower

America is the story of the geography of success

The American story is the story of the perfect Geography of Success. That geography determines not only American power, but also America’s role in the world.

More pithy geo reductionism

Slavery happened in the south because of need to improve soil chemistry

The geo-economic reductionism just keeps coming

Non-standard employment models such as indentured servitude and slavery took root in the South because of the need to improve soil chemistry as much as anything else.

Really? Albion's seed would suggest otherwise.

Geo factors of Midwest gave its small town nature

All the land in the new Midwest was high quality, so there were no massive gaps between settled areas like there were in the Appalachians. This relatively dense settlement pattern, combined with the region’s high productivity and low transport costs, naturally led to the formation of the heartland’s small-town culture. Small banks popped up throughout the Mississippi system to manage the capital generated from product sales to the East Coast and Europe. Financial depth soon became a defining American characteristic. This not only enabled steady expansions in midwestern agriculture in terms of territory and productivity, but it also provided Middle America with the capital required to bootstrap early regional development in terms of infrastructure and education.

Becauee of ease of movement US cultutr was unified despite diversity

More fascinating stuuf - clearly (and simply) put. And ... again a somewhat over simplistic

The easy movement of people and goods throughout the river network forced Americans to interact with one another regularly, contributing to the unification of American culture despite a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.

THE UNITED STATES IS THE MOST POWERFUL DEEPWATER POWER IN HISTORY

Most of the world’s ocean coasts are somewhat problematic. Flat coastlines and extreme tidal variations expose would-be port locations to such unrelenting oceanic battering that truly epic port cities are a relative rarity. Except, that is, in the United States. The middle third of the North American continent’s Atlantic coast isn’t simply blessed by an egregious number of indentations that make siting port cities child’s play; most of those port locations are then positioned behind peninsulas or barrier islands that shield America’s coasts even more. From Brownsville on the Texas–Mexico border to Miami at Florida’s tip to Chesapeake Bay, the barrier islands alone give the United States more natural port potential than all the world’s other continents combined. Even without the barrier islands, America’s beyond-world-class coastal indentations provide almost omnipresent shielded maritime access from Boston Harbor to the Long Island and Puget Sounds to the Delaware and San Francisco Bays. And don’t forget those omnipresent rivers: of America’s top 100 ports, fully half are upriver—some by as much as 2,000 miles.

The bolded item is a fascinating point I didn't know.

Americans are in a unique position

• massive easy to defend heartland
• access to two oceans
• ports and rivers
• good farmland

The Americans—and the Americans alone—have the capacity to interact with any power on either ocean on their own terms, whether those terms be economic or military.

Sure ... and questions...

Why isn't Europe unified in the same way?

Isn't there a chance that America could have been separate states like Europe (Rockies is a natural barrier)

This is more than geography.

US ilhas v low population density even today: US population would have to triple to have German density in 1900

Simply to achieve the degree of population density that Germany had in 1900, the United States would have to nearly triple its 2022 population (and that doesn’t even count the half of American territories—such as the Rocky Mountains—that are not well suited to settling). Industrialization could and did happen in the United States, but the transformation was slower and less jarring, giving Americans generations to adapt to change.

Though note German 1900 population was high.

Russian and Chinese centralisation was due to lack of local savings banks (???)

The ability of local community banks to finance local developments prevented the sort of centralized authorities that so devastated the Russians and Chinese, or that so radicalized the Japanese and Germans.

US did not build an empire. Why? Geo reasons mostly (?)

Of four main points he make 3 are geo demographic

Why, at the very edge of victory, did the Americans give away a worldful of imperial opportunities?Partly it was a numbers game. In 1945 the American population was roughly equal to that of the combined Western European population, which was roughly equal to that of the Soviet population. Even leaving teeming East and South Asia aside, not only did the Americans lack the forces at war’s end to keep the territory it held, but simple math meant that they could not muster sufficient occupation forces to make a global empire work.Partly it was a distance contest. Even with the strength of the U.S. Navy, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are some serious moats—and moats work both ways. The logistical costs and overreach of maintaining permanent forward-positioned garrison systems several thousand miles over the horizon simply wasn’t practical. As the Americans discovered in the decades that followed, it is difficult to occupy a country on the other side of the world if the locals don’t want you there. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan were often more than the Americans could handle when they were managed one at a time. Imagine what it would have been like to occupy Germany and France and Italy and Turkey and Arabia and Iran and Pakistan and India and Indonesia and Malaysia and Japan and China (and Korea and Vietnam and Lebanon and Iraq and Afghanistan) all at once.Partly it was a map thing. The Soviet Union was a massive land-based empire that fought with huge, slow-moving armies. America’s military may have been the largest of the Allies, but the United States was primarily a naval power. Duking it out with the Soviets soldier-to-soldier simply wasn’t an option when the bulk of the American military capacity required, well, water, and wasn’t designed to fight a thousand miles from the nearest friendly port.Partly it was a culture clash. The United States was the modern world’s first democracy. Democracies are pretty good at defending their own and tearing down dictatorships and fighting for truth and justice and all that. Long-term occupations expressly designed to bleed the locals dry? That’s a harder sell.

Pax Americana

But this is quite like one past empire: Rome. albeit updated for modernity (so more democracy and less citizenship)

At war’s end the Americans used Bretton Woods to create the globalized Order and fundamentally change the rules of the game. Instead of subjugating their allies and enemies, they offered peace and protection. They transformed regional geopolitics by putting nearly all the warring empires of the previous age—in many cases countries that had been in a shifting, cutthroat competition with one another for centuries—on the same team.

The Story of ... Us

Agriculture prioritizes lots of children living on the farm or nearby. Cities are different.

More high gloss stuff that has truth to it ... and neglects key other parts of the narrative. See Heinrich again on how west was different with neolocalism etc. Or work showing that populations in Europe limited fertility even before industrial age.

The net effect of the new urban industries and the newly hyperproductive countryside started all of us down the road to city living, spawning a host of issues the human race is still grappling with today. By far the most dramatic impact has been on birth rates. On the farm, having children was often more an economic decision than it was about love. Children were free labor that were de facto chained to their parents’ economic needs. There was an understanding—rooted in millennia of cultural and economic norms—that children would either take over the farm as their parents aged, or at least not move all that far away. The extended family formed a tribe that consistently supported one another. This cultural-economic dynamic has held true since the dawn of recorded history, even to and through the consolidation of the world into empires and nation-states.

Children after urbanisation are pricy conversation pieces

Classic example of his cleverness. But it is cleverness... not brilliance. Bought at the price of crude simplification.

Move from the small town to the city, and children quickly (d)evolved (in economic terms) into being little more than really pricy conversation pieces.

History speeds up

Most of 50% growth in human population since 1965 comes from mortality reductions

Todo find excerpt

A massive population crash is coming as populations age and birth rates are well below replacement levels

Great summary of the coming population crash. This is clearer than I have ever got it before and I have seen stuff alluding to parts of this for 20 years.

But even if the Americans choose to continue holding up the world’s collective civilizational ceiling, there was nothing about the heyday of globalization that is sustainable. The halcyon days of 1980–2015 are over. The collapse in birth rates that began across the developed world in the 1960s and across the developing world in the 1990s now has decades of steam behind it.The pipe bomb in the ointment is that what proved true for accelerated industrialization proved equally true for accelerated demographics. In 1700 the average British woman bore 4.6 children. That’s almost identical to that of the average German woman in 1800 or the average Italian woman in 1900 or the average Korean woman in 1960 or the average Chinese woman in the early 1970s. Now, in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 and in many cases well below.* This is a position the average Bangladeshi woman will likely find herself in by 2030.Now comes the other side of the hill.A central factor in every growth story that accompanies industrialization is that much of the economic growth comes from a swelling population. What most people miss is that there’s another step in the industrializationcum-urbanization process: lower mortality increases the population to such a degree that it overwhelms any impact from a decline in birth rates . . . but only for a few decades. Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country a greater population, but with few children. Yesterday’s few children leads to today’s few young workers leads to tomorrow’s few mature workers. And now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.In the 2020s, birth rates are no longer simply dropping; they have been so low for so long that even the countries with the younger age structures are now running low of young adults—the demographic that produces the children. As the already smaller twenty-something and thirty-something cadres age into their thirties and forties, birth rates will not simply continue their long decline, they will collapse. And once a country has more older folks than children, the next, horrible step is utterly unavoidable: a population crash. And because any country that begins this process is one that has already run out of young adults, these countries will never recover.

Even worse, just as the entire transformation from rural to urban has proceeded ever-faster since the British started us all down this road, so too does the demographic transformation from lots of children to lots of retirees. The faster the transformation and growth on the front end, the faster the population collapse on the back end.By far the most unfortunate tsunami of consequence of this compression phenomenon at work is China. The long stretch of Chinese history was comparatively preindustrial until one Richard Milhous Nixon’s 1972 visit to one Mao Zedong, in what would prove a successful effort to turn Red China against the Soviet Union. The price for Chinese realignment was pretty straightforward: admittance into the American-led global Order. Some 800 million Chinese started down the route to industrialization, a route that was now less a newly blazed path, and more a fourteen-lane superhighway with double HOV lanes. Following the patterns established by much of the rest of humanity, Chinese mortality plummeted by three-quarters and the Chinese population expanded to match. China, like everyone before, saw its population surge from under 800 million in 1970 to over 1.4 billion in 2021.

Todo insert graphs.

Note these graphs could be a single presentation on its own.

Many countries have already passed the point of no return

What many in the world see as a threat—the rapid rise of China in economic, military, and demographic terms—is nothing more than two hundred years of economic and demographic transformation squeezed into a searing four decades, utterly transforming Chinese society and global patterns of trade . . .. . . as well as the Chinese demography. No matter how you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of early-2022, China’s only partly released 2011–2020 census indicates China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout human history. The country’s demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion, with complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation. China is amazing, just not for the reasons most opine. The country will soon have traveled from preindustrial levels of wealth and health to postindustrial demographic collapse in a single human lifetime. With a few years to spare.Nor will China die alone. The time-staggered nature of the industrialization process—from Britain to Germany to Russia and northwestern Europe and Japan to Korea to Canada and Spain—combined with the steadily accelerating nature of that process, means that much of the world’s population faces mass retirements followed by population crashes at roughly the same time. The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart.For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. None have sufficient young people to even pretend to regenerate their populations. All suffer from terminal demographics. The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? And do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light?

...

All the political isms of modernity are about "more"

That's because they are all children of modernity culturally - and economically and technologically.

Each model has its own pros and cons. Capitalism trades away equality to maximize growth, both economic and technological. Socialism sacrifices growth at the altar of inclusivity and social placidity. Command-driven communism writes off dynamism, instead aiming for stability and focused achievements. Fascist corporatism attempts to achieve state goals without sacrificing growth or dynamism, but at the cost of popular will, a massively violent state, epically awe-inspiring levels of corruption, and the gnawing terror of knowing that state-sponsored genocide is but a few pen strokes away. Capitalism and socialism are broadly compatible with democracy and all the political noise and chaos that comes with it. Command-driven communism and fascist corporatism are far more politically . . . quiet.

But what all these -isms we have developed in recent centuries and fine-tuned in recent decades have in common is something our world is about to lack: more.

vv

It is much more than that and less fragile

But none of this is a natural outcome of the “normal” world; rather, it is instead an artificial outcome of the American-created security and trade Order. Without global peace, the world gets smaller. Or, put more accurately, the one big world breaks up into several smaller worlds (and oftentimes, mutually antagonistic worlds).

Things are going to change (for the worse) in a big way

Instead, it is to underline two outcomes:First, everything is going to change. Whatever new economic system or systems the world develops will be something we’re unlikely to recognize as being viable today. We will probably need far higher volumes of capital (retirees absorb it like sponges), but we’ll have far less of it (fewer workers means fewer taxpayers). That suggests economic growth and technological progress (both of which require capital as an input) will stall out. And that’s just one facet. Everything that capitalism and fascism and the rest were designed to balance or manage—supply, demand, production, capital, labor, debt, scarcity, logistics—isn’t so much contorting as evolving into forms we have literally never experienced as a species. We are entering a period of extreme transformation, with our strategic, political, economic, technological, demographic, and cultural norms all in flux at the same time. Of course we will shift to a different management system.

The transition will be traumatic

Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been “more” on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings. Between the demographic inversion and the end of globalization, we are not simply ending our long experience with more, or even beginning a terrifying new world of less; we face economic free fall as everything that has underpinned humanity’s economic existence since the Renaissance unwinds all at once.

cc

Immigration is at an all time high

A big reason why so many Boomers have been so supportive of nativist politicians such as Donald Trump is that their feelings of shock at the pace of change in American society is not a collective hallucination. It is firmly backed up by reality.

Indeed.

Transport

France had multiple famines in early modern works even though best place in Europe

Even breadbaskets could not reliably feed themselves. Between 1500 and 1778, France suffered several national famines (and dozens of regional famines). Yes, that France—the country that has been Europe’s largest and most reliable food producer stretching back a millennium, the country that has three SEPARATE agricultural regions, the country that had, bar none, the best internal transport system of the preindustrial world.

Costs in shipping fell massively

For the first time, true international trade in bulk goods was possible. Between 1825 and 1910, inflation-adjusted prices for freighting cotton and wheat fell by 94 percent. Between 1880 and 1910, the cost component of transport for wheat being shipped from the United States to Europe fell from 18 percent to 8 percent. Now that transport issues had gone from straitjacket to springboard, no one in Britain who had the option would keep eating local foodstuffs. Between 1850 and 1880, the proportion of British cereals in the average British diet fell from three-fifths to one-fifth.

pax Americana made trade safe

Really? What about pax Britannica?

#oversimple

While the Industrial Revolution made it much cheaper to ship products from A to B, it took the Americans’ global Order to make transport much safer. Between the changed technological base and the changed geopolitical circumstances, what constitutes a Geography of Success expanded to . . . almost everywhere. And that marched us all in some unexpected directions.

Big section on containerisation

Aside: this is another great example of [[platformnomics]]. A new standard meant new economies of scale. This even platforms interacting with platforms IE sea vessels and ports.

But while lower costs, combined with the container’s flexibility, enabled port siting to be less finicky, the ports themselves had to become more so. Now that anything and everything could be containerized and shipped, the ports had to be able to serve as way stations for absolutely colossal through-volumes. And as ships became ever larger, not every port could play host.First to go were the medium-sized regional ports that simply couldn’t handle the new transoceanic behemoths. Cargo either went to the newer, gargantuan megacontainer ports or to the very small ports that managed local distribution. As the megaports drew more and more cargo and became more and more . . . mega, even small distribution hubs faded away. After all, rail lines could connect to the bigger ports and simply rail cargo to the small ports’ own distribution network. Ports upriver, especially smaller ones that could not handle oceangoing vessels, became redundant.These kinds of economic rearrangements happened all over the world, setting off concurrent races to become the regional hub. Ports designed to serve a single metro region—think the ports of Paris, London, Brooklyn, St. Louis, or Chicago—all but evaporated. Instead, locations that could contort themselves into a shape that facilitated broad-scale container distribution—think the ports of Rotterdam, Felixstowe, New Jersey, Houston, or Tacoma—exploded into being.Larger and larger ships were sailing among fewer and fewer ports, which themselves became progressively larger and larger.

Costs of transport dropped to under 1%

Combined with bigger, slower ships, containerization has reduced the total cost of transporting goods to less than 1 percent of said goods’ overall cost. Before industrialization, the figure was typically more than three-quarters. Pre-deepwater, the figure was often north of 99 percent.

Summary

Transport networks are complex and fragile. Without safe passage they will rapidly degrade leading to major problems.

Would benefit from more walkthrough of detail . Eh what increase in costs will lead to X reduction in trade meaning Y impact on economy. Very high level and a bit hand wavy.

Also wonder if systems are more resilient than we think.

Section III: Finance

A short history of the rise of money in the post bronze age collapse

I cite this example because it exemplifies the strength and weaknesses of his style and approach. Compresses a lot into a compelling, irreverent and memorable narrative. However, over simplified to point of distortion, over does geo and techno factors over others etc.

focused mentality not only granted us greater heft and stability and populations, they contributed to the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Some outcomes of this accelerated technological track were any number of new agricultural tools and techniques, culminating in the emergence of classical Greece, with its all-important water wheels. Human civilization still had plenty of bumps and scrapes ahead of it—setbacks and horrors like the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, twerking, the 2020 American presidential debate—but this post-collapse intermixing pushed the technical envelope sufficiently forward that humanity never again suffered a mass collapse event. And if the wolf of civilizational collapse is no longer at the door, you’re more willing to accept payment in coin as opposed to barley.Third, with both stability and economic dynamism steadily increasing, traders had more confidence that the city or country or empire they wanted to trade with or for would be there when they got back. For the first time in history there was a geopolitical rationale for developing a currency better than barley.All at once in multiple locations, we developed metal coinage as a method of exchange: in China, in India, in the Eastern Mediterranean. The rest, as they say, is history. Instead of surpluses or shortages of a good triggering a flurry of confusingly haphazard barter, courtesy of metal coinage the value of one side of the trade was now always known. The whims of climate and season and culture and scarcity and plenty were no longer obstacles that discouraged economic activity, but instead were its fuel.

The Chinese model: free money

Beautifully told.

The biggest of the adherents to the Asian financial model is, of course, China. It isn’t so much that the Chinese applied the model in any fundamentally new ways, but instead that they carried the model to its absurd extremes by nearly every measure.Part of the absurdity is simply size. When China started down its development path in 1980, it already had one billion people, more than the combined total of the rest of the East Asian nations, from Japan to Indonesia.Part was timing. China’s entrance into the global Order did not occur until after the Nixon-Mao summit, the death of Mao, and the initiation of broad-spectrum economic reforms in the late 1970s. By the time the Chinese were ready to get down to the business of business, the gold standard was nearly a decade gone. Modern Communist China has known nothing but the era of fiat currencies and cheap money. It had no good habits to break.Part was the nature of Beijing’s unification goals. Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia have half their populations on a small footprint (Greater Seoul for the Koreans, the west coast of the middle Malay Peninsula for Malaysia, and the island of Java for Indonesia). Japan was the world’s most ethnically pure state before it industrialized. Singapore is a city. These Asian states began with reasonably unified populations.Not so with China. China is messy.Even eliminating the un- and lightly populated portions, China spans more than 1.5 million square miles, about the same size as all of Western Europe. This populated 1.5 million square miles spans climate zones from near desert to near tundra to near tropics.* Even the “simple” part of China, the North China Plain, has witnessed more wars and ethnic cleansings than any other spot on the planet. The Yangtze Valley in China’s center has ranked among the world’s most sophisticated economies for most of recorded history. Southern China’s rugged landscapes have hosted everything from the poorest and most technologically backward of Asia’s many peoples to the hypertechnocracy of Hong Kong.Every country puts a premium on political unification. Every country has fought internal wars to achieve it. China’s own internal unification effort is one of the world’s most heinous, stretching back across four millennia and dozens of discrete conflicts. The most recent major dustup—Mao’s Cultural Revolution—killed at least 40 million people, twenty-five times the number of Americans killed in all wars. The Chinese belief in the necessity of internal political violence, repression, and propaganda didn’t manifest out of nowhere, but is instead viewed as a necessary reality to avoid nightmarish civil wars. The solution?Spend!The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.

And so a price was indeed paid:Fresh new lending in calendar year 2020 was about 34.9 trillion yuan (roughly US$5.4 trillion), which, even if you use the statistics for national economic size that even Chinese state economists say are bloated, comes to just shy of 40 percent of GDP. The best guess is that as of calendar year 2022, total outstanding corporate debt in China has reached 350 percent of GDP, or some 385 trillion yuan (US$58 trillion).

The Chinese have embraced the fiat currency era just as warmly as they embraced the Asian financial model. China regularly prints currency at more than double the rate of the United States, sometimes at five times the U.S. rate. And whereas the U.S. dollar is the store of value for the world and the global medium of exchange, the Chinese yuan wasn’t even used in Hong Kong until the 2010s.

Part and parcel of the Chinese financial model is that there is no top. Because the system throws a bottomless supply of money at issues, it is hongry. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is allowed to stand in the way of development. Price is no issue because the volume of credit is no issue. One result among many is insane bidding wars for any product that exists in limited quantity. If ravenous demand for cement or copper or oil drives product prices up, then the system simply deploys more capital to secure them.

Something similar occurred in Japan in the 1980s with real estate, when for a brief and bizarre moment a square mile of downtown Tokyo was supposedly worth more than the entire U.S. western seaboard. The Japanese immediately recognized that this was not a sign that things had gone radically right, but instead that something had gone radically wrong. The Chinese have yet to register such a dark eureka. In particular the Chinese boom stressed global commodities markets between 2003 and 2007, with oil prices reaching historical, inflation-adjusted highs in 2007 of approximately $150 a barrel.Another result is massive overproduction. China is worried about idle hands, not bottom lines. China is by far the world’s largest exporter of steel and aluminum and cement because it produces more of all three than even hyper-ravenous China can use. China’s much-discussed One Belt One Road global infrastructure program—which many non-Chinese fear is part influence peddling, part strategic gambit—is in many ways little more than a means of disposing of the surpluses.Perhaps the most significant result of the Chinese derivation of the Asian financial model is that there is no end. All the other Asian states ultimately came to terms with the massive-debt-eventually-leads-to-dumpster-fires nature of the model. Japan crashed in 1989 and took thirty years to emerge from under the debt. The recovery took so long that Japan lost the entirety of its demographic dividend and is unlikely to ever have meaningful economic growth again. Indonesia crashed in 1998, which destroyed its government. Twice. The country’s political system remains a chaotic mess. Korea and Thailand also crashed in 1998 and used the pain to solidify transition to civilian rule (a process that bore more durable results in Korea than Thailand).None of these options can be considered in Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party’s only source of legitimacy is economic growth, and China’s only economic growth comes from egregious volumes of financing. Every time the Chinese government attempts to dial back the credit and make the country’s economy more healthy or sustainable, growth crashes, the natives start talking about making lengthy strolls in large groups, and the government turns the credit spigot back to full. In the CCP’s mind, moving away from debt-as-all is synonymous with the end of modern China, unified China, and the CCP. In that, the Party is probably correct. It’s no surprise then that the CCP’s preferred method of storing their wealth is in U.S. currency . . . outside of China.

No-one wants yuan for a reason

But it is China, where monetary expansion is the standard operating procedure for everything, that has truly broken the bank. Since 2007—the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet—the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent.Outside the mainland, the Chinese yuan is only popular in Hong Kong, and only because Hong Kong serves as the financial intersection between China proper and the rest of the world. Anywhere else, the yuan is nearly nonexistent. The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America’s for a decade—often twice as big. So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one. Capital flight out of China to the U.S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.China’s financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led. That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes—developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control. China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century. This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.

Todo graph from text here

Sceptical of crypto

The same capital is also responsible for recent explosions of stupid. In early 2021 a bunch of gamers hurled so much capital into the video game platform GameStop that it briefly became one of America’s most valuable firms, despite being about to file for bankruptcy. Cyptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not backed by a government, are not readily exchangeable, are not useful in making payments, have no intrinsic value, and are primarily generated by Chinese magnates seeking an end run around sanctions, yet the combined value of all cryptos is in excess of $2 trillion. My personal favorite is something called Dogecoin, which was literally formed as a joke to highlight how idiotic crypto investors could be. At times the total value of dogecoins has topped $50 billion. All of this and more is textbook overcapitalization of a nearly Chinese scale. When capital is cheap enough, even pigs can fly.Once.

Demographics mean a major credit crunch as boomers retire

Second, it is so coming crashing down. There’s no geopolitical forecast here. It is basic math. The majority of the men and women in the world’s mature worker bulge—those all-important Baby Boomers—will hit retirement in the first half of the 2020s. Retirees no longer have new income to invest.That’s worse than it sounds for the world of finance.Not only is there nothing new to be invested, but what investments they do have tend to be reapportioned from high-earning stocks, corporate bonds, and foreign assets to investments that are inflation-proof, stock market crash-proof, and currency crash-proof. Out with the Chinese tech start-up fund, Rwandan infrastructure bonds, and Bolivian lithium projects, and in with T-bills, money markets, and cash. Otherwise a single market correction could wipe out decades of savings and the now-retiree could lose everything. This is smart and logical for the individual, but not so hot for the broader system, for two reasons.The first is pretty obvious. Credit is the lifeblood of a modern economy. If you’re a company, borrowing helps you meet payroll, fund expansions, purchase machinery, and build new facilities. Every Jane or Joe uses credit every day: college loans, car loans, mortgage loans, home equity loans, credit cards. It is the lubrication that makes pretty much everything possible. Without credit, one of the few methods of purchasing goods is with cash, up front and in full. How long would it take you to earn enough to pay for your car, your college education, or your house—up front and in full?

Bad times are coming

Once again, recent decades have been the best time in human history, and we are never going back. Even worse, we’re not looking down the maw of a return to 1950s-style government services—at that point there was relative balance between young workers, mature workers, and retirees. For much of the world, we’re looking down the maw of 1850s-style government services before most governments even offered services, but without the attendant economic growth that would allow populations a chance to take care of themselves.

Would be good to have a bit more detail here. Healthcare might revert bit most healthcare gains were actually in cheap public health stuff etc.

Post-capitalism is already here

If none of this sounds particularly capitalistic, that’s because it is not. The environment that allowed capitalism to exist is part of the “more” we’ve all become used to, and it is highly questionable whether capitalism can exist without ongoing economic growth.My point isn’t that capitalism is dead, but instead that even the Americans, the youngest and richest advanced population in the world—the people with the most “more” of all—are already eyeball-deep into the transition from a capitalist, globalized system to . . . whatever comes next.On top of that, if what we know, or at least what we think we know, is already fading away in America in the here and now, then what hope does the rest of the world have for figuring out the future?

Climate Change

Greentrch has some serious limitations regarding buildout

Most parts of the world are neither very windy nor very sunny. Eastern Canada and northern and Central Europe are cloud-bound for more than nine months of the year on average, in addition to having painfully short winter days. No one goes to Florida or northern Brazil to kiteboard. The eastern two-thirds of China, the vast bulk of India, and nearly the entirety of Southeast Asia—home to fully half the world’s population—have so little solar and wind potential that a large-scale greentech buildout would emit more carbon than it would ever save. Same for West Africa. And the northern Andes. And the more populated portions of the former Soviet Union. And Ontario.

Zones for which today’s greentech makes both environmental and economic sense comprise less than one-fifth of the land area of the populated continents, most of which is far removed from our major population centers. Think Patagonia for wind, or the Outback for solar. The unfortunate fact is that greentech in its current form simply isn’t useful for most people in most places—either to reduce carbon emissions or to provide a substitute for energy inputs in a more chaotic, post-Order world.

Even more issues for greentech

Fossil fuels are so concentrated that they are literally “energy” in physical form. In contrast, all greentechs require space. Solar is the worst of the bunch: it is roughly one thousand times less dense than systems powered by more conventional means. Consider America’s Megalopolis, the line of densely packed cities from Boston in the north to the Greater DC area in the south. Collectively, the coastal cities of this line comprise roughly one-third of the American population on a tiny footprint. They also happen to be positioned on patches of land with very low solar and wind potential. The idea they could generate sufficient volumes of electricity locally is asinine. They need to import it. The closest zone with reasonably good solar potential (not “good,” “reasonably good”) is south-central Virginia. That’s an inconvenient six hundred miles away from Boston, and Boston would be last in line for sips of electricity after D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford, and Providence.It isn’t simply an issue for cities located in cloudy, still locations. It is a problem for cities everywhere. Every technological development that has brought us to our industrialized, urbanized present must be reevaluated to make today’s greentech work. But by far the biggest challenge is the very existence of cities themselves. All are by definition densely populated, while greentech by definition is not dense. Squaring that circle even in sunny and windy locations will require massive infrastructure to bridge the gap between dense population patterns and far more dispersed greentech electricity-generating systems. Such infrastructure would be on a scale and of a scope that humanity has not yet attempted. The alternative is to empty the cities and unwind six thousand years of history. Color me skeptical.Fifth, even if solar and wind were equivalent technologies to oil, natural gas, and coal in terms of reliability, decarbonizing the grid would remain a mammoth task. Currently, 38 percent of global power generation is carbon free, suggesting we’d “only” need to roughly triple the good slice to displace the bad. Wrong. Hydropower has already used all available appropriate geographies globally. Nuclear would first need a helluva PR campaign to sufficiently improve its image. If only solar and wind are doing the lifting, they would need a ninefold buildout to fully displace fossil fuels.

Sixth, even in the geographies where greentech works well, it is at best only a partial patch. Greentech only generates electricity. Wind and solar might theoretically be able to replace coal in some specific locations, but electricity of any type is not compatible with existing infrastructure and vehicles that use oil-derived liquid fuels.Such a restriction naturally leads to discussion of electric vehicles as a wholesale replacement for those powered by internal combustion engines. Such is far more difficult than it sounds.The entirety of the global electricity sector generates roughly as much power as liquid transport fuels. Run the math: switching all transport from internal combustion to electric would necessitate a doubling of humanity’s capacity to generate electricity. Again, hydro and nuclear couldn’t help, so that ninefold increase in solar and wind is now a twenty-fold increase. Nor are you even remotely done. You now need absolutely massive transmission capacity to link the locations where wind and solar systems can generate power to where that power would ultimately be consumed. In the case of Europe and China, those power lines have to jump continents. You’re also assuming minor little details break your way, such as the wind always blowing or the sun never setting or there never being hiccups in transmitting power from the Libyan desert to Berlin or the Outback to Beijing. More likely, EVs with today’s technology will work only if we double down on the very energy sources that environmentalists say we’re trying to cut out of the system.In my not so humble opinion, we need to tackle first things first: we need to green the grid before we expand it. And unfortunately, the pace of that effort is painfully slow: From 2014, when the solar boom began, until 2020, solar has only increased to become 1.5 percent of total energy use.

Todo figures which are good

Seventh, the practical aspects of a potential switchover are beyond Herculean, both in terms of technical challenges and cost, and I am not talking about the relatively simple task of installing enough solar panels and wind turbines to generate 43,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly seventy times the total greentech buildout of 2010 through 2021. Part of what makes the modern world work is on-demand electricity. This requires something called dispatchability: the idea that a power plant can ramp its power output up and down to match demand. Not only can wind and solar not do this; they are also intermittent. Power levels vary based on that most mercurial of forces: the weather. Hardware upgrades can prevent such surges from alternatively shorting out or browning out industrial and residential customers, but that’s not free.Part of what makes dispatchability so attractive is that there are peaks and troughs in normal electricity demand. Specifically, in most locations peak electricity demand is between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., with higher demand rates in the winter. However, peak solar supply is between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., with higher supply profiles in the summer. And that’s before considering that the same panel will generate different amounts of power based on location. My panels in the highlands of Colorado would spit out less than one-fifth the power in the doldrums of Toronto. No amount of money enables us to ignore this little geographic problem.Unlike coal or natural gas, which can be prepositioned, the wind blows where the wind blows and the sun shines where the sun shines. Any greentech-generated electricity must then be wired to where it can be used. This is also not free, and often results in the doubling (or more) of the cost of the delivered power (the details vary massively based on where the power is coming from, where it will be consumed, the nature of the connecting infrastructure, what sort of political borders must be crossed, etc.). It’s no wonder fully 95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away.

charges the battery, nor the transmission asset to get the electricity to the battery.As of 2021, the United States had 1,100 gigawatts of installed electricity-generation capacity, but only 23.2 gigawatts of electricity storage. Roughly 70 percent of that 23.2 gigawatts is something called “pumped storage,” in essence using excess generated power to pump water uphill, and then allowing that water to flow down a watercourse to power a generator as needed. Most of the other 30 percent is some sort of storage capacity located in people’s homes. Only 0.73 gigawatts of storage is actually in the form of batteries. The American state that is most committed to the ideology of a green future is California. The state as a whole has but enough total storage—not battery storage, total storage—for one minute of power. Los Angeles, the American metropolitan area with the most aggressive plan for installing grid storage, doesn’t anticipate reaching one hour of total storage capacity until 2045.Remember, that’s one hour of storage for LA’s current electricity system—not the doubling that would be required to realize the dream of universal EV adoption for cars and light trucks.Nor would that magical four hours be anything more than the first step on a long and tortuous road. A true shift to a carbon-neutral power system would require the capacity to camel not hours, but months of electricity for the seasons that are not as windy or sunny. We don’t know everything about the world of energy, but we know for certain that there is not enough lithium ore on the entire planet to enable a rich country like the United States to achieve such a goal, much less the world writ large.

Eighth, there is a little-discussed financial issue that might soon make this entire discussion moot.In places with good solar or wind resources, most current price assessments suggest that the combined lifetime cost of fuel, maintenance, and installation for greentech versus conventional is more or less equal. From a financial point of view, the primary difference is when capital must be committed. About one-fifth of the total costs for the entire life span of a conventional power are spent up front on land acquisition and facility construction, with the rest dribbled out over decades for fuel purchase and facility maintenance. In contrast, for greentech nearly the entire cost is up front, two-thirds up front in the case of onshore wind turbines. After all, fuel costs are zero.

In the capital-rich world of the late Order, this is a footnote, and not a particularly important one at that. There is nothing wrong with financing twenty-five years of power bills up front when capital is cheap. But in the capital-poor world of the Disorder, this could well be everything. Should investment capital become harder to source or borrowing costs go up, all such up-front investments degrade from an easy carry to unsatisfactorily risky and expensive. In that world, the far lower installation costs of conventional systems make a great deal more sense.Greentech in its current form simply isn’t mature enough or cheap enough to move the needle for most peoples in most locations. It is largely limited to developed countries with rich capital supplies who just coincidentally happen to have large population centers fairly close to sunny or windy locations. The southwest quarter of the United States looks great, as do the American Great Plains, Australia, and the coasts of the North Sea.Nearly all other locations will remain dependent upon more traditional fuels for the vast majority of their energy needs. This is far worse than it sounds from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions because the vast majority of these locations will not be able to retain access to internationally traded oil and natural gas, either. If they cannot source oil or natural gas and their geographies do not enable sufficient use of solar and wind, they will have a simple decision to make. Option A is to do without the products that have enabled humanity to advance for the past two centuries, to suffer catastrophic reductions in product access and food production, triggering massive downward revisions in standards of living and population. To go without electricity. To deindustrialize. To decivilize.Or—Option B—to use the one fuel source that nearly all countries have locally: coal. Many particularly unlucky people will be stuck with something called lignite, a barely-qualifies-as-coal fuel that is typically one-fifth water by weight and is by far the least efficient and dirtiest fuel in use today. Germany already today uses lignite as its primary power input fuel because greentech is so woefully unapplicable to the German geography, and yet the Germans—for environmental reasons—have shut down most of their other power-generation options.

Aside: German example is a great example of views and values shaping crucial decisions against basic logic (ie opposition to nuclear power in green movement)

As a planet, we are perfectly capable of suffering broad-scale economic collapse and vastly increasing our carbon emissions at the same time.

Section VI: Manufacturing

why china us screwed (again)

At the bottom of the quality and value scale lies China, which despite years of effort and untold billions of dollars invested has to this point not only proven unable to crack the high-end market, it cannot even build the machines that build most of the middle-market stuff. While low-cost labor in China has enabled the Chinese to dominate product assembly, nearly all high-end components (and a fair amount of middle-quality components) are imported from elsewhere. The products China makes—as opposed to assembles—tend to be on the lower end: steel and plastics and anything that can be die-cast or injection-molded.By many measures, China is going backward. The country’s manufacturing output as a percent of GDP has been falling since 2006, which, judging by corporate profitability figures, was probably China’s peak year in terms of production efficiency.China should have become a noncompetitive country in manufacturing in the late 2000s because it had exhausted its coastal labor pool. Instead the coast imported at least 300 million—likely as many as 400 million—workers from the interior.* That bought the Chinese economy another fifteen years, but at the cost of hardwiring, both within the coast and between the coast and the interior, massive inequality in income and levels of industrial development.It also makes the Chinese goal of a domestically oriented, consumption-driven, internationally insulated economy flatly impossible to reach. Little of the income from all those Chinese exports went to the workers (especially the workers from the interior), so little can be spent on consumption. China now has a rapidly aging coastal population that has limited consumption needs and—most important—hasn’t repopulated. That coastal population is stacked against a seething migrant class from the interior that lives in semi-illegal circumstances in hypercramped, near-slumlike conditions, working grueling hours, and that cannot repopulate. It is all located next to an emptied-out interior whose primary source of economic activity is state investments into an industrial plant that is of questionable economic usefulness, populated by a demographic that is too old to repopulate. This is all in a country where decades of the One Child Policy have encouraged selective-sex abortions en masse, so there simply are not enough women under forty to repopulate the country in the first place.The successive waves of hypergrowth—concentrated on the coastal zones where the world can see them—make China’s rise seem inevitable. The reality is China has borrowed from its interior regions and its demography in order to achieve what, historically speaking, is a very short-term boost. Never let anyone tell you the Chinese are good at the long game. In 3,500 years of Chinese history, the longest stint one of their empires has gone without massive territorial losses is seventy years. That’s. Right. Now. In a geopolitical era created by an outside force that the Chinese cannot shape.

Manufacturing a new world

Chinese have not been able to replicate German expertise in machinery despite copying the designs

Interesting [[primacy of culture]] point

Machinery is where things get sketchy, and not simply because no one really puts machinery into a specific category for data collection. Germany is hands-down the world’s best because the German cultural penchant for anal-retentive precision is precisely what makes for good machinery. Unfortunately for the world, culture cannot be transferred. No matter how much cash is splurged on it. Just ask the Chinese, whose efforts to pirate German designs and mimic German output have consistently met with failure.

Famine is coming

And China again ...

Haiti isn’t even the extreme case. Many states are worse managed, are suffering greater agricultural collapses, or both. I’m particularly concerned, in no particular order, about Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Guatemala, Laos, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, Niger, and Mali. All have experienced population booms beyond their systems’ capacity to feed them, while simultaneously losing command of the preindustrial skill sets that sustained their pre-Order populations. For many of these places, the pre-Order, preindustrial struggle for subsistence will soon be thought of as a high point that cannot be returned to.Should something—should anything—happen to those imported food flows, civilizational collapse into anarchy complete with a population “correction” isn’t simply a distinct possibility, it is the most likely outcome. After all, a government that cannot feed its population is a government that falls.

That’s the story of the biggest losers in relative terms. In absolute terms the biggest loser by far will be China. China sits at the end of the world’s longest supply routes for nearly everything it imports, including roughly 80 percent of its oil needs. China’s navy lacks the range necessary to secure, via trade or conquest, agricultural products—or even the inputs to grow and raise its own.China’s demographic collapse suggests imminent labor force and capital-supplies collapses. And China’s existing, Order-era agricultural system is already the most hyperinanced sector in history’s most hyperfinanced economy. There is nothing about this that will work in the world to come. There will be no shortage of famines in the post-Order world. ,Likely in excess of 1 billion people will starve to death, and another 2 billion will suffer chronic malnutrition. Some two-thirds of China’s population faces one of those two fates. And remember, China is also history’s most quickly aging society. The people who will be called upon to manage—or suffer through—mass malnutrition and famine are going to be old.

The Long ride of the third horseman

Thesis summarised: it is a classic fragile complexity breaks down

The same webwork of sacrosanct interconnections that has brought us everything from quick mortgages to smartphones to on-demand electricity has not only also filled 8 billion bellies, it has done so with the odd out-of-season avocado. That’s now largely behind us. The web is failing. Just past the horizon looms a world of lower and less reliable agricultural yields, marred by less variety. A world with less energy or fewer manufactured goods is the difference between wealth and security or poverty and conflict. But a world with fewer foodstuffs is one with fewer people.More than war, more than disease, famine is the ultimate country killer. And it is not something the human condition can adjust to quickly or easily.It is the magic mix of industrialization and urbanization that makes modernity possible, and it is precisely those intertwined factors that are under such extreme threat. Weaken the pair, much less break them down, and it will take at bare minimum a generation to rebuild a mix of financial access and manufacturing supply chains and technological evolutions and labor forces that are capable of feeding 8 billion people. And in the time it takes to do that . . . we will no longer have 8 billion people.

Epilogue

We missed our chances in the lady 40y

Courtesy of the depressing, impressively disengaged leadership of Barack Obama and the equally depressing, impressively disconnected leadership of Donald Trump, we are so far off from the world that I want to see, it has gotten easier for me to bury my personal preferences and get on with the work of assessing the state of the world. And write this book.This is not a call to action. In my opinion, we missed a chance to go down a separate road—a better road—well over a decade ago. And even if I had a viable plan for today, Americans who are interested in playing a constructive role in recrafting the world with an eye toward a brighter future have lost the last eight presidential elections. I might say the singular exception was the most recent one. In the Trump-Biden contest, internationalists like myself didn’t even have a guy in the race.Nor is this project a lamentation for the world that could have been. When the Cold War ended, the Americans had the opportunity to do nearly anything. Instead, both on the Left and the Right, we started a lazy descent into narcissistic populism. The presidential election record that brought us Clinton and W Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden isn’t an aberration, but instead a pattern of active disinterest in the wider world. It is our new norm. This book is about where that norm leads.Nor is there leadership beyond America. There is no new hegemon-in-waiting, nor countries that will rise to support a common vision. There is no savior waiting in the wings. Instead, the world’s secondary powers have already fallen back into their old habits of mutual antagonism.

The Europeans, in the most peaceful and wealthy period in their history, have proven incapable of coming together for a common cheese policy, a common banking policy, a common foreign policy, or a common refugee policy—much less a common strategic policy. Without globalization, nearly three generations of achievement will boil away. Perhaps the European response to the Ukraine War will prove me wrong. I hope so.China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas. In the post–Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order prevented the powers that had impoverished, shattered, and conquered them through the centuries from fully exerting themselves, while simultaneously creating the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known. Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structures. Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.

Seeds of demographic collapse planted in 1980s and are now well and truly here

If anything, humanity’s next chapter will be even more grim, for now we have the demographic angle to fold into the mix. In most countries, the point of no return passed around 1980. That’s when masses of twenty-and thirty-somethings simply stopped having children. Fast-forward four decades to the present and this childless generation is now retiring. Most of the developed world faces imminent, simultaneous consumption, production, and financial collapses. The advanced developing world—China included—is, if anything, worse off. There, urbanization and industrialization happened much more quickly, so birth rates crumpled all the faster. Their even-faster aging dictates an even-faster collapse. The numbers tell us that it all must happen in this decade. The numbers tell us it was always going to happen in this decade.

Inter-regnums are always messy, but that's the way of births

Or: Spring only comes after a winter. this is my very [[second renaissance]] reading.

A running theme through all my work, including my three previous books, is that our particular point in history—the unwinding of globalization—is little more than a momentary transition period. An interregnum, as it were. Such historical periods are (in)famous for their instability as the old gives way to the new. The interregnum between the British-German competition and the Cold War included the world wars and the Great Depression. The interregnum between the French-German competition and the British-German competition included Napoleon. When old structures fall, or “merely” persevere in the face of extreme challenge, stuff breaks. Lots of stuff.

The 2020s and 2030s will be exceedingly uncomfortable for many, but this too will pass. Best of all, we can already see the sun starting to burn through the clouds. A few things to consider:

(North) America will be the total winner

Perhaps best of all, the above assumes that a great many things do not go very . . . well. Much of this book—much of all my books—chronicles the not-very-well bits of future history that lie ahead. Collapses capital and agricultural and cultural. Fractures transport and manufacturing and national. But the North American continent stands apart both geographically and demographically from much of the approaching chaos. It will serve as both a repository of the gains of ages past and a laboratory for the age to come.The real question—the real mystery—is what happens then? Never before in human history has an interregnum smashed so many countries and cultures across such a wide swath of the planet. Even the Late Bronze Age Collapse wasn’t so complete. We called the twentieth century “the American Century” because the United States emerged globally predominant in 1945. In the coming age, the gap between North America and the bulk of the world will be, if anything, starker. Never before in human history has the premier power from the previous era emerged so unassailably dominant at the beginning of the next.

Further Reading

Special thanks to Richard Hokenson—whose work started me down the road to marrying demographics to economics so many years ago—and Paul Morland for writing The Human Tide, arguably the best book ever on the intersection of demographics, history, and national power.If you ever find yourself needing to stress test an energy-related theory, Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba serves as a one-stop shop.