I’ve been following Zeihan since his first book. I’m yet to find a credible counter argument to his theses. And he’s being proven right at an alarming pace this year.
So far this year we’ve had:
- A land war in Europe
- Food insecurity in the developing world
- Breakdown of supply chains and shipping routes
- Nation states resorting to seizing each other’s ships (see Greece-Iran issue recently).
Everything that he had talked about in the past and in his latest book.
The thing about Zeihan’s arguments is that you can’t really argue against demographics. You can procure any resource from any part of the world, but if you want an 18 year old to consume or work or fight, you HAVE to wait 18 years. Or import them from elsewhere - which causes all sorts of cultural and societal conflicts.
How many of his predictions have failed? How many are timebound and falsifiable?
I am not specifically familiar with Zehain, but I am very well acquainted with figures who generate many predictions, have a small number become true, and then get treated as oracles for years before the truth is exposed: predicting the future in massive, chaotic systems is nearly impossible.
His core arguments focus on geography and demographics, both of which are “hard” problems. Declining populations simply cannot maintain the “grow at all costs” current economic order. Even an advanced country like Japan with plenty of automation and high productivity rates hasn’t see any growth in two decades since its population itself doesn’t grow anymore.
Even if you don’t go by his more alarmist arguments, you have to agree that in the face of declining populations and ageing demographics, we will have to shift to a new economic model where growth isn’t the only goal. And any large scale shift in economic models comes with some grief, at the very least.
One major differentiator between the US and China is that China traditionally / currently is not considered a good destination for foreigners / immigrants. (even Chinese people inside China from lower tier cities / countryside struggle to gain residency in top tier cities or get good jobs / benefits). Whereas the US, for all of its flailing around politically, is perceived by many people in many countries as a good place to move. So immigration is a major leverage point the US can / should use to keep the economic engine going. A working age person coming to the US and working hard is basically one of the best case scenarios -- the US tax-base did almost nothing then suddenly you have a new productive person. Contrary to tons of rhetoric, unless you have a failing business, virtually all people at your company will maintain employment if their production is more valuable than what you pay them -- so they end up being a net gain. And last time I checked, not many people come from another country with furniture, a house, a car, etc.. (so they both produce for some company, and consume likely at much higher levels than say boomers who already own virtually everything they need). So, hopefully the US doesn't lose its "mindshare" leadership around being a good destination for immigrants, because in the next 50 years we will see more and more battles for bringing immigrants to your country to make up for the low birth rates.
> currently is not considered a good destination for foreigners / immigrants. (even Chinese people inside China from lower tier cities / countryside struggle to gain residency in top tier cities or get good jobs / benefits)
And to the US.
Once Chinese reach tier 1 cities, they try to get their kids into US universities.
> So, hopefully the US doesn't lose its "mindshare" leadership around being a good destination for immigrants, because in the next 50 years we will see more and more battles for bringing immigrants to your country to make up for the low birth rates.
This was predicted ad-nauseam (especially when the last administration took office). Yet the opposite happened [0]. 3-5x more applicants than the per year quota.
> Whereas the US, for all of its flailing around politically, is perceived by many people in many countries as a good place to move.
The lower language barrier is a massive help. Thanks to British colonizing half the world, there are over a billion people who speak and understand English.
Hollywood (and now, TV shows) help too. American culture is already familiar to most people across the world. You're less likely to get a culture shock moving from India to USA than from India to China.
I don’t think the US is easy to
emigrate to for extended periods of
time. I am put off by being tied to one employer in an at-will employment culture and needing that job to stay resident.
Wikipedia says 188,100 new and initial H-1B visas were issued in 2019. So not a lot.
That's also bad for US salaries as those visa holders have less mobility and thus drive the equilibrium price down. It's a lose/lose in the name of "ma jobs"...
According to [0] there are more than 3.5 million births per year, so a bit more than 100 million since 1990. 1.5% isn’t insignificant, but I wouldn’t call it huge.
People like to point at Japan and its lack of growth pointing out to various degrees how awful that is, but if you’re actually Japanese, you’re pretty much fine for these decades of zeroish growth. Not to say Japan is an idyllic place free from problems, but the economics of a zero growth society has at least that example of a distinct lack of doom. If the rest of us experience it like that, it’s not really anything to worry about unless your worries revolve around earning money from capital.
That’s likely to change for the worst for Japan in the next year or two, possibly as soon as this summer.
They’re trying to defend their currency and interest rates at the same time. Already the Yen has taken a beating this year. They are at high risk of a huge economic shock.
They’ve been able to postpone it, but just like getting out of a bad stock trade, only the first movers can do it, which means others can’t copy the Japanese strategy. Also, there are tons of specifics for Japan, such as education, economic drivers, geography and supply chains that make it unique, so it would be even harder to copy.
There's a distinct cost to that lack of doom. In fact, "lack of doom" depends entirely on where you live in Japan. Most of the country is somewhere on the spectrum of "moving to Tokyo" for economic opportunity. Smaller cities just seem to be a waypoint on that journey.
Japanese work long hours and don't make very much money. The average salary is just under 54k USD. People continue to work well into old age and in many ways Japan's culture and history are becoming lost due to the rural/suburban exodus.
This is happening on every country on earth and for good reason. Cities are more efficient. (Growth Ponzi Scheme)
> Japanese work long hours and don't make very much money.
That's culture and not an economic necessity. They also have a months holiday, maternity leave, and healthcare isn't 20% gdp. The French would say that Americans work a lot for little pay.
> People continue to work well into old age
Common in the west as well. Many countries have pushed back pension age since 2000.
> Japan's culture and history are becoming lost due to the rural/suburban exodus.
Cultures changes over time. Italian culture Italian culture did not include tomato sauces or pizza not to long ago. Hell, Italy wasn't a country! France didn't have a unified language until Napoleon
Interesting take. The majority of Japanese live outside of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Maybe someday that will be untrue, but I don't think it will happen for a long while. The other big cities in Japan are still strong and several of the smaller cities. Some small towns and villages have died or going that way, but plenty are doing OK.
But even in those places that are dying, people take great care to preserve and prolong Japanese culture and history. It is perhaps the country most interested in its own history and culture in all the world.
"People" might, but the post you're replying to didn't. All they said was "Declining populations simply cannot maintain the “grow at all costs” current economic order" which implies a change is necessary, not whether that change is good/bad/whatever.
But Japan experienced that change already and it wasn't apocalyptic by any means. Puranjay's claim here is almost literally "change will happen, and it will bring grief." So change happening without much grief runs right against that.
Meanwhile, the US has had any number of highly-adversarial, occasionally-violent political fights in the last decade while still in that "grow the top line" mindset.
You could make a plausible argument that those additional few decades of "growth" has a lot to do with the violence and unrest, even, not the other way around. (For instance, see any of a number of takes from all over the political spectrum blaming increasing stratification of elites.)
Hell, wasn't Marx predicting internal upheaval and self-defeat of capitalist economies many, many decades ago based on the same sort of demographics/populations/resources economic arguments? Things will change is an easy prediction, they haven't ever been stable. But it's also a meaningless one if you can't convincingly show that it's this decade not "any time between 10 and 200 years from now."
>> Puranjay's claim here is almost literally "change will happen, and it will bring grief."
The only place he mentions grief (rather than "demographic change requires economic change") is at the very end, with "And any large scale shift in economic models comes with some grief, at the very least." Nowhere else.
Some grief. As a footnote. That's hardly quantified, and itself could be covered simply by the fact change is hard. Japan was forced into changing, and...it went fine. The US hasn't yet. It'll require adjustment, which will probably bring some unpleasantness as we all adapt. That isn't alarmist, which was my point.
>you have to agree that in the face of declining populations and ageing demographics, we will have to shift to a new economic model where growth isn’t the only goal
Who exactly is setting growth as the "only goal"? It's really only developing countries and the tech sector. Japan and basically are of Europe is more or less fine with their stagnant GDP.
An economy without growth will fall apart. Yuval Noah Harari said it very well. Lenders only lend because there’s faith that $1 loaned today becomes more than $1 paid back tomorrow.
Without growth there’s no incentive to lend. Without lending we’re looking at medieval level economies.
It’s not the only thing we care about, but it’s a necessity. That being said growth can come in all shapes and sizes. Elevating everyone out of poverty is growth. Reducing waste increases efficiency, that’s also growth.
Growth is not a bad word. It’s absolutely required for positive outcomes. The potential for growth is infinite. What, you might ask, about when everyone is elevated out of poverty and waste is largely eliminated? Truly infinite requires growth even beyond that. We should be so lucky to face that problem. But the answer there is obvious as well. The resources available in the universe are effectively infinite.
Yuval Noah Harari is the worst offender of the reductionist mindset. I can't even begin to understand how the WEF even listens to that uppity book peddler.
Economic growth can occur while simultaneously becoming more efficient with existing resources. See the massive gains in agriculture, for example. An acre of land today can produce vastly more food than an acre could 500 years ago, for example.
Adding more inputs to a production process generally increases output. But many parts of the world are already suffering from soil depletion because of intensive farming, and the fertilizers and fossil fuels which we use to raise yields will run out eventually.
Innovation has been able to outrun resource depletion for the last 300 years of industrialism, but that is no guarantee that it will last forever. Even a lot of that growth has come at the cost of increased emissions and resource depletion rather than efficiency gains.
> Innovation has been able to outrun resource depletion for the last 300 years of industrialism.
It did over hundreds of years of EXTREMELY high growth (both in terms of number of people and wealth per person). If growth falls to a positive-but-very-low level, it will make it a lot easier for innovation to keep up.
Also, keep in mind that apart from Uranium, all the atoms on Earth remain here. We don't "use up" atoms at any significant rate. Apart from the atoms themselves, the main challenge is how they're put together. To rearrange how atoms are put together (to create fertilizer, recycle waste, etc), we primarily need energy. And before energy resoures run out, we should be able to produce suffient amounts of energy using either renewables or fusion.
Now fusion could cause us to face a situation where we run out of hydrogen atoms, but at the rate we currently consume energy, that would take practically forever.
In any event, in about a billion years, the sun will become a red giant.
While this sounds convincing, what about if there is just a little inflation and no real growth, only nominal growth due to that inflation. Wouldnt the motive of lending 1$ today for a year not be to have an amount which has the same purchase value in a year?
> Lenders only lend because there’s faith that $1 loaned today becomes more than $1 paid back tomorrow.
This is false, especially for low risk lending. An at least equally important reason for lending, is to delay consumption. Lending teleoports wealth forward in time. Supply and demand of credit will depend if the wealth gets bigger or smaller as a consequence.
Keep in mind that even a bank depost it "lending", and if the deposit is big, you don't have a government guarantee. Also, even with low inflation, the interest rate may very well still be lower than inflation.
If you're a fan of gold, you may want to buy gold. That brings two problems:
1) Where do you store it? If you store it at home, you are inviting burglars. If you store it in a vault, the owner is likely to charge you from 0.5% to 1.0% per year as a storage fee.
2) If you buy the gold when credit is cheap, and interest rates are lower than inflation, the price is high. But if, by the time you want to sell it, the economic downturn is over, and everyone want to borrow money to invest in a business or a new house, the gold price has probably come down already.
So, unless you buy the gold BEFORE the downturn, you may very well lose quite a bit from gold, compared to other assets.
> Growth is not a bad word. It’s absolutely required for positive outcomes.
Growth is good and it makes many things easier. But it IS possible for societies to function well with minimal or even negative growth, at least for a time. In fact, throughout most of history, the average growth per year was pretty low, and might very well be below zero over the lifetime of a given person.
Part of the problem we have no, is that we come to EXPECT such growth, instead of being grateful when we have it.
You are saying that people will lend without faith that they will get more back than lent?
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has capital - lending is all bad. why go to effort, to risk of losing your money, and opportunity cost of using the money yourself? There's gotta be some incentive for the individual lender if it's actually going to happen at scale in society.
Lending below the real (inflation adjusted) interest rate is very common, and this is the main case. If there is an average of 2% inflation, a deposit of 0% nominal interest is -2% of real interest rate.
But even at 0% nominal interest rate (in periods of low inflation), you see organizatons lend at below 0%, if the risk is zero or close to zero (such as when a bank is lending to the central bank).
In fact, throughout history, savings were usually stored in some commodity. The most common ones were grain and gold. Storing grain and gold is not easy, you have to ward off rats, thieves, rot etc. So throughout history, people have been paying granaries, goldsmiths, banks and others a fee for storing their commodities.
If a granary were almost full, the owner migth decide to sell some of the grain, and gain profit, instead of storing all the grain under his supervision. This would be relatively safe if the reserve was big enough, and if he would have ways to cover a "granary run".
Let me first assume the strictest case, ie that you mean 0% literally, not 0% real rate (adjusted for inflation).
Imagine you are a big institution that holds $10 Billion in "cash", for instance a European bank. The interest offered to them by the ECB at the moment is -0.50%. Most banks prefer to pay that premium for storing "cash" in the ECB account over extracting physical notes. (The notes may not even be available.)
Whether or not private citizens are willing to lend at negative nominal interest rate, doesn't matter so much, as long as companies and institutions are willing.
But in the real world, there is usually some inflation. If the inflation is 5%, cash will lose 5% if its value per year if you store it as paper. Most people will store it in a bank deposit. In today's market, far below 5%, probably closer to 0 than 5. In other words, private persons often lend money to the bank at a negative real interest rate.
Whether your mean nominal or real rates, there are people or organizations out there that are willing to lend below a rate of 0% at this very moment.
You either lead a fief or are serf working for one to survive.
If you are a serf, a) your fiefdom may switch ownership due to a defeat in a conflict or political dealings of the nobility; but life never change for you too much and b) you're a serf forever.
I suppose that makes sense. I must admit that there are aspects of the world I live in which I refuse to feel content about, even though there is nothing I can do about them.
It would be more palatable if it were an objective economic reality we all had to accept, but right now it's marching orders from the wealthy neoliberals holding year after year record profits.
I was thinking the same thing. The only solution I can see to demographic colapse is far from palatable: Euthanasia, or more specifically ritual senicide. Ättestupa as the Vikings called it.
Not sure if you’ve been to Japan within the last twenty years but it’s neither advanced or highly automated. People do everything.
Edit Anyone down voting please supply some practical examples of how Japan is advanced and highly automated.
Also it wasn't meant as a criticism of Japan, I love the place. I just believe that the stereotype of Japan being in the future isn't accurate or helpful. It's overused.
Japan's workers productivity rates are known to be pretty average/bad and about growth, I don't think the issue is the aging population (as you said there is automation) but rather finite resources.
> Zeihan has an implicit prediction that neither China or any other power would step into any power void left by the withdrawal of the USA
I believe this has already been proven wrong with the One Belt Road. It’s ridiculous to think that no one will step in once there’s a power vacuum.
> Japan, Turkey and Argentina will Rise as Future Great Powers
I have a really hard time believing this, especially with Japan. It’s under threat from climate change and its xenophobic, anti immigration stance paired with its aging population.
Thanks! I appreciated this. Some of the links are especially good, where the author goes back to Zeihan's STRATFOR days and talks about how they've been predicting the end of China for years.
Note that this is from 2018. I looked at the site briefly and didn't see any more recent predictions.
Also some of these seem like almost vacuous statements. Predicting food insecurity(or any other type of insecurity) in the developing world is not a groundbreaking prediction.
He didn’t just say there will be food insecurity in the developing world; he said there will be food insecurity in the developing world because of competition between nation states far, far away. A much more specific prediction.
And that’s precisely what’s happening right now - countries like India and Indonesia stopping exports to safeguard their own interests.
He predicted the invasion of Ukraine back in this video from 2017 (actually earlier, but this was the easiest source for me to cite): https://youtu.be/rkuhWA9GdCo
The whole video is pretty short, but he mentions Ukraine about 2 1/2 minutes in.
Russia had already invaded Ukraine in 2014. This is similar to claiming the US would invade some N+1 Middle eastern country. He makes a lot of claims and some of them happen to be right.
I don't think he "predicted" the Russian invasion. I think everyone denied it. Just remember a few weeks before this invasion, everyone was not believing the USA alarms about an imminent invasion; including high-ranking leaders in supposedly powerful EU countries. Just shows how blindness can affect anyone.
To be fair to Zeihan, he apparently got the year for the Ukraine invasion everyone knew Putin ideally wanted but didn't think he'd dare.
But he also predicted the economic collapse of China in the last decade, and Japan being involved in a major crisis or possibly a regional conflict due to its [already established] ageing population issues, and those predictions which definitely didn't happen are arguably much more important to his core ideas about demographic trends.
I predicted the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 after no one gave a shit about the Crimean invasion. Plenty of other people did too, it wasn't even a difficult prediction to make, Putin has been very clear about his Ukrainian ambition for a long time. Remember Trump's first impeachment? It was literally about withholding military aid to Ukraine, all of the state department officials were bewildered because they knew about the impending invasion.
Because Russia was stocking up on foreign valuta for exactly the current scenario.
Close advisors to Zelensky have been aware of the incoming invasion since at least 2017. But they could not act, because sounding the alarm would cause mass evacuations. This would have clogged their infrastructure, which would prevent their army from being able to act quickly and basically lose them the war before it had even begun.
It is not a very strong example of a prediction. At most it shows he is well informed.
Many reasons, waiting for people to forget about the crimean invasion, waiting for people to be distracted, waiting for an especially cold winter that would cause europe more harm if they instituted sanctions, waiting for his health to deteriorate.
Because he was waiting for Trump to pull the US out of NATO. Which Putin wanted him to do, and Trump talked endlessly about doing, but kept waiting and waiting. Trump knows it's good to have a powerful man need you to do something, it's not so good to have already done it. Of course, you can only make them wait for so long, which was why Trump made it clear he would do that at the start of his second term.
People don't want to believe this because they hate Trump. But there's no denying he was unpredictable and that's not something you want from the most powerful man in the world if you are trying to destabilize the world. There's no way Putin invades with Trump in power.
> While the Trump administration was the first willing to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, the Obama administration did provide defense and military equipment.
I'm not commenting on whether he deserved to be impeached, only that we have proof that the state department thought it was very important to provide Ukraine with military aid.
Either way though, the crimean invasion happen 6 years into Obama's term. Not surprising that Trump gave them more aid.
I have the feeling that we might be in our current predicament because a few billionaires are reading the same books, and trying to bring about some ideological nonsense into reality.
Politicians are there to provide cover so you don't blame the billionaires directly. But you would be surprised how much Politicians bend over backwards to protect them when it matters.
Putin went after some US connected oligarchs to clean up corruption in his country. US policy towards Russian literally changed overnight and US imposed sanctions, and we have everything that followed.
In Michigan a billionaire started building a bridge on public park land. Judge sent him to prison for contempt. Michigan legislature had an emergency midnight session to get him out.
- Bernie Madoff was worth $20bn and is in jail for 150 years
- Eike Batista was worth $30bn but was jailed for bribery
- Alfred Taubman was fined $7m and jailed for a year
- The Kwok brothers were worth $16bn but were jailed and fined for bribery
Etc etc. There's no point forming a worldview based on cherry picking. Nothing is simple. Politicians, billionares, or any other line you care to draw around people to define a group, are not homogenous. Some will be individually moral and upright, or guilt-ridden but greedy, or pyschopathic and power-hungry.
> Nation states resorting to seizing each other’s ships (see Greece-Iran issue recently).
The US Navy is a major player here, having recently seized Venezuelan and Iranian tankers on the basis of violating sanctions. Only in retaliation did Iran begin seizing boats. This undermines the thesis that the US Navy is somehow protecting the stability of global trade. They're actively destabilizing to advance Washington's hegemonic interests.
> The thing about Zeihan’s arguments is that you can’t really argue against demographics.
You can absolutely argue against this. It's called automation. Needing millions of young healthy bodies to push machines around is increasingly outdated. A highly technical population with "bad demographics" will easily outperform a 20th century population with "good demographics" in the 21st century. Not to mention high population growth (required for "good demographics") is increasingly unsustainable due to natural resource limitations.
Zeihan is frankly a crock. He makes pretty maps and bold claims, but his evidence-based analysis is incredibly shallow. His MO is selling books: geopolitics as entertainment, not providing useful analysis.
You are much better served by listening to experienced realists like John Mearsheimer or Michael Hudson, rather than Zeihan's pop-geopol junk.
> You can absolutely argue against this. It's called automation.
You're viewing it from a myopic production-focused viewpoint. Whereas the problem is our consumption-led economic order and its reliant on adding an ever increasing number of consumers.
Compared to young people:
A) Machines do not consume goods and trinkets. Western economies are based on consumption, not production.
B) Machines do not pay taxes, making it harder and harder for the state to pay for the welfare of ageing populations.
C) Automation simply doesn't work for service-focused work. Otherwise there wouldn't be record number of job openings and labor shortages in the US right now.
> Western economies are based on consumption, not production.
Hence their present downfall.
> Machines do not pay taxes, making it harder and harder for the state to pay for the welfare of ageing populations.
Taxes are a relic of the long-gone physical money era. Vulgar taxation is a legacy technology that provides more waste than utility in the 21st century.
> Automation simply doesn't work for service-focused work.
Yes it does, increasingly over time. I just ordered my lunch through a virtual cafeteria cashier that was literally a human until a month ago. Someone still prepared it by hand by putting ~10 spoonfuls of different ingredients into a tortilla, but that is already being automated in more advanced societies.
> Yes it does, increasingly over time. I just ordered my lunch through a virtual cafeteria cashier that was literally a human until a month ago
How does it make a difference whether a tortilla was being made by a human or a machine when that automation just opens up another job somewhere else?
I've been hearing about automation and how it will eat the world for years, yet here we are in 2022 with "help wanted" ads everywhere and businesses literally throwing money to hire people.
> How does it make a difference whether a tortilla was being made by a human or a machine when that automation just opens up another job somewhere else?
Please explain how even a medium large service automation SaaS (say, 100-1000 software developers) is going to restore the 10,000s of jobs it is obsoleting.
> I've been hearing about automation and how it will eat the world for years, yet here we are in 2022 with "help wanted" ads everywhere and businesses literally throwing money to hire people.
Tech has seen some of the biggest salary growth, and America in particular is pretty slow to adapt new tech and automation for business. Think about how it took a pandemic to finally get everyone using cashless payment systems. A ton of restaurants still haven't figured out how to do fully automated online ordering.
> Taxes are a relic of the long-gone physical money era. Vulgar taxation is a legacy technology that provides more waste than utility in the 21st century.
It isn't often I see really novel ideas on hacker news, but this is an interesting take. Will need to think about it more but definitely interesting to think about the best means of providing public goods etc and if the system we have does this.
Taxation in the fiat CB/MMT era stops being a means to fill public coffers and becomes primarily a means to artificially suppress demand. You tax someone not to raise your funds, but to decrease their spending power.
If you need to fill the public coffers, just ask the CB! You can then use taxation to mitigate the inflationary pressure of doing that.
But generally taxation becomes a bandaid for poor economics, and institutions like the IRS are obscenely arcane and bloated. They should be eradicated and replaced by a much simpler and more automated digital accounting system.
No, this doesn't have anything to do with the virtual beanie babies known as cryptocurrency.
It sounds like you're responding to a cryptocurrency talking point. How likely do you think it is that taxation (as in, "nothing is certain except death and taxes") will disappear at some point?
I've never heard of Zeihan. The article touts his prowess of predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine in his book published in late 2014. Well, Russia had just seized Crimea and eastern Donbass in February of 2014, so this doesn't strike me as a particularly prescient call.
Except that from January to March this year pundits swore up and down that Russia wouldn’t launch a full invasion of Ukraine. When it happened a lot of people were surprised. You could have made a killing in the stock market if you’d realized that Russia would certainly invade, and they probably had a deadline in order to maximize the summer fighting season. It seemed obvious to me, but not so obvious that I positioned myself properly in the stock market.
Everything is obvious after the fact. Look around for the people asserting that it’s obvious BEFORE the fact and measure their accuracy. Those people might have useful insight.
Exactly. They entire EU energy strategy was predicated on the idea that trade would moderate Russian ambitions and hold the peace. And they were flat out wrong.
> When it happened a lot of people were surprised.
Meanwhile the US intelligence service had been claiming since summer that an invasion was likely. Trump's impeachment was over withholding military aid that the state department deemed crucial. The career foreign service workers saw this coming.
>Or import them from elsewhere - which causes all sorts of cultural and societal conflicts.
I might be a bit biased in this regard (see username), but I've always thought the issue of immigration is massively overblown by journalists and politicians in order to get clicks/listeners/votes.
Both at home and when traveling, it's surprising how well understood "global culture" is by pretty much everyone who lives in a city or large town. Outside of language barriers, things like catching a train or buying a bottle of Coke are all done much the same way no matter where you came from.
I distinctly remember one instance where this old Ethiopian guy, who didn't know a single word of English, successfully managed to communicate that he'd forgotten to grab something and I should save his space in the supermarket queue.
Outside of specific conflicts (Serbia/Croatia, India/Pakistan), or particular instances where one particular group has turned out to cause a whole lot of trouble, the policy as a whole seems surprisingly effective.
You can't argue with demographics because, outside of immigration, it is physically impossible to change them in the short term.
Even if e.g. Korea somehow managed to get a fertility rate of 10 tomorrow, it would takes many decades for that generation to begin to contribute to the economy as a class of high-skilled laborers. No matter what Korea does, absent implausible levels of immigration, they are still set for future economic hardship due to their demographics.
America is quite unique in the world by being so significantly multicultural, and increasingly so. It can tune and balance its demographics with immigration. It is especially good at attracting the best and brightest from around the world, because there is a realistic, and well trodden path, of not only fully integrating yourself and your children into American society, but also integrating into the ruling/upper class.
For example, any Chinese citizen can effectively defect and build a safe and sustainable life in America. Millions have already done it. First generation immigrants lead some of America's most powerful corporations. Second generation immigrants are welcome as officials in the government. The current VP is second generation immigrant of Indian/Jamaican descent.
On the other hand, an American can never effectively defect to China. Maybe if you are ethnically Chinese, your children could be accepted, but not likely anyone else. China simply doesn't have a culture of fully integrating people of all kinds into it's society.
The funnel of exceptional humans is one way, and it's into America.
Love this and I'm sure a few will start poking into this comment, but I appreciate you saying this.
There's a comedian, I think Bill Burr, that says one of the great things about US sports is our incredible diversity. Look at any of our Olympic teams and you'll see all kinds of ethnicities in our teams, whoever is the best. On the other hand, I doubt you'll see the same on the chinese Olympic team. Obviously, there are other countries that do the same as us, but we do it on a pretty big scale and I think our success in medals is often in being comfortable with this. Heck, there are a few athletes that have the option of competing for us or their native land and they choose to go back to their country for that. Naomi Osaka comes to mind. She has lived in the US since she was 3 years old yet chose to play for Japan.
Thank you for posting this! I imagine some people reading it may have not considered it before.
Does this idea also extend to ethnicity? This is far from the original topic, but if I emigrate to my wife's home country, I don't think I can ever say I am ethnically "Danish", (or can I?) but she has been "ethnically" American since the day they gave her an ID. Or perhaps there is no "American" ethnicity? I would love someone to educate me on this topic. Perhaps "American" ethnicity is represented in those who move here to be a participate in 'American values'?
Well said. Growing up in the US, this is something I completely took for granted. Living in a couple other countries made me realize how special and unique it is.
Australia (my home country) is another that comes to mind in terms of multiculturalism, and I also took it for granted before I spent time in a very different country (Estonia).
You can't argue against demographics from a economic and geopolitical viewpoint.
To create a young person, you need a fixed number of years. If you want an 18 year old to hit college and take on a $100k loan (or join your army and shoot your enemies), you will have to have started in 2004. There is no way to accelerate this.
Even if you poured all your energy and resources into getting people to reproduce more starting today, you won't see an active worker or soldier or college student/scholar until 2040.
At the end of the day it does not matter much whether he is right or wrong. Our elites have quite the Malthusian outlook and it informs a lot of the decisions we are seeing on a global scale. Why do you think is there such a big push for reducing energy production?
Nope. Malthus made his observation based on history. He just happened to do so at the worst possible time, as the next couple of centuries saw unprecedented advances in food production and distribution followed by the more developed countries getting their population in check
> Nope. Malthus made his observation based on history. He just happened to do so at the worst possible time, as the next couple of centuries saw unprecedented advances in food production and distribution followed by the more developed countries getting their population in check
Isn't that also a problem with the "refutations" of him? They're also based on history, just slightly more recent history. It's quite possible that future "advances in food production" will eventually fail to keep up with (perhaps slower) population growth, or future changes (climate change, reductions in fossil fuels, etc.) will undo some of the previous "advances in food production" required to sustain our current population.
A universal law refuted by 200 years of completely different patterns isn't resuscitated because someone, somewhere may run out of food in some situation completely unlike the one Malthus described (i.e. food production always grows arithmetically, population always grows geometrically unless plague and famine kill enough people off... complete with extended musing on how to diminish or defer the "passion between the sexes" which assumes contraception isn't a thing)
I only read the linked article, not the books. I think that the thesis (as professed by the article) that the "deglobalization" is largely due to the decline of the US Navy is pretty silly. "Decline in the standard of US foreign policy and diplomacy" - in itself an ill-judged reaction to the rise of China's economic power and influence - is much closer to the mark. Of course the Covid pandemic didn't help either.
Seriously - what does the US Navy have to do with Trump's "trade war" with China? With Russia-Ukraine conflict? With US balance of trade that is $7 trillion out of kilter? And with US sanctions, which not only restrict international trade directly, but also will lead the countries holding some of that $7 trillion to reassess the risks of selling to the US?
I don't think he is particularly 'smart' (wait for me a second here). I think he instead makes obvious conclusions from undeniable evidence like demographics and geography. The 'smarter' more institutional types from Brookings and Hoover tend to argue from policy and politics backwards and then the facts become inconvenient.
>Evidence from surveys of childbearing preferences indicate that even in populations with low or very low fertility for decades, women continue to express a desire for around two children on average. The myriad reasons for the gap between desired and completed fertility include such factors as an incompatibility between childrearing and the demands of higher education and career building, a lack of affordable highquality child care, the decline of reproductive capacity at advanced maternal ages, and imbalanced gender roles for housework and child care.
>The fact that fertility preferences remain close to two children per woman, even as realized fertility has fallen well below that level, suggests that the fertility rate in low-fertility countries may increase as populations learn to manage and mitigate some or all impeding factors.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence of that actually happening, though. Japan has been below-replacement since 1973. Ukraine and Russia had TFRs of 1.23 and 1.5 respectively in 2019, and they're busy pointlessly killing a generation of young men, which won't help much with family formation. Where is the "mitigation"?
The UN's argument seems to be that it would be stupid for a country just to commit suicide for no reason, so they won't do that. Unfortunately, this report was written in 2019, before the events of the last few years. It is no longer quite so certain that countries won't pursue pointless self-destructive policies for no good reason.
I agree this hasn't yet seem to bear itself out, though I think statistically we have until 2029 or so before you can "call it" as absolutely 100% incorrect (that, using very armchair back of the math sort of logic here, admittedly, would allot for a first wave of sorts meeting the timeline, anything later and perhaps it should really cause some panic)
With that said, and this is really the point, I think we failed at this goal:
>populations learn to manage and mitigate some or all impeding factors
We haven't done this yet. I mean, Europe maybe more so, but have we really moved the needle on removing impeding factors to encourage people to have families?
The cost of family friendly housing in economically prosperous places in the UK is the limiting factor in my view.
Ironically, if you go on to any tabloid rag website like the Daily Mail, and find an article about house prices, you won't have to scroll far until you find Joe Public blaming the lack of supply on overpopulation from immigration
Richer people have less children. People are not not having children for financial reasons.
And even if what you said was true, Europe who has a lot more social protections for such things, has an even lower birth rate than the US. So that's clearly not relevant.
THANK YOU! I've been looking for the rationalization of that rediculous curve for months now and haven't been able to find it. It makes zero sense that the curve would suddenly start leveling out. We're headed right for a population collapse in a century or two.
I, too, am a fan of Zeihan's. I think his thesis is basically correct, but he is frustratingly cagey with detail. Timeframes matter, as does any citation of sources. Given the level of detail, it seems accurate and reliable but I just feel uneasy without the ability to verify anything.
What bothers me is the sheer mass of factually incorrect statements Zeihan makes that would be trivial to check if he bothered. Things like "China only makes the low-end computer chips, anything that's going into a cellphone or laptop is made in the USA"
He's not incorrect on that point. Huawei sources its SoCs from Taiwanese and American fabs, which is why the trade war has absolutely gutted their bottom line. HiSilicon licenses chip designs, adds their specific stuff on top of them, and has the chips fabbed by TSMC.
He's incorrect in that he thinks the destruction of the Taiwanese semiconductor industry during an invasion by the mainland would be a minor inconvenience for the US but an insurmountable obstacle for China.
Why? The US has Intel and AMD, and increasingly TSMC employees. China can’t replace those fabs, they don’t have the knowledge. The US is already building new fabs.
Unfortunately, for understanding the root argument that isn’t super useful. China has lots of semiconductor manufacturing, but not with modern processes.
"You're wrong" + insult is not the kind of reply we are looking for here on HN. Either post a constructive argument explaining how they are wrong in your opinion, or abstain from commenting.
Zeihan is completely right about China's demographic nightmare. I just don't think we're going to get off as Scott-free as he thinks we are without major domestic investments done now instead of later.
Zeihan's thesis is generic geopolitical analysis, which is a fine model, but there's no reason to credit that to him. Really it's about the quality of his predictions which is hard to gauge other than he throws a lot of shit out to see what sticks and occasionally some do. Broken clock etc. Otherwise, he sells US exceptionalism powerpoints to wealthy boomers over expensive dinners. He tends to pile on "natural 20" dice rolls to America's favour and extrapolates from there why Fortress America will be fine no matter how much she FUBARs which undermines the quality of his prediction. It matters if supply chain break down was due to pandemic driven factors rather than active reshoring. Greece-Iran drama was Greece fulfilling US request and eventual release back to Iran - this isn't anarchy caused by US withdraw but US continued engagement/meddling while countries try to minimize fallout - essentially opposite cause of Zeihan prediction. Hard to credit right predictions for wrong reasons. Lastly if demography was destiny, India would be a super power - divident can turn into curse depending on policy and other structural factors.
I just read all Zeihan's books. The only counterargument I can think of is that maybe with our interdependent world, sanctions have gotten effective enough to substitute for US military power to some extent. Zeihan himself has said China has to be reevaluating the idea of an attack on Taiwan, after seeing the sanctions and boycotts against Russia.
Sanctions haven't stopped Russia but Russia is a food and fuel exporter. Most countries are more reliant in imports for essentials. E.g. the Saudis need food imports, so maybe going to war with Iran isn't such a good idea for them, and that helps prevent the drastic Asian oil shortages Zeihan describes.
What are some good examples of when sanctions "worked"? Apartheid-era South Africa? Maybe in delaying Iran developing nuclear weapons? Are any of the following considered success stories for sanctions?
- Saddam era Iraq
- North Korea
- Cuba
- Venezuela
Apparently the U.S. has quite a list of sanctions:
If benchmark the success of sanctions as being able to direct countries towards more liberal-democratic policies, then they're a failure. If you benchmark the success of sanctions by the ability of the US to completely torpedo a geopolitical enemy's economy, then I'd say all four of those are resounding success stories.
All of these are completely non-functioning, bankrupt and incapable countries. The sanctions DO work, despite these countries being rich in resources (except NK).
Sanctions are a "one time weapon" I fear, and many many countries are now including "what if we or someone we trade with gets sanctioned by the US" as part of their contingency planning.
They've always had this kind of contingency planning, it's why Russia dabbled in onshoring chip manufacturing, and why the US keeps a tight lid on oil imports and exports, and why the US keeps automotive and aerospace manufacturing onshore.
The thing is, unless you are the US, China, or the EU, you simply can't afford to onshore most of the life-critical industries you rely on - even in theory. So you may be unhappy about what sanctions could do to you, but the only actual working solution that you have is to suck up to one of those three.
Doesnt even really work then. In Iraq it just meant a million people people/babies dying from preventable disease and the rest resenting the US for it.
It's blunt, ineffectual weapon at the best of times. Target an economy that's too strong and the sanctioner ends up hit almost as badly as the sanctionee. If we did it to China we'd probably be hit with 20-50% inflation instead of 9%.
I dont really see how US war planners can back out of the Russian sanctions though, even at 9% inflation. It would mean losing so much face to kowtow to Putin, but Ill bet theyll be far more hesitant to use it elsewhere.
It's now a calculation of whether they lose more face sticking pigheadedly to a bad decision, that the rest of world is moving on from, or losing more face by admitting they were wrong and quickly changing tactics.
Based on the fact that marijuana is still considered a schedule one drug, with no accepted medical use, at the US federal level, I'm going to put my money on pigheadedly continuing with a likely wrong strategy.
The US government is facing a rapidly accelerating legitimacy crisis due to its apparent inability to say "we were wrong".
Plus all the election fortification efforts that made this timeline happen. Trump was hated for being friendly with Putin by top Democrats but also by many in the Republican party. Mass Mail-in voting was to Trumps huge disadvantage, yet Republicans went along with it. Makes you think.
If financial sanctions get bypassed, another cheap US option is to confiscate a couple ships heading to the sanctioned country, making commercial shipping insurance difficult to get.
That would be a pretty big step though, essentially changing the US from the guarantor of the open seas to their biggest threat. So that might precipitate Zeihan's Disorder instead of preventing it.
Furthermore, after the one-time pain, assuming they survive the pain, the sanctioned nation arguably ends up stronger because they're forced to develop in-house versions of things.
I'm just waiting for China to decide they're strong enough to cut the US off. Assuming we survive the pain, that'll be an interesting day.
> Furthermore, after the one-time pain, assuming they survive the pain, the sanctioned nation arguably ends up stronger because they're forced to develop in-house versions of things.
Which is why North Korea is now a world-leader in... Oh, right. They are an impoverished Chinese vassal, that can barely even keep its own people fed.
I don't understand where all this 'Sanctions do nothing' zeitgeist is coming from. Is six-dollar a gallon gas the cause for a complete reversal on this sort of thing? If so, I'd daresay that sanctions seem pretty effective - given that their targets have to deal with a lot worse than expensive gas.
Russia's on track for an 8% reduction in GDP this year. I can't speak for everyone, but between the two options, I think I'd prefer the six-dollar gas.
List the countries that are 1. not tiny little jokes of a country and 2. not currently already under heavy sanctions that the US can sanction without harming themselves.
1. North Korea is a country of 26 million people. That's bigger than most of the countries in Europe, and is half the population of its nearest neighbour, South Korea. If the 20-million-to-40-million person range is a joke of a country, well, I've got to say, the overwhelming majority of the world's countries are that size or smaller.
The reason it's a joke of a country is precisely because of sanctions (and equivalents thereof). It didn't becomes stronger due to being cut off from foreign trade - unlike its sibling SEA nations, it failed to develop in large part because of it.
2. Without harming itself? Even one iota? There aren't any. Without harming itself disproportionately less than its harming the sanctioned country? Almost every country in the world. [1] Doubly so if it does so in lockstep with the EU.
Of course sanctions harm the country invoking them. But like going to war against a weaker country, they harm the target a lot more than they harm the issuer. Cuba, Iraq and Iran were all impoverished, compared to their peers, by sanctions. Russia's well on it's way to eating a boot, economically. The US sure seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of this 'one-use' weapon...
[1] China, Japan, Mexico, maaaaaaaaybe Canada, Taiwan, and a few countries in Europe are the only ones I can think of, where sanctions against them would hurt the US almost as much as it would hurt them.
The industry developed during sanctions is a lot like those created during times of highly protectionist policies though.
Once those walls come down, they have to compete with the rest of the world that has been innovating a lot faster. They’ll need a lot of supplemental income or all these bubble-spawned companies will die off. I think it’d be smarter to NOT try to develop everything in-house if you’re a smaller country with many imports.
Well..the Biden administration is slowly removing sanctions from Venezuala after belatedly realising that sanctioning Iran, Venezuala and Russia caused a global energy crisis. And making a diplomacy visit to the Saudis to beg them to pump more oil. Despite a harsh condemnation of the Prince just last year where he said he would never speak to him again.
Sanctions are of questionable effectiveness and tend to harm other nations more than the nation that is the target of the sanctions.
I went and got the latest book and started reading it right then and there.
It's crap.
Demography is powerful, yes, but the interpretation matters, and the premises here are of steady-state or linear extrapolation. There is no mention of technological disruption: all the criticism assumes linear progress, allowing analysis to proceed along the lines of resource shortage. This core assumption means the book is already wrong since the progress in key disruptive techs has actually followed exponential curves(see any Tony Seba lecture). If we have the AI and robotics to fill in 18-year old roles, we don't need actual 18 year olds.
It's a work of the moment in that it explains near-term problems reasonably well, while also being extremely wrong about anything more than a few years out because it can't imagine a world that gets weirder, when every big epochal shift has made the world weirder in the process of fending off Malthusian logic.
This sound like very high level, easy to “predict” predictions. Show me a percentage of how many predictions in a book worked out and how much detail they went into before I buy this snake oil. Yes, I’m using prediction intentionally. This isn’t an analysis, it’s prediction.
Reading his book The End of Everything is Just Beginning, he posits a history of early human evolution that is throughly debunked in The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow.
Not that this invalidates his future predictions, but...
I found that when drawing conclusions for the financial markets from demographic changes such as the Boomer generation entering retirement he seems to completely ignore inheritance. People getting older forms just suck money out of the system. It also pumps money into it.
The power vacuum that's arisen from populism & isolationism is about to create a gigantic untapped market for firms that provide the services of a state - defense, dispute resolution, and currency - for a fee, to gigantic multinational corporations. At the same time, there are nascent technologies (drones and robotics for defense, blockchain and the Internet for dispute resolution & currency) that dramatically lower the cost of many of these services, to the point where we may see private companies that are more effective than nation-states at it. Might we see the nation-state get replaced by a web of competing mercenaries, each of which effectively serves as a protection racket for their customers?
> Might we see the nation-state get replaced by a web of competing mercenaries, each of which effectively serves as a protection racket for their customers?
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, explores this possible future. Great book.
I think Snowcrash is intentionally campy and satirical?
At any rate I don't think what science fiction writers do is "exploring possible futures" so much as "telling lies for fun and profit" as one author entitled his fiction writing craft book.
Exploring possible futures is exactly what sf writers do as is telling lies for fun and profit. Predicting possible futures is not part of their job description, though sometimes it seems that way.
What the science fiction writers explores doesn't have to be possible futures, it can be impossible ones. And some science fiction, like Stranger Things, is set in the past.
In fact it's been a while since I read Snowcrash but it's set implausibly close to when it was written in 1992. This is presumably intentional.
"Intentionally campy and satirical" and "chillingly predictive" are not mutually exclusive. The movie Idiocracy has probably become the canonical example in that space.
In any case, speculative fiction is usually more about the present than it is about the future. The original Star Trek, for instance, dealt quite a bit with the racial politics of the 1960s, even though it was set in the 2260s. The hypercapitalism in Snow Crash (and other cyberpunk works around that time) reflected the trend of American society in the 1980s and 90s. It was less "telling lies" and more logical extrapolation of the existing trend, which hasn't really been arrested since, either.
It's "telling lies" in the sense that I wouldn't expect the author to think that the plot of the book, or anything like it, is a logical extrapolation of existing trends.
Could hyper corporatization of America continue? Sure. Might the author be commenting on present trends? Absolutely.
Does the book's author actually believe the mafia might hire street samurai to do pizza deliveries? Probably not.
Yes it's a cyberpunk trope, but it's also based in history. Wealthy nobles of Rome and Medieval times were landowners and, to put it bluntly, warmongers... using armies to make profit by war. They were nothing if not the corporate warlords of their times, holding shares in agriculture, land ownership and armies. Collecting shares of their workers (commonly referred to as share cropping), much like taxation. If that isn't some form of pseudo governmental function, I'm not sure what is =/
> For the 81 states for which estimates were available, private security workers appear to outnumber police forces in 44 countries – with a combined population of roughly 4 billion people – or more than half of the world’s total of 7.5 billion.
There's a bit of a difference between a world in which it's common for rich people and big buildings to employ security guards (as it has been for most of history) and Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong...
One thing about WALL-E that bothers me is: this was a civilization that mastered interstellar travel, to the point where it was trivial enough for vacations. They seriously couldn’t come up with a better plan than burning all the trash? Just send it to the sun lol
Red Mars doesn't go quite as far, but does look at a world in which multinational corporations are competitive with countries in terms of global power.
In many[1] of those countries, private security workers do not have the power of pit, gallows, judicial, or extrajudicial execution. The police, on the other hand, do [2].
[1] Yes, there are parts of the world where the local mining firm's private security will happily intimidate, beat, and murder problem people. It's generally the exception, rather than the rule. Your local mall cop can't do that to you, and is generally held to a far higher standard of conduct and legal accountability than the police.
[2] Yes, if you squint a bunch, stuff like forced arbitration encroaches on the space occupied by the legal system, but it is ultimately subservient to it.
> Might we see the nation-state get replaced by a web of competing mercenaries, each of which effectively serves as a protection racket for their customers?
How do you envision the deprecation of the nuclear-armed nation state unfolding? The USSR had a unipolar world outside to stabilize and manage its disintegration. How is this accomplished in a multipolar context, with tensions inflamed by intensifying scarcity, competition, environmental instability, etc?
I'm not too worried about loose nukes or nuclear terrorism. Every major nuclear power other than China incorporates PALs [1] into the design of their nuclear weapons. Without a centrally generated & authenticated code, they don't function. The PAL is designed such that disabling it requires dismantling the nuclear weapon, which means you need to have the know-how to build nukes in the first place to re-enable it.
This, incidentally, is why Ukraine gave Russia back its nukes after the fall of the Soviet Union. Without the codes in Moscow's possession they were just radioactive waste.
I do expect a number of smaller conventional conflicts to break out in the transition, because that's what always happens when a hegemon loses its monopoly on physical force. It's going to be a bloody few decades, but not the end of humanity.
A PAL system can be just a combination lock. The people who gain access to the weapons themselves might also gain access to the codes and components necessary to arm them.
Who's to say there is a pot of gold at the end of those bloody few decades, with the climate crisis ramping up and natural resources dwindling. We certainly willed the prosperity after the Second World War into existence, by getting better at cannibalizing our natural resources, unsustainably. I would expect the cannibalization of what's left to continue, with pockets of the world doing better for a while, the rest doing worst. I would also expect these pockets to increasingly not be able to share the benefits of innovation with the rest of the world.
Given that Chernobyl is located inside the Ukrainian border, “its nuclear waste” doesn’t seem like that good of an argument as to why they should have gotten rid of them, given recent events.
I would imagine that this would first manifest itself in smaller countries. For example Mali employs the Wagner group out of Russia as a supplement for its Army. And I believe they are used by other countries as well.
I don't see nuclear-armed nations using private companies, but possibly being the source of troops and technology. Really I don't see U.S. citizens joining mercenary groups, quality of life is too good. I would imagine 2nd world nations like Russia, Iraq being the main source of these troops, backed by cheap advanced armaments from China.
One issue with mercenaries is that they're not subject to military laws and will be hang if captured. Like it happens with few american citizens captured in Ukraine by DNR.
> Like it happens with few american citizens captured in Ukraine by DNR.
The American and UK citizens captured by Russia and it's proxies have been regular Ukrainian soldiers subject to military law and protected by the Geneva Convention, but that doesn't matter because Russia and their proxies are ignoring international law (and not just where it comes to treatment of prisoners.)
Sure it does. The Russian government is paying Wagner members and leadership on a contract basis.
Is your argument is the fact that Wagner operations seem to be closely tied to the whims and wishes of the Russian government? Thats true for all Russian companies. Gazprom is exactly the same.
It's not just the multipolarity you have to consider. I actually think that's fairly resolvable for something like loose nukes as basically every stable power has an interest in catch-alls for such things.
But the U.S. the EU and China are all facing internal shifts in thinking about how they relate to the rest of the world. And that's a true wildcard.
Those swings, coupled with multipolarity create a very dynamic system that I think is impossible to predict. When a country may stick its thumb in the eye of international treaty simply because it satisfies a belligerent domestic constituency and that alienates a relatively equal strength power, that's a very volatile situation.
there's no reason that things need to unfold such that a nuclear armed state exists one day and then doesn't the next.
It could easily evolve from regulatory capture, increased influence of large corporations in governance, capture of public discourse by corporate sponsored narratives, and eventual de-facto private control of government. You'd end up with a nation with a nuclear force exists on paper but in fact the corporate interests were in control of that entity.
In fact, of the preceding 5 conditions I would say 4 are already either done or in progress.
IRL I've heard people criticize using dogs as weapons of war with the specific criticism "Do you think the dog actually likes jumping out of a plane?"
And my immediate answer is "There's plenty of valid criticism you can levy at that use case, but this ain't it. Because the answer is 'yes.' Lots of dogs do. The ones that don't, wash out of military dog training. By-and-large, a dog's default is to go with the pack, so if its handler is chill with the jump so's the dog."
Dogs aren't human beings and don't experience the world like human beings. The empathy circuitry they engage so effectively in us can make us forget that sometimes.
It is a stretch to call enforcing terms of service “government-like” rules and enforcement. This is like calling a restaurant hanging up a “no shirt, no shoes, no service” sign the same. And thus far I haven’t seen them issue fines or imprisonment over breaking their rules.
What happens when the terms of service change in real time? When you try to contact someone and you're met with a void? When your livelihood is tied to a platform that decides to shut down? When an algorithm determines you're a threat or you're not allowed to cross a boarder?
Tech is integrating itself into daily life every day, for better and for worse. Leaders in the space need to slow down and realize the havoc they wreck when they "move fast and break things."
As someone on HN you're likely privy to how to navigate these waters. Everyday people are buying into whatever they're being sold (because why wouldn't they when they've basically got no viable alternatives) from tech and then being left empty handed when the VCs and leaders get their payouts and move on to what ever shiny object they spot on the horizon.
If you or your family and friends haven't been on the receiving end of fines or imprisonment due to technology consider yourself lucky and diversify your community.
I’m interested in examples of where breaking a company’s rules has led to fines or imprisonment—particularly ones _enforced_ by the tech monopoly—that didn’t also involve breaking laws. Not talking about the flaws in technology (your example of misidentification for instance). You may just be making a separate point, but my response was in regards to the sentiment of its parent.
Your other comments I agree with, but the root cause isn’t government-like rules and enforcement; but rather government-like services being owned by broadly unregulated private entities.
The closest at this time would be PayPal freezing/seizing accounts that are "in violation of the terms and conditions" - there are various stories around it.
A government is more than just the entity that can fine/imprison you.
Right, they can. Undoubtedly kicking someone off a private platform can cause them harm, sometimes significant harm. We agree there.
Where I disagree is the term goverment-like enforcement implies more than de-platforming. Seizing assets is closer, but banks and apartments and landlords have seized assets for hundreds (thousands?) of years. It would also be a stretch to call rules and enforcements of those rules by banks, apartments, and landlords government-like. These tech monopoly rules and enforcement don’t seem outside the norm for a private entity.
I don’t disagree that the scale of the companies present problems that need to be addressed. But businesses having rules and enforcing them are not problems alone.
It’s a continuum though. The restaurant example is limited scope and limited enforcement. Compare it instead to a school/university which does enforce code of conducts etc and suspends students. Similar with housing organisations.
And you already have it happening to businesses; companies such as payment processors effectively wield life/death decisions over many types of businesses, for better or for worse.
Can Google or PayPal legally kill you? No, but there are many other types of punishment in the world than imprisonment or death.
Any of this could easily be wrong and I'm by no means an historian or political theorist but I'm in the middle of a book called Absolutism and its Discontents and it's made me a little hesitant to draw too many parallels between medieval feudalism and modern/future corporate serfdom
Feudal Europe, as I understand, was stabilized by the material independence of agrarian enclaves from one another, as well as an absence (in the wretched majority at least) of any conception of politics or a state or secular power over and above the will of the king or the local nobility, with the latter much more relevant to most people
Although there seems to be much controversy among historians I have the impression many agree that the simultaneous (and often antipathetic) rise of absolutism and markets created the series of crises which brought the end of feudalism, and although absolutism is mostly gone, markets are now ubiquitous
Even if supply chains and communications networks fragment I'm not sure the feudalism of old bears much on the modern day unless we lose nearly all the technology developed in the last 500 years
I don't think that's worth noting at all. After all, we could also say the same about hunter gatherer communities, the Assyrian empire, the Egyptian empire, the Roman empire, etc...
But anyway, way things are going libertarians and conservatives will get their dreamt feudalism.
The discussion is about governments losing that monopoly.
It is true that one plausible mechanism of that transition is outsourcing. Let a mercenary outfit become too competent and your vendor can become your rival.
Interesting idea, but where might the physical boundaries of such a entity be? Since we are physical beings… would the corporations buy land to live on? Would we be all just living this in a virtual world? Would we be on a gigantic spaceship?
> That's all government has ever been and will always be: a protection racket.
Eh, no.
I think it's usually an indication of sloppy thinking when someone makes sweepingly absolute statements about vague, abstract concepts with numerous and important differences in implementation.
In the European tradition, the number 1 thing government protects is private property. There's a reason that deeds are recorded with the county amd that you must pay tax on real estate and that these are fundamental things local government does in even in the most backwater province where they may not even have a library system.
>> That's all government has ever been and will always be: a protection racket.
> In the European tradition, the number 1 thing government protects is private property. There's a reason that deeds are recorded with the county amd that you must pay tax on real estate and that these are fundamental things local government does in even in the most backwater province where they may not even have a library system.
Most (but not all) people who make sweeping statements like the GP's are ideological capitalists, but capitalism fails without the government record-keeping and enforcement systems you bring up:
I will definitely give this a read. This is an idea I happened upon and have developed informally so it will be very interesting to read someone who has codified it a bit.
It's interesting to me that casual civics and history instruction spends so much time on the bill of rights, democracy, etc and yet the system of "private property" which to my eye appears even more fundamental than our constitution to how things work in our society is taken for granted.
The "Stateless" period of Somalia ended over 15 years ago - even there were various authorities that acted as a de-facto government of certain parts of it.
Unlike most of HN I'm not an expert on modern Somalian politics - could you describe more about how Somalias current central government only exists on paper?
you're saying the quiet part out loud... it's supposed to be the arbiter of civil rights, fairness, and enablement, with the convenient side effect of enriching a very small group of people who actually pull the strings
>it's supposed to be the arbiter of civil rights, fairness, and enablement, with the convenient side effect of enriching a very small group of people who actually pull the strings
so the ends justify the means? Even the premise is wrong
Name a system that doesn't enrich a small group of people when actually implemented in real life. So yeah you pick the least bad of the options you have.
edit: That also includes being stable against competing systems. A utopia that is conquered in 5 minutes and replaced with a dystopia is not a utopia.
Imo let's be real, drop the pretension. I'd rather we get off the notion that these things are possible. I.e. we are ruled by smart people (aristocracy), that enrich themselves, but that are smart and have skin in the game. Rather than dumb (and impressionable) collective deciding in a popularity contest, probably _extremely_ influenced by a 3rd party (media), pretending it's fulfilling its duty, while it's actually falling in some 'cool' 'wolf's' song, that only accomplishes short term gains, while mortgaging our future.
Just drop the pretension.
Edit: maybe I'm schizo-ranting, but in my opinion, this is a very sober/hyperconscious perspective, that should be had by everyone. Not this Plato's Cave bs, that we live in a 'free democracy' where nobody questions status quo, except a minority of right-left non-npc people.
Haven't read the book, but for those who don't know who Zeihan is, his work follows two threads of post-WWII history:
1. Deglobalization; and
2. Depopulation
The article focuses mostly on deglobalization, but depopulation is in the horse pulling the cart.
Many are familiar with the deglobalization idea from the last US presidential administration. The current administration kept those tariffs, and abided by the previous commitment to exit Afghanistan. Zeihan argues that this trend toward increasing isolationism goes back decades.
What may seem less familiar is the demographic implosion the entire world is undergoing - a baby bust. The vast majority of major countries with the exception of the US and Mexico have passed a point of no return demographically. Their populations will shrink with mathematical certainty. As their populations ebb, so will their economic growth prospects and place on the world stage. The problem is especially pronounced in Asia and Europe, but can be found everywhere.
The reason for the bust: people moved to cities. On a farm, kids are free labor. In a city, kids are expensive conversational pieces.
> Their populations will shrink with mathematical certainty.
Yeah you know why? Because both parents sitting in offices 8 hours a day have no means of looking after their kids. And a mother giving birth needs to return to work in a few months time, else she there's no pay. Oh and neither parent can give up work to raise these future adults because living expenses are too high. I don't know why everyone is so surprised by the raging population decline. Most of the western world is not child friendly, simple as that.
This is a popular theory on reddit, but it's not true. Birth rates are extremely low even in countries that paid parents to stay at home with kids and generally have good work culture.
You would also expect birth rates to be lowest among people working 2-3 low-wage jobs, which is also not true.
As financial stability and safety increase, birth rates go down. That's the only common driver of it.
Historically, children were sources of unpaid labor. They worked (either at the family business or outside the job), raised younger siblings, and took care of elderly parents.
In short, children were (and sometimes are) a social safety net. What happens in societies that try to eliminate poverty, take care of the elderly, and ban child labor? A lower birth rate.
Low birth rates are not a problem (and reflect enormous amounts of social progress). We just need to solve the Ponzi scheme of retirement and elder care, which I think is doable with automation.
> Birth rates are extremely low even in countries that paid parents to stay at home with kids and generally have good work culture.
I'll still bet that there's a significant career opportunity cost to leaving the workforce for a while like that.
> You would also expect birth rates to be lowest among people working 2-3 low-wage jobs, which is also not true.
If anything, aren't these the people for whom the opportunity cost is lowest? A gap on your "resume" after "McDonald's fry cook" to care for your kids doesn't require much explanation when you later apply for "Starbucks barista". If on the other hand you're a lawyer, maybe you didn't make Partner.
> In short, children were (and sometimes are) a social safety net.
I agree with this, and think it applies not just to children, but also to many adults, who can be helpful to their families but who might be unemployable in the larger market. The destruction of family businesses and informal employment is a problem, because society turns into, "get a job with formal compensation from one of these ten monopolies, or else you are worthless". And there are a lot of people who can't meet that standard.
For example, say your family member has mental illness that makes it hard for him to keep a job. If you owned a farm, you could still find something useful for him to do, and put up with him, and he'd be able to earn his keep, more or less.
Or say you meet a woman who, though creative and intelligent in many ways, also has unrealistic ideas about her "career", and who has never really had a proper job. So she's never going to make money, but she naturally tends to the house and does some cooking and contributes to the social life of the people around her. And say she wants to marry you. Do you do it? In a world of small family businesses, surely she'd help out somehow. In a world of FAANG-employed DINKs, she's worthless. And if she insists on living in California? "Sorry, I can't do this single-handed."
What this whole structure of society forces on people is cruelty. "Can you make money or can you not?" becomes the only important question to ask about another human being. It's horrible. At some level, Jeff Bezos' calculations of human worth enter our own calculations.
I'm not at all sure that the subjection of all things to the market has been progress. A world in which more "wealth" was in social/family networks, and where not all labor were so formal, might be a better one.
I'm dating right now, and it's almost always one of the first things asked. Tinder let's you stick that info up front so people can filter appropriately.
Edit: Just double checked, occupation data is right below your name and age.
Although people use much more flowery language then what you use.
"What do you do for a living?" And so on.
Wish me luck finding someone to split rent with. Peace y'all.
Endless (population) growth might not be sustainable, but
> Low birth rates are not a problem (and reflect enormous amounts of social progress). We just need to solve the Ponzi scheme of retirement and elder care, which I think is doable with automation.
… neither is endless shrinkage, automation or not.
Resulting from otherwise positive changes doesn't mean low birth rates aren't a problem. It's a long term one, of course, but they have to be fixed at some point. If the entire world gets to the development level of South Korea with birth rates below 1, civilization will collapse until it regresses to a point that people start having >2 children again.
Social security (in the US) is explicitly designed such that each generation is paying for the one that came before it and generally needs to be larger.
Pensions could and should work just as long as the funds grow faster than inflation, although in practice they can also indirectly rely on younger people paying for older people.
Birth rates are collapsing in rural India as well. Even where women have an extremely low participation rate in the labor force.
I don’t think the issue is simply “cities have less space, working couples have less money”. Its likely more complicated than that, because nothing really explains why people in India’s vast rural areas would have so few kids.
India has issues with traditional farming being uncompetitive, highlighted by infamous farmer suicides. Pesticides were commonly fingerpointed in the past with simplistic "Monsanto responsible for all bad" narratives, but they didn't stop to think. Not using their products would leave the farmers even worse off economically. Better yield is why they pay.
Kids aren't valued anymore economically. Parents will spend a lot but kids aren't seen as a literal asset but as a sacrifice. Altogether it suggests that at some point if governments want more reproduction they will have to subsidize it more strange as it sounds. It hasn't been a problem in the past from growing poorer undeveloped regions but eventually we could run out of people to uplift economically, leaving even the most xenophilic to have to breed more as immigration numbers wind up low. That scenario probably won't come to pass this century, but potentially the next or later.
Nah. EU is "the west" too, and it's more people than US. And maternity leaves here are around 6-12 months. Population still decreases. Significant part of EU was under communism and had baby booms then despite abysmal pay and much WORSE standards of living then than now. Now their populations go down despite the face they are much wealthier and well off. I live in Poland. There's no comparison, when I look at photos and videos made in 80s in my country it looks like 3rd world. I haven't realized then but now when I look back it's crazy how much changed. But people had kids then and don't have kids now.
What changed is perspectives. In communism you'd earn almost the same no matter where, how much, and how well you worked. And money mattered little anyway, you couldn't buy anything with them, you had to have connections to "arrange" anything (even basic building materials were "arranged" through social networks not bought from a shop). So people invested in families and big social networks to survive. And had lots of kids cause there wasn't much else to do. No career to sacrifice, no recreation other than drinking and partying. No internet. TV had 2 channels and most people had only black-and-white receivers. Culture was only accessible in big cities. Half the families had no car. You couldn't travel abroad easily. There was censorship. There were blackouts at the night.
Why not have kids in these circumstances? What are you losing?
Now your standard of living depends mostly on your education and working ethic. And it can vary greatly. Sky is the limit. You can have a yacht. You can travel all over the world. You can be unemployed and live under the bridge. And anything in between.
You don't need other people to survive. Money are very important. Career is an option. There's LOTS of ways to spend time and money. Having a kid is a big sacrifice in this world. So people work more and have smaller families.
The parts of each country that are less wealthy are usually also the parts with highest natural growth.
Basically - economic growth and development reduces natural growth. Pro-family laws are nice, but they don't change the basic calculation of pros vs cons as much as the changes in societies did.
Go back and read Adam Smith. The thing we don't appreciate today is that having more children used to be an investment -- not just in the idea of family, but literally an investment, as kids would grow up enough to start producing more resources than they cost pretty quickly, and were a net contributor to the family.
Nowadays, having kids is wonderful and great and fulfilling and life-changing and all those things -- but economically a disaster.
It is therefore unsurprising that there are so many fewer children. You have to really want them.
Oh, for sure, having children stopped being net-economically-positive long ago -- though the degree to which it is net-economically-negative seems like it has kept increasing, as our expectations of an acceptable childhood keep growing.
I don't think going from 2.x kids per family to 1.x or even lower was mostly about money. It's about opportunity costs (and the resource that you must allocate between the alternatives is mostly time).
To put it differently: in 80s your standard of living was X no matter if you had kids.
Now if you have kids it's 2X and if you don't it's 5X (assuming the same effort).
That's why giving people with kids enough money to survive don't help much. It changes it from 2X vs 5X to 2.1X vs 5X. Maybe 3X vs 5X if you're very generous.
This is really about economics. 100 years ago, having a kid produced more resources. 40 years ago, it was relatively close to neutral ("X no matter if you had kids"). Now, it's super strongly negative.
If that was the case - big social spending would increase natural growth significantly. But it doesn't.
For example in Poland in 2015 a new social program was introduced. Parents get paid 500 PLN for each kid each month till it's 18 years old. At the time the median wage was under 2500 PLN for comparison. So 2 kids increased your earnings by 20%-40% (depending if both parents work).
Natural growth increased by 3.5% for 1 year and quickly returned to the trend. You can't even guess on the graph when it was introduced [1]
Our paper economies are not in tune with reality. They were made to serve people. If there are fewer people with fewer relationships and our economies value numbers over creating happy families, our metrics and economies are broken.
It did not take material wealth or years of checkbox regulated planning to raise a happy family in the past and it does not take it now.
The decline in birthrates is a world wide values and time allocation problem. We do not prioritize relationships and community building, we prioritize immediate gratification and status seeking.
All that an economy should do is manage the logistics of a higher purpose.
But working in the fields doing manual labor is what makes population explosions. It is crassly more a matter of economics. Kids are liabilities in urban and highly educated sections and an asset in rural manual labor situations. Urban vs rural has basically always seen that through different means.
Even if we fixed those problems, birth rates would still be falling. Why? Even accounting for social changes like the sexual revolution, researchers have found that birth rates would still fall due to decreasing male fertility which is common in any industrialized country even for developing ones now, which is alarming. (Everyone has good theories, but no one knows definitively why it is happening.) The only continent that still has healthy fertility is Africa, and that’s only for central Africa. Even coastal Africa is starting to be affected by this Children of Men phenomena.
Need I remind you women are creatures with their own volition and needs, who may decide for or against going to work -- and derive satisfaction or frustration from it -- just like men?
You could make the more reasonable argument that it's increasingly unreasonable to expect any person of any sex to sit in an office for 8 hours a day. And that's not even to mention people doing real, physically extenuating work for really long hours (which those of us on HN tend to forget about, comfy in our white collar bubbles).
Its alarming how fast all earlier projections are being proven wrong.
Like in India, our latest survey revealed that our fertility rate is now already below replacement level - a landmark we were supposed to hit in 2050. We hit that three decades ahead of schedule.
Sub-Saharan Africa is irrelevant, economically. Majority of the population engages in subsistence-level agriculture, or resource extraction for foreign companies. IQ Is measured at an average of 70 or lower: https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php (partly due to inadequate nutrition and opportunities).
Corruption and poverty is widespread, and population expansion is directly tied to environmental degradation. This part of the world is one area where fewer or no children should be ideal.
The population of eg. Ghana could be 5 million (as it was as recently as 1950) instead of 50 million, there would just be more mechanization of agriculture (and substantially better quality of life for the people living there).
> Sub-Saharan Africa is irrelevant, economically. Majority of the population engages in subsistence-level agriculture, or resource extraction for foreign companies. IQ Is measured at an average of 70 or lower: https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php (partly due to inadequate nutrition and opportunities).
That link seems super suspect to me because of this:
> The last place with only 56 points is occupied by Equatorial Guinea.
56 seems to be a unbelievably low number for an average. It's so low that people with that score may have trouble comprehending the concept of death (e.g. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm: "The inability to comprehend abstract concepts may include the inability to fully understand the meaning of "death" or "murder". Morris Mason, whose I.Q. was 62-66, was executed in 1985 in Virginia after being convicted of rape and murder. Before his execution, Mason asked one of his legal advisors for advice on what to wear to his funeral."). I don't see how a society could even function with a majority like that.
Seems much more likely that a result like this reflects a flaw in the tests.
Sub Saharan African countries have population but not economy to be anything other than minor regional players. At this point it is unlikely they will be able to become industrialized and move to mid income bracket.
Emigration from Africa is likely to become huge destabilizing factor in richer countries with declining population. Similar to current Hispanic majority in California, African majority population is likely in some European countries in mid term.
This is assuming that emigration of a poor uneducated population will not result in a prospering economy.
At the very least, this hypothesis cannot be confirmed by the history of the United States, and, as a matter of fact by the prison islanders of Australia.
German population was considered to be shrinking for a long time, but in fact it keeps growing due to immigration.
Is it easy to integrate people? No. Will Europe collapse? No. Will it change? Yes. Will it continue to thrive? Most probably.
I just want to take some issue with your characterization of "with mathematical certainty".
You're completely right that given fertility rates are under replacement rate—from memory: 2.1 children per woman—populations will decrease with mathematical certainty. But there is no universal law that developed countries must remain below replacement fertility levels; that's just what has always happened so far—given the cultures and policies which exist today.
It's not completely absurd to imagine scenarios like:
- a rich society getting serious about the fertility problem and putting it's money where it's mouth is: free childcare, free fertility clinics, generous subsidies for having a third kid, etc
- a culture shift amongst the patriotic, or the religious, or whatever subgroup, to believe it's their responsibility to have more children.
Look at Russia's attempts since ~2006 to basically throw money at their fertility problem and see how well it has worked out for them. There is just no actual need like there used to be (farm labor) for kids these days. Unless house prices crash such that people on minimum wage can afford a large house and still have lots of disposable income to put towards children I don't see how this can be solved with money.
A cultural shift just won't occur in the span of a few years and would likely only be possible from the next generation onwards, but by then the damage has already been done. Maybe 50-100 years from now after "the end of the world" mindsets will change and we'll see a big repopulation.
> Unless house prices crash such that people on minimum wage can afford a large house and still have lots of disposable income to put towards children I don't see how this can be solved with money.
Am I misreading your comment?
"Unless people on minimum wage get more money, I don't see how this can be solved with money."
Sure, the current population would shrink as is, but what about immigration? The US is a country built on that. Surely this would be a factor in preventing depopulation.
> and abided by the previous commitment to exit Afghanistan.
Ummm, what? Biden moved the date for withdrawal back, to make it coincide with a 9/11 anniversary. Then, seeing that the US would just arbitrarily change treaties, the Taliban launched an assault and reconquered the country. I get that historical revisionism is popular with political partisans, but usually you wait until goldfish have forgotten the details before attempted to do so in such a blatant manner.
Just going to chime in with a non political fact: the withdrawal treaty was done by the previous administration, the planning by the military.
It was always going to be a shit show. Presidents are not all powerful gods who control things like the stock market, inflation, or pulling everyone out of a foreign country.
I voted for Biden in 2020. It feels better to say this wasn't his fault for those of us who voted for him. It was his fault, and primarily a failure of his administration, especially Jake Sullivan, who is the least qualified National Security Advisor I've ever seen, including those who advised GW Bush, which is saying something. His qualifications are primarily political and partisan, and he's incredibly thin on actual defense matters. Feel free to take a look at his background, and prepare to be depressed that he wasn't fired immediately after that fiasco. In fact, nobody was fired from the administration, which for me was the most horrifying part. Obama's administration NEVER WOULD HAVE LET THIS HAPPEN.
Specifically, "the planning by the military" was under constraints placed on it by the executive branch. (The constraints were that no more troops would be added on the ground to "cover the withdrawal" and that all civilian contractors had to be out of country months prior, which immediately destroyed all air capability depended upon by Afghan forces) And the idea that Biden was committed to any plan concocted in the Trump administration is absurd. (this treaty was already long in violation by Taliban as well) Nobody who voted for Biden, myself included, expected (or wanted!) him to cling to any plans developed by the previous administration. It's an excuse. I'm a former defense/intel contractor, I've been to Bagram on multiple occasions, and everyone in the DoD community knows that this was an executive branch mistake conflated with malignant obedience at the Pentagon command level.
In case I sound partisan (I'm not), let me be extremely clear in my statement:
The botched withdrawal of Afghanistan NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED under Obama. His administration was vastly more competent than the current one, on multiple matters.
Without a surge of troops to cover withdrawal, the US embassy in Kabul could not be secured simultaneously with Bagram. The decision was made to instead focus on securing the embassy AND HKI airport and to abandon Bagram instead. As is typical of decisions coming from the top levels of the Pentagon under intense executive pressure, all feedback from the ground of the plan's lack of feasibility was ignored, along with warnings of the rapidity of ADF collapse once civilian contractors were pulled from the hangars.
I'm stating this because, not unlike the highly partisan administration under GW Bush, when partisans get too much power in administrations, you get disasters like this. Partisans are selected for loyalty over competence, and it's a growing epidemic in US politics that partisans get more and more power in successive administrations.
1. We have zero way of knowing how any previous executive team would have handled this, but I find that mildly weird given this was a military operation.
2. Does the President have the ultimate responsibility for everything in the USA going on during his term? Yes, as any good leader is ultimately responsible for everything under him.
3. Does that mean the president has any control over it? Not really, the pullout was planned by the military and initiated by the previous administration.
You are very wrong here on every point. Mistakes were made, at what levels and by who is going to take a 200 page report from the Pentagon. And, a healthy amount are due to the fog of war.
You have no idea what you're talking about, and don't even understand the relationship between the executive branch and the DoD, which is a cabinet level department with the President as literal "commander in chief". You also don't understand the basics of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or anything else. When the Bin Laden raid was executed, it was Obama who evaluated the plan and risked his presidency by signing off on it. I, and most of the country, gave him credit for that.
Partisans will blame the person they didn't vote for if things go bad, and act like they had no control if they go well. If it's the person they voted for, if things go well it's due to strategic genius. Bad? They had no control over it and nothing to do with it. That's you.
The statement you wrote feels like extremely motivated reasoning by somebody who, like me, voted for a person, but unlike me, feels the need to defend said person and absolve them of all blame.
Nobody in the Pentagon was fired. Not one person. They couldn't be blamed, because the bad decisions came from the administration. "Check your facts" is a funny statement from someone who offered zero themselves.
I understand your desire that the world works with some ultimate leader but this is not how it works. In the end the President makes a decision based on recommendations/advice from the government agency. Symbolically they are responsible but obviously the Presidential team is not designing missions.
Why would someone at the Pentagon be fired? They got unlucky and made some mistakes, learn from them and get better. Why would you fire them? Last I checked the Pentagon is not fully in control over reality.
I'm sorry, I'm really not trying to be insulting here just sharing my perspective as someone interested in this but not in the industry. Me and many people I talk to feel like you and your colleagues have been given trillions of dollars and 20+ years and accomplished nothing. You have no credibility as an industry or group and frankly nobody should listen to you about anything. It's honestly hard to hear someone from your community describing other people's actions as botched
It’s surprising to see people’s willingness to attribute everything that happens to the president.
Trump:
Stock market boom,
Jobs boom,
Covid,
Police violence
Biden:
Recession
The optimal Covid response will only be known a generation from now. The best government economic policy is something that has to play out over many years and has only a loose connection to broader economic performance. The cops are going to do what they’re going to do. Etc.
Sure, you can't attribute a recession or a boom to a president. But the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is pretty much squarely on the shoulders of the Commander in Chief.
So things like that, that the president does or does not do, can be laid at the feet of the president.
But he does not control the economy, and does not know the perfect answer to a black swan event like Covid… since we don’t know what the perfect response looks like. For example, hard lockdown = possibly less Covid, more harm from the lockdown. No lockdown = possibly more Covid, economy keeps booming (unless everyone dies of Covid!). What’s the optimal mix? Nobody knows. The president, even if he knows, cannot snap his fingers and make it happen.
Isn't that a verifiable fact though, that Trump set the deadline to be fully out of Afghanistan and that it was going to be super messy with the aggressive timeline? Article from March 2021: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/03/17/u...
Obama never would have withdrawn under the conditions. At the time of withdrawal, the Taliban was already long in violation of that treaty. Additionally, the US could have easily done as the Pentagon originally asked, and surged in troops to "cover the withdrawal" which is a standard tactic (and term) for withdrawing from war zones. By refusing to add boots on the ground to "cover the withdrawal" the US military was forced into a no-win situation, having to abandon Bagram and use HKIA, a completely indefensible airport with no controllable perimiter.
Let me be clear:
The withdrawal, if executed properly at a tactical level, was always going to end in a Taliban takeover. However, various tactical failures made it a vastly worse and accelerated affair than it needed to be.
I will again emphasize that this NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED UNDER OBAMA. It's important to state this, because we too often devolve to partisan comparisons on these topics, when the reality is that different administrations have highly varying degrees of competence in their personnel. Biden's biggest fault, in my opinion, is how loyal and kind he is to his team. They helped get him elected, he's very loyal to them for that, and as a result hasn't fired half of them the way he should have a long time ago, starting with Jake Sullivan.
Are you trying to suggest the taliban wouldn't have launched an assault if the date wasn't moved and the US pulled out? I feel your desire to throw a political punch has utterly blinded you here.
That is exactly what I'm claiming, as evidenced by the timeline and events as they occurred. To label a resounding defeat as a withdrawal, simultaneously claim the withdrawal treaty was Trump's plan (but not hold Biden to account for breaking it), and then also claim that this was a continuation of the previous administration's policy... I mean these responses are inline with the sort of "facts don't matter" tribal rage I expected. Yours however, that dismisses the US blatantly breaking a treaty, is the special kind of qualified US military apologist rhetoric (just so long as the president has a D by their name) that is truly contemptible. Hence why your comment got the reply.
I'll agree with one thing - the current administration did what they could to shake off the blame. However, your implications that the Taliban wouldn't have invaded if the timeline had been 4 months different seems to be "the sort of 'facts don't matter' tribal rage I expected".
I'd suggest stepping back and evaluating your political blinders.
How does withdrawing in late August coincide with 9/11 anniversary? And how does 'delaying the withdrawl since the other side was not keeping to the treaty by attacking local governments' become 'arbitrarily changing treaties'?
> Biden moved the date for withdrawal back, to make it coincide with a 9/11 anniversary. Then, seeing that the US would just arbitrarily change treaties, the Taliban launched an assault and reconquered the country.
Are you implying that not delaying the withdrawal would have resulted in the Taliban leaving the rest of the country alone and going about their business?
From what I understand about it, the treaty was falling apart from the very beginning due to the US Government conducting negotiations without involving the Afghan government [1].
Would you believe that the US policy of continually expanding NATO, combined with a military coup of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014 are more to blame for Putin attacking Ukraine? I wouldn't blame Biden. I'd blame Clinton, Bush, and Obama. But hey, you weren't actually asking to be informed about anything that wasn't CIA approved corporate news talking points. You just wanted a pithy straw man joke. (Side Note - Burning karma to put some truth where people might see it is the only good use for the stuff.)
I believe a citation is needed for the claim that the 2014 Ukraine revolution was a "military coup".
Anyway, it's not like the US demanded that Latvia, Poland, etc. join NATO. They are sovereign nations who hated Soviet occupation, and when they got a chance, they joined a mutual defense organization to keep Russia from re-invading them. If Russia didn't want NATO to expand, it shouldn't have been so aggressive towards its neighbors.
I would only believe that Putin is to blame for Putin attacking and brutalizing Ukraine. And Syria. And Chechnya. And Georgia. Sorry, apparently I’m brainwashed.
Funny you should mention Georgia, since they declared war on Russia. Every single one of my factual claims is just an internet search away. And yes, (though you said it in jest) I do believe you are brainwashed.
The Marines' most famous action of this period occurred during the First Barbary War (1801–1805) against the Barbary pirates,[38] when William Eaton and First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon led 8 Marines and 500 mercenaries in an effort to capture Tripoli. Though they only reached Derna, the action at Tripoli has been immortalized in the Marines' Hymn and the Mameluke sword carried by Marine officers.
8 Marines, 500 mercenaries. Contractors have always played a big part in the ebb and flow of international conflict.
>Everyone prospered from more efficient shipping but there was a cost paid by the one nation that did not need maritime security because it had two large oceans protecting it from would-be aggressors, was a net exporter of food and fuel.
Big error there: the US is a net exporter of fuel now but it sure wasn't for most of the Cold War.
How does someone writing in a magazine or blog for the shipping industry not know that? Petroleum and petroleum products make up more than half of the world's tonnage of ocean-going shipping and have since the start of the Cold War!
Also, if you share a continent with a potential invader (like for example Ukraine does) then you should invest mainly in your army. It is exactly when you are secure in your own continent (or island) like the US is (and Britain before it was) that it starts to make sense to invest heavily in a Navy, to address the residual military threat. All countries with populations next to an ocean would benefit from a good navy, but only rich countries with no pressing need for a good army can afford the luxury of a navy strong enough to repel any other country's navy. All the other countries of the world with coastal populations just have to put up with the risk of an attack from one of the world's dominant navies.
And if the US didn't have a good navy, it would be vulnerable to the countries that did, regardless of where in the world that countries was located. Contrary to the sentence I quoted, an ocean is no barrier to a sufficiently well-funded navy. The only protection from a blue-water navy is a better navy. Well, that might be starting to change now (in the future, the best protection might be hypersonic missiles with advanced guidance and sensory systems plus a constellation of satellites to surveil the oceans plus an array of listening stations in the ocean) but it has been true for centuries and is probably still true.
Peter Zeihan has a point (namely, the US has less of an incentive to use its dominant navy to protect the world's shipping than it did during the Cold War) but the OP has not successfully reproduced Zeihan's argument. (Also, the US continues to have an incentive to continue to maintain a dominant navy, briefly because even if you are already the most militarily secure nation on Earth, it still makes sense to buy more security if you can do so at a reasonable cost, and for the US, a good navy is probably a reasonable cost.)
THe problem with this prediction is that there is an astronomical amount of money tied up in global trade.
To stop that would be incredibly disruptive.
Thats not to say it won't happen (history has plenty of examples. WWI is a recent one).
However for the "end of shipping" to happen we need those vested interests to stop being interested in literal trillions of dollars worth of trade.
I can see a few scenarios where that happens, but russian embargoes isnt one of them. China attacking Taiwan, perhaps. Again there is a huge amount of rich people who don't really want that to happen, both inside and outside of china.
Again, this isn't to say that Xi isn't stupid enough to try.
The point Zeihan makes is that world trade as we know it a recent invention. It exists purely as a result of the US commitment to protect trade from piracy around the world. Prior to that, the system was one of isolated empires each protecting their own routes.
As the US is largely self-sufficient in energy and will likely start becoming self-sufficient in a great many things, it needs the rest of the world less and less.
Those shipping lines, which mainly benefit the rest of the world, start to look like an expensive relic with each passing year.
All it takes for an end of shipping is for the US to stop protecting shipping lines which mainly benefit foreign governments.
I'm going to be very bold here, and say thats almost entirely incorrect. Any empire in the last 2000 years has depended on global trade. Before empire, in the bronze age, there is evidence of international trade.
> it needs the rest of the world less and less.
If we ignore the part where its almost entirely untrue that the USA is becoming self sufficient(its not, there is a reason why the Dollar is the international trade currency), It needs the world to export to.
> Those shipping lines, which mainly benefit the rest of the world
The things that stop global trade are disasters, wars, or weird autocracy fetishes (see expelling jews(middle ages), WWI, James I & Charles I being inept, north korea.) not "the natural order".
I don't know how to phrase this but this feels like a lot of truisms / a few reasonable possibilities and then some pretty BIG leaps as far as predictions go.
I feel similarly. Globalization can and probably should boil down to rare materials and high-profit items, not bulk food, disposable consumables etc. I see that as a healthy reduction in globalization while still providing sufficient international trade to maintain relations. Note that I haven't read any of his work.
This is probably an unpopular opinion: it pains me to see the manufacturing industry decline in the US. I don't really mind paying $300 for a pair of shoes. Yes, it will be expensive, but then I'll just buy fewer pairs. In return, more people get decent jobs, or so I hope. And no, I'm not talking about just the so-called "low-end" manufacturing, but also the high end. Indeed, how can we even grow "high-end" talent if we don't have a place for them to start their career? The average age of workers in the remaining few ship manufacturers is well over 50. The cost of producing things in the US is just way more expensive than in China, even if we factor out labor cost. When covid started, both GE and BYD set up factories to produce masks. GE's assembly lines are semi automatic, if not manual, and their machines looked archaic. In contrast, BYD's assembly line was fully automated and shiny.
I mean, can a country as large as the US be really competitive without manufacturing? I just can't see how services and virtual stuff like FB alone can be essential.
In the hey-day of manufacturing things like shoes and clothing in the US, these things weren't considered "good" jobs. You can easily find numerous articles in national magazines from the period decrying them as dangerous, monotonous, and otherwise awful. You can still buy a $600 pair of boots or derbys from Alden of New England (I have a pair) or Viberg. But these are niche products within a niche.
If you're talking about high end manufacturing like cars, planes, specialized steel or similar we still do tons of that in the US. In inflation adjusted dollar amounts we produce more than ever, it just doesn't take very many people to do those things anymore. Robots do most of the jobs people used to do in that kind of manufacturing.
Ship building has been killed largely by the low cost of over land transit since the highway system was built and government protectionism vis-a-vis the Jones act which allowed ship builders in the US to become uncompetitive. But realistically we never had a special advantage in ship building, beyond build a bunch of naval vessels really quickly.
> I mean, can a country as large as the US be really competitive without manufacturing?
We do manufacture a lot of things, just very few people work in manufacturing. We're also a world leader in agriculture. Services are fine, and very lucrative. One of our chief exports is education, which is a service.
> In the hey-day of manufacturing things like shoes and clothing in the US, these things weren't considered "good" jobs.
My understanding is that a family can afford middle-class life with a single blue-collar job with the US has a prosperous manufacturing industry.
> If you're talking about high end manufacturing like cars, planes, specialized steel or similar we still do tons of that in the US.
I thought the market share was declining. The US used to have more than 68% of market share in manufacturing in the world back in 2001 or 2002, but now it is about 40%? It can't be that only low-end manufacturing that is gone, right?
Only some blue collar jobs, specially union jobs in select industries provided that opportunity. It’s also worth noting that it was lower material standard of living than people generally enjoy today in the US.
You’re referring to a slice of the whole pie globally, However the pie is much larger now. Every industrial nation other than the US was basically leveled in WWII so we had a huge slice from the jump.
US manufacturing output has not actually declined though - it has never been higher and has increased over 40% in the last 2 decades[1].
The perception of US manufacturing decline is widespread. My guess is that this perception is due to a number of factors. Other sectors of the US economy have grown more, so manufacturing now represents a smaller share. And also as productivity increases, fewer people are required to produce the same amount of output - so manufacturing workers make up a smaller share of the workforce than they did in the past. Both of these facts mean that manufacturing has less visibility in the US than it had. Finally, as poorer parts of the rest of the world have grown - the US's share of global manufacturing is smaller.
And by the way, there is absolutely no problem finding someone who will sell you a pair of US made shoes for $300 (or more) if that's what you want. There's a long list of US manufacturers who make high end boots and shoes.
relative output matters and the US has lost massively in terms of global manufacturing compared to what it used to be.
saying US manufacturing hasn't declined is like saying IBM hasn't declined in stature compared to decades past. IBM technically has more revenue than they did in the past, but they aren't considered a technology leader anymore and very few are impressed by them, many see them as a dying company
I don't think using IBM is an appropriate comparison. It is a company in actual decline - revenues peaked at about $110B just over ten years ago and were less than $60B last year. Like I said US manufacturing output is growing and has been growing.
And I don't subscribe to a zero-sum view. Just because other historically poorer countries have grown economically doesn't hurt Americans (the opposite) or their way of life or standard of living. And just because other sectors of the US economy (like tourism for example) have grown more rapidly doesn't mean that US manufacturing is harmed - and certainly doesn't mean Americans are worse off in any absolute sense.
Worrying about loss of stature is highly subjective and is more about feelings/pride/emotions/etc.
the US objectively loses a massive amount of foreign policy leverage by not being the largest manufacturer anymore, this is undeniable and obvious when you see how many countries are openly not sticking with the US with regards to Ukraine because they can just side with China, Russia, and India.
The US has gone from 40% of global GDP in the 60s to less than 20%, they've lost relative power when it comes to global issues as a result of that.
The US has also gained immense power through growth in other sectors like finance/banking/insurance - the biggest sector in terms of US GDP. The second biggest sector - professional/business services - also allows the US to project immense power - particularly when combined with the fact that the US dominates global banking and finance.
Looking at a table of US GDP by sector, what rebalancing are you suggesting would increase the ability of US to project power globally? For more Americans and US capital to be involved in manufacturing, some other sector will have to shrink. And manufacturing is already the fourth biggest sector.
I'm skeptical of those numbers although they may be wholly true, they may only be technically true because final "huge value add" simple assembly is done onshore while all the base parts are produced offshore.
Ford "assembles" cars - that's why they're called "assembly lines." Yes, any manufactured good of sufficient complexity will have at least one part coming from somewhere else in the world that specializes in making that part. That's not a bad thing. Insisting we make everything in the U.S. to be counted as being built in the U.S. is a huge step backwards. It is simply unreasonable to expect the U.S. to be the most efficient at producing everything. And if we're forced to accept such inefficiencies then we're necessarily lowering our standard of living.
I don't consider cars simple assembly, that has obvious value add when compared to a pile of parts. Fiber optic assemblies are expensive to buy but trivial to build from the inexpensive imported parts. Forcing purchasers of those assembled parts to buy onshore should count as an effective negative manufacturing GDP because it could have been purchased offshore fully assembled for cheaper. Perhaps there are good national security reasons for requiring onshore assembly of telecoms equipment but mixing it with economics statements is goosing.
People don't see industies where they don't work. Rising specialization and automation means that fewer are involver in industry. People are myopic and judge facts by feelings instead of using them as a proper guide of priorities.
It's only unpopular because it flies in the face of economics. You say you're fine paying $300 for a pair of shoes - but are you okay with your livelihood being making shoes? If you're capable of doing higher-value work then isn't it a "waste" for you to be doing lower-value work?
The U.S. has invested trillions of dollars building an infrastructure that has led its citizens to being some of the best-educated and most-productive in the world. Those citizens are capable of doing higher-value work. Should they do that low-value work when it can be easily and eagerly performed by other countries where the populace hasn't benefitted from such an infrastructure investment? Thereby raising the standard of living for all the parties involved? That's the economists' argument. Moreover the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries taught us that focusing on the nation-state leads to widespread warfare. Better to have those nation-states in economic cooperation that leads to peace than economic competition that leads to war.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying you need to really think through why and how we got here when considering our next steps. You're going to need to address how doing what we did before won't lead to the same problems we experienced before. I suspect you're not going to be able to do that, but I'm willing to be shown to be wrong.
> The U.S. has invested trillions of dollars building an infrastructure that has led its citizens to being some of the best-educated and most-productive in the world.
Remember what you said: some of the population is capable of doing such things, but a relatively large portion of the population are doing gig work. The distinction isn't "why take the highly skilled segment of the workforce and retrain them," but instead "why not take the 'low-skilled' portion and upskill them." Ultimately we know the answer, but your framing was off.
> but are you okay with your livelihood being making shoes? If you're capable of doing higher-value work then isn't it a "waste" for you to be doing lower-value work?
This assumes that everyone can do the higher-value work per their standards, right? US is probably the most educated country in the world, while in the meantime we still have millions adults[1] who don't have college degree. We still have millions of kids who struggle with basic algebra. And per my interaction with kids and college students in the past many years, I have to conclude that not everyone can or like to take on "high-end" jobs. In any class except those magnetic schools, you can see the bottom 20% or more students are hopeless in learning STEM or sophisticated writing. However, they may get decent jobs if there are other demand in the market.
That worries me, actually. Are we leaving a large group of people behind? Have we written them off because they're not able to do "high value" work and yet our life expenses in the U.S. are such that they're not economically viable for doing the "low value" work, either? Is living on public assistance really the best option? Or working in the gig economy? I don't have answers to these questions but I do think about these things.
> That worries me, actually. Are we leaving a large group of people behind? Have we written them off because they're not able to do "high value" work and yet our life expenses in the U.S. are such that they're not economically viable for doing the "low value" work, either?
The answer to both of these questions is "yes". I've worked in education and am very familiar with homeless communities and their issues. It's very obvious that in some locations (like the Bay Area) there simply isn't enough low-complexity work for the bottom 10-15%, people for whom "dishwasher" is a complex job. Technology has just been slowly eating away at those jobs for a century and replacements have not come in as fast the jobs are disappearing.
> Moreover the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries taught us that focusing on the nation-state leads to widespread warfare. Better to have those nation-states in economic cooperation that leads to peace than economic competition that leads to war.
I think it has taught us the opposite? Pre WWI, the world was already very integrated and globalized, to the point that many pundits said that a large war is impossible, because it would hurt businesses everywhere too much. And yet it happened.
The story I've always heard is nobody thought there would be war in Europe to the magnitude of WWI because so many heads of state were Queen Victoria's grandchildren. Surely the family wouldn't war with one another?
> The U.S. has invested trillions of dollars building an infrastructure that has led its citizens to being some of the best-educated and most-productive in the world.
Citation, please (and yeah, I see you using weasel words.)
Why in the world do you think it would take $300 to buy a pair of shoes???
Like what? You can buy all the raw materials for 10 - 15 dollars (way less in bulk) and a single person can make a pair in under an hour with minimal training.
Manufacturing things in the US doesn't have to be vastly more expensive.
The greatest revolution right now is the ability to do small scale manufacturing. Now the issue is that most of the equipment IS still being made in China. That's because manufacturing in China is small scale. Even on a large scale it is still just a lot of people together doing small scale manufacturing.
They don't have the crazy advanced automated processes like you see in the stereotypical american factory with lots of parts whizzing down automated assembly lines. They just have thousands of people putting things together by hand or with modest equipment.
I was thinking of the price of shoes in the late 80s when Canada and US had not outsourced their shoe manufacturing, and my mom told me that it would cost more than $200 to buy a pair of decent shoes. Now adding inflation and subtracting tech improvements, I came up with the $300 number. The point is that I'm willing to pay more to see US as productive as when it was in post-WWII era.
If the opinion you share is unpopular, it's because it's correct, and the truth is the enemy of the oligarchs that are scamming citizens in the US and the West in general. US is now a scam that exports inflation and crap 2nd rate weaponry. Scam economy, scam military industrial complex, scam military, scam president, scam everything.
If you have a feeling the US is in decline, it's because it is. The situation is much worse than most Americans realize. There is no hope for either Democrats or Republicans to fix anything here. I recommend to all my friends that they emigrate if they can.
And who is ascendant? China, who, oops, was overcounting their population by 100 million and now realize they have reached/passed the peak working population? Europe, who is completely dependant on the USA to maintain a unipolar world that they then take advantage of? Are you an 80s kid like me, and Japan and Russia are going to eat our lunch any day now? Maybe Dubai with their wanna be Vegas financial center in the desert is where you think is safe in a 'the world is falling apart, let's move to a self sustaining country' scenario? Is the whole world falling apart, in which case it's probably best to be in a country that is energy independent (USA), able to be food independant (USA), has the manufacturing base that if needed can onshore/bootstrap manufacturing (USA) and able to retool to be technologically independent (USA).
Wealth is something that is given by God, not something that is taken from another person or state. Many nations will prosper but the colonies will never prosper. The people that are actually eating our lunch are our oligarchs right here in USA. When you have a bunch of uneducated brainwashed people with zero morals or integrity, you’re not going to have a good outcome.
Did I say anything about NATO? How many bilateral deals does the USA have with Europe, where only the USA keeps their side? Every industry I have been in that is supposed to have 'open' trade has had artificial barriers erected on the European side, barriers not allowed by treaty. And when we tried to get the relevant USA agency to require Europe to follow the treaty we were seldom supported. German companies can bribe to get contracts in foreign countries, USA companies (rightly) can not. That puts us at a huge disadvantage. Dude, stop with Trump, and try to understand how Trump came to exist, and why 'lies' have so much staying power. Or just feel smug. Start holding Europe accountable. Who creates and keeps structures beneficial to Europe operating around the world? Who keeps safe open shipping lanes? International dispute resolution that allows international diplomacy to have enough faith in rules to function? A stable enough reserve currency to make long term deals feasible? There is so much 'scaffolding' that is there thanks to the USA the we get zero credit for. But keep demeaning our contribution. Keep making it about Trump instead of maybe addressing American's frustrations (resentments) with Europe and the worlds relationship with us that allowed Trump to happen, that will make the world better. Instead of telling me my frustration doesn't exist (Trump lies) maybe try to understand WHY those lies have staying power, why Trump happened in the first place.
Stop bribing and encourage corruption, start paying (in diplomatic works, in laying 'Western' ideal foundations, and in just sticking to your word, whether that be military commitments or open trade deals) your fair share to the world order and be a partner. Try to understand WHY the average American is frustrated enough that we bought those lies. Or yeah, go after the symptom, not the disease, and enjoy the next iteration of a 'Trump' figure before the decade is out.
Um, no. My family are all immigrants from Europe. Most Americans are raised to despise Europe, and the situation's that resulted in our families having to flee to another continent with nothing (this manifests as being anti-big government, because we have family memory of big government banning our existence/trying to wipe us out). I don't think Europeans understand the average american's psyche or the damage it does when your country tries to eliminate your existence (Irish Catholic, Russian Jewish, small sect German, non-Catholic French descent here).
America is an especially non-homogenous country. And I wouldn't exactly call it damage when they were 100% right about big government trying to destroy them while citing the benefit of the masses more or less. A non-nuanced view about why it is a problem but that is always the case.
Any sovereign nation would be better. Mexico, China, India, Hungary, Croatia, Singapore, Switzerland… USA is a zombie nation state that is more like a colony than a functional nation state.
There's two main "foreign" forces at work in the USA that have more power than the average Joe/Jane, but I'll let you do the math on which forces those are.
> I don't really mind paying $300 for a pair of shoes. Yes, it will be expensive, but then I'll just buy fewer pairs. In return, more people get decent jobs, or so I hope.
I suspect that this would just help keep the same returns for the shareholders and executives.
Shoes may be more expensive, but not $200 more expensive (if we take that on average they cost $100 now) if made in the US. Even for a single worker spending four hours in a pair of shoes, this accounts for $50 extra per hour, or around $100,000 per year.
The whole "we can't make things in America, you wouldn't be able to afford them" song and dance is a lie. When companies outsourced production of goods, they didn't drop the prices - they pocketed the increase in margin.
The reverse is true: nothing stops production from coming back except corporate/investor greed.
Shoes that retail for $120-$150 don’t cost $100 to make. Normal shoes cost like $20 to make. The rest of the costs are transportation, warehousing, marketing, etc. Also remember that retail takes a 25-35% cut. I would expect a shoe that costs $200 to make to retail for at least $400.
My point is that the hypothetical $200 difference between a pair of shoes made in the US, and somewhere else, is not going to go to the folks making them.
+1 - Id also argue that even though that show costs $300 we have enough of a market and population to have competition drive prices down in a generation or two (if not faster).
That is because EU has Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and other places where Western Europe partially outsourced parts of its manufacturing. It was more expensive than moving it to China, but otherwise much more convenient and less risky.
Europe still kind of has regional currencies, so that makes manufacturing cheaper in certain countries, while the lower wages still can pay for an acceptable standard of living inside those countries.
> Yes, it will be expensive, but then I'll just buy fewer pairs
This is key though, it presupposes everyone can buy fewer pairs. There are probably a lot of people who get by on one pair of sneakers - particularly children, who are going to grow out of them anyway. These are the people that will suffer if $300 shoes become commonplace.
offshoring is short term optimization and has long term negative consequences by killing the entire ecosystem it takes to go from raw material to finished products. The problem is that economists only think 1st order effects, not 2nd and 3rd order.
Charlie Munger has a pretty good take on it and how many economists and our own government officials are in complete denial about it:
>Now let’s follow and second and third order consequences: You are more prosperous than you would have been if you hadn’t traded with China in terms of average well-being in the United States, right? Ricardo proved it. But which nation is going to be growing faster in economic terms? It’s obviously China. They’re absorbing all the modern technology of the world through this great facilitator in free trade, and, like the Asian Tigers have proved, they will get ahead fast. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan. Look at early Japan. So, you start in a place where you’ve got a weak nation of backward peasants, a billion and a quarter of them, and in the end they’re going to be a much bigger, stronger nation than you are, maybe even having more and better atomic bombs. Well, Ricardo did not prove that that’s a wonderful outcome for the former leading nation. He didn’t try to determine second order and higher order effects.
>If you try and talk like this to an economics professor, and I’ve done this three times, they shrink in horror and offense because they don’t like this kind of talk. It really gums up this nice discipline of theirs, which is so much simpler when you ignore second and third order consequences.
>The best answer I ever got on that subject – in three tries – was from George Schultz. [Schultz was an MIT economics professor before becoming Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State.] He said, “Charlie, the way I figure it is if we stop trading with China, the other advanced nations will do it anyway, and we wouldn’t stop the ascent of China compared to us, and we’d lose the Ricardo- diagnosed advantages of trade.” Which is obviously correct. And I said, “Well George, you’ve just invented a new form of the tragedy of the commons. You’re locked in this system and you can’t fix it. You’re going to go to a tragic hell in a handbasket, if going to hell involves being once the great leader of the world and finally going to the shallows in terms of leadership.” And he said, “Charlie, I do not want to think about this.” I think he’s wise. He’s even older than I am, and maybe I should learn from him.
Basically our leaders know we are in a horrible position and are counting on dying before the full consequences of their actions take effect.
it's funny how HN says outsourcing manufacturing is fine and has no negative consequences while going into a fury at the suggestion that software engineering can/should be outsourced. Both result in short term gains but long term negatives
> But which nation is going to be growing faster in economic terms?
well, likely both. because of trade and specialization. when the US offshored shoemaking people did not just went to the beach and called it a day. both capital and labor got reallocated for better returns. (yes, not everyone moved to the service industry, unfortunately not everybody was able or willing to change to different jobs/sectors.)
> maybe even having more and better atomic bombs
even one is plenty.
> If you try and talk like this to an economics professor, and I’ve done this three times, they shrink in horror and offense because they don’t like this kind of talk. It really gums up this nice discipline of theirs, which is so much simpler when you ignore second and third order consequences.
was it at a xenophobic libertarian economists party?
anyway regarding higher order effects and long-term strategy and American "interests":
your response to the argument that economists are wrong is to post more stuff from economists that don't look at 2nd order effects? China doesn't practice anything resembling free trade and as a result they are dominating naïve Western economies
the biggest problem is people who worship "free trade" as a religion while smarter nations use it as a tool to bash them in the head
None of those are economists though. (I don't know whether they have econ degrees of some sorts but neither of them are practicing economists, both are pundits.)
I'm completely in favor of levying customs on China for anticompetitive practices. (Eg. favoring state-owned enterprises against other market participants.)
The point that the free trade zealots make - correctly IMHO - is that despite all the problems with the freeness of trade the trade part in itself got us so so so much prosperity.
> they are dominating naïve Western economies
Okay, that's a very vague claim. Dominating how? Their GDP growth is bigger? (Which is completely expected, it's much easier to catch up.) They stole a lot of tech? (Western companies knew all the risks when they entered into these partnerships, plus if they feel their IP is misused they can - and do - sue both inside and outside China, I guess with largely predictable outcomes.)
The problem in the US is fair distribution of income, not lack of production. In other words, we don't need to make more stuff.
"When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." This is faulty reasoning that probably makes sense to an engineer because, well, engineers usually make stuff.
The only people who this is an unpopular opinion to are the rich fat cat execs who only care about their profits and share prices. Pretty much everyone I know thinks it was a bad idea to outsource manufacturing to less than friendly countries. Thanks, Krugman.
This just isn't true. Maybe they think that because they're not aware of what would happen if manufacturing hadn't been offshored, but the vast majority of people would be extremely unhappy if the cost of all manufactured goods doubled.
This reads like a lot of Mahanism (He Who Controls The Seas Controls The World) in a new coat of paint. And that Mahanism is the greatest self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a big kernel of truth should be self-evident looking at human history. So, while not false in itself, also nothing earthshatteringly new.
I've read most of Mahan's books and I've read at least some of Zeihan's books. Mahan's view is essentially that battle fleet dominance combined with ownership of key naval strongpoints (think Gibraltar) makes military success and overall dominance more likely.
Zeihan's view diverges somewhat from Mahan's points, in part because he has different views, and partly just because we're in a different era than the one Mahan was writing for. Mahan earned a lot of credibility because the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century was one in which there could be decisive naval battles, and a powerful battlefleet could virtually guarantee sea dominance.
Mahanism isn't really a prophecy so much as it was a political program pursued by Mahan himself and his allies in the legislature, the presidency under Roosevelt, the business community of his time, and with the general cooperation of the British. German naval leaders during WWI and WWII tried to implement Mahanism as if it were an ideology, but failed in part due to German naval geography and in part because they just were never able to get the level of political support that would have been necessary to rival the Atlantic powers on water. So, at least in the US, it wasn't "self-fulfilling" -- he made it his life's work to fulfill it. At a time in which most of our foreign policy intellectuals fail at accomplishing their goals, it's worth noting that he succeeded, regardless of whether or not one thinks those goals are good.
The era that we are in now is one in which coastal defenses are more powerful and unpredictable than they have been in the past. The role of aviation and aircraft carriers is also highly debatable until we have a real peer to peer war with nukes.
Personally, I found Zeihan a bit exasperating in that his analysis is often good, but he's also often glib and breezy, particularly on analysis of Russia, China, and some other countries. But he's very good at talking about some of these crucial big picture topics that get taken for granted to a popular audience.
US-centric approach. How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. How about if eg. COSCO buys out the port operators around the globe. How about if they decide to protect their shipping routes with their military so that they carry on with providing goods to the globe. Globalization is still in the best interests of China, even if the US decides to abandon it.
> How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves.
Zeihan argues that this is impossible on demographic grounds. The after-effects of the One Child Policy and the mass migration from farms to cities ensures a lack of soldiers, a greying population, and economic/military decline. Throw in Xi's unprecedented cult of personality that prevents anyone reporting bad news as the icing on the cake.
The US has nothing to fear from China, so Zeihan says.
Yeah he also predicted China and Germany were going to collapse a decade ago. He makes a lot of strong claims but does not show his work. So he's about as accurate as astrology, when he's right he's not necessarily right because of any great internal understanding.
This arguement is questionable because the amount of bodies and resources it takes to cultivate and maintain modern tier1 military is not substantial at PRC scale. Even PRC with South Korea TFR (worlds worst) will be generating millions of new births, more than US generates via births + immigration. Or that current PLA budget is ~2% and major powers including PRC has gone up to 7%+ during periods of "peaceful" competition. There isn't a credible scenario within this century where PRC will lack bodies or resources to field a military that is rapidly closing gap and will likely contest US for global interests within short/medium term.
The Chinese base in Djibouti for example, is larger than the US base there.
What the US misses is that China doesn't necessarily want a fleet of expensive (and very vulnerable) carriers floating around. It would much rather have islands and coastal bases around important choke points. Sure, the price you pay is force projection, but the benefit is that it's a much more sustainable military.
PLANs has conducting antipiracy missions in gulf of Aden for over a decade now. Their bread and butter frigate type 54 has done port visits across the world. Most 2016 modernization has massively increased UNREP / auxillary fleet. PLAN has enough hulls and capabilities to protect at least her shipping, there's simply no reason to while uncle Sam foots the bill.
Looks like the US and China import about the same quantity of oil. That doesn't contradict what you said, but I think it does diminish its significance.
Importing oil doesn't necessarily say anything about use. The US imports a lot of oil to refine and then export as petroleum products. Countries don't just burn crude oil in a giant bucket to keep warm.
> US-centric approach. How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. How about if they decide to protect their shipping routes with their military so that they carry on with providing goods to the globe.
That already covered by option 2 in the op ("2 The Rise Of China"). It's not a very interesting option to discuss when it comes to shipping (e.g. everything stays the same, except Chinese warships substituted for American).
China's Navy is now bigger than the US Navy. Few have noticed.
China's third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, was launched last week. This is the lead ship of a new carrier class. Carrier #4 is said to be under construction at Dalian. (There's so much shipbuilding in China that it's hard to tell if a new hull is a warship or just another giant container ship.)
These are not nuclear powered. That's expected with the next class of carrier.
But is it any good? That's the question. I don't doubt that they'll try something in the next 10 years, because now is the largest force they'll ever be able to muster. One child policy screwed them.
PLA is still massively modernizing and expanding with barely ~2% of GDP. It doesn't take that many bodies to man modern military, even worst case combination of South Korea tier TFR (<1) and cold war ear spending (6%+) enables PRC to field a military multiple times larger than current size. This is without considering unmanned autonomous platforms that PRC defense industry is heavily focusing on. Need to properly conceptualize how fast/large PLA has grown last decade relative to how modest the amount of resources has actually been devoted.
Expecting China to run out of people is a strange idea. In the last few decades, the PLA has shrunk, but has become much better equipped.
The US military has a much worse manpower problem. 71% of US military age youth are ineligible for the US military - too fat, too dumb, or too criminal.[1]
The success of the US Navy in the past was due to constant training and the empowerment of the officer corps at the junior ranks, and billions in cash thrown at tech and equipment. If China can afford to train well, has decent technology that’s reliable, and is flexible enough to allow power to disseminate the ranks, then I assume they are on the way to overtaking the US Navy in ability as the USN wanes due to lack of leadership and misplaced priorities.
The big one is that they haven't fought a naval battle in decades. The US Army, Air Force, and USMC have been involved in too many wars in recent decades. For better or worse, they have a lot of people who have been at the sharp end. The Navy, not so much.
It's beginning to look like warships will not be able to operate anywhere near a hostile shore in future. Truck-mounted systems are now a serious threat to warships. No more parking a helicopter carrier offshore and sending in the Marines. The new "littoral combat ships" are already being retired after only a few years in service.
Yea, I was in the pre-com unit for the first LCS ship and it was an absolute shit-show at the builders constantly. The real problem isn't that the Navy can't fight battles, it's that they can't even perform basic navigation now without subs and ships hitting everything in sight! There is a "brain drain" in the USN where the best leaders (officers or otherwise) are forced out by the toxic culture and all that remains are the dickheads who are barely competent.
and is flexible enough to allow power to disseminate the ranks
They're not. China (and other dictatorships) do not want an empowered office corps at the junior ranks, and the CCP is very careful to keep senior PLA generals on a short leash.
The PLA Navy has not fired a shot in anger since the 1980s.
True. The PLAN is working towards being more of a blue-water navy, but they are not there yet.
Here's a list of shipyards in China.[1] It helps building a large number of commercial ships. China's third carrier was built in a shipyard that also builds commercial ships. The fourth carrier is reportedly being constructed in a commercial shipyard in Dalian.
The US only has two shipyards left capable of building large surface naval vessels - Bath Iron Works and Newport News Shipbuilding. Both are very old companies, from the 19th century. There's Ingalls in Mississippi for medium-sized vessels, and Electric Boat in Connecticut for submarines. There are still four US naval shipyards run by the Navy, but they just do repairs now.
I'm sorry but it's not accurate to call the PLAN larger than the US Navy unless you're just counting the number of ships. The USN has twice the displacement of the PLAN.
The USN is by far and away the strongest blue water navy with the capability to operate multiple independent strike missions in any region of the world simultaneously, including contested waters like the South China Sea. The PLAN is barely able to support missions outside of its EEZ, and has outfitted their newest carrier with EMALS despite having a oil-powered turbine engine, which basically means they're not able to launch more than 2-3 aircraft an hour without shutting down their entire onboard systems to recharge the supercapacitors. In contrast, a US supercarrier can launch it's entire flight wing of ~90 aircraft in 30-40 minutes.
The PLAN has 3 carriers. The US has 11 supercarriers and 9 assault carriers.
I think it's like this: "The end of the world" is not an event, it's a process. That process is just beginning. We're nowhere near "the end of the end".
Yeah, thanks. The article is about a book called "The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning", the missing "the" turns the meaning of the book title on its head, from an optimistic sounding "this is just the beginning" to a fatalistic "the end of the world is beginning".
I've read a few of Zeihan's books, and it seems like the author of this article is missing the point. Zeihan says, again and again, that basically the ONLY reason for the US pulling away from globalization is the new shale oil boom, which makes the country energy independent. My layman's understanding is that under the Biden administration regulators have hobbled these shale wells in the hope of achieving an energy "transition", whatever that may mean. So we aren't really energy independent after all, at least not until the transition is completed. So I'm not sure how the conclusions of the article really make sense, notwithstanding the many references to how you could get rich quick by betting on these outcomes.
1. "Not a single ship captain works in the Pentagon or any of the major national security think tanks." - I doubt there are satellite operators, travel industry execs, farmers or construction workers either. US military leaders are tasked with zero substantial threats to US peace, security and order, and mostly succeeds, with the exceptions rare enough to be newsworthy (JFK/etc assassinations, WTC93 and 9/11, etc)
2. "Nearly everyone prospered and the oceans became safe for ships of immense size and slow speed, unlocking economies of scale that became possible only because the ocean became safe enough for shippers to put all their eggs – or at least 26,000 TEU’s worth of eggs – in one basket." - AFAICT, the TEU/container is the unit of shipping, not the whole ship. This means that ships can get larger and larger without increased financial/etc risk to producers or consumers. For many reasons, shipping companies own many ships and individual losses are a financial matter and not existential threat.
A TEU is a "Twenty-foot-equivalent" or a half-container (most containers you see are 40 footers.
But the boats that carry them are huge and slow and absolutely sitting ducks to even a small navy (the Coast Guard could sink them, and improvised equipment could trash them relatively easily).
If there was any risk of losing one of those ships to deliberate activity, all hell would break loose (the theory behind the article). Weather isn't even a major an issue anymore with modern predictions and satellites. So insurers are happy to insure at low risk odds, pennies or dollars per container.
Large, slow ships are easily found and caught. If that's a problem, then you build smaller, faster ships, which are less energy efficient.
Losses of ships are only a financial matter because losses are very rare, so insurance is cheap. If losses become common, insurance costs skyrocket and the cost of doing business goes way up, reducing the amount of trade. That's what the article is saying will happen.
I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying in the second sentence of #1. But primarily, none of the examples you cite were on the military to stop, they were the responsibility of civilian agencies.
Not if the US Navy stops caring, which is the whole point. If there is no military to step in, piracy ends massive cargo ships, which ends the current immense economies of scale in shipping.
I've been thinking for the last few years that ships moved tons of goods using just the wind for centuries, and that nowadays, autonomous schooners that cross the ocean are more of a basic engineering challenge that would require no miracles. Further, these schooners could probably be fully or mostly solar-powered - if it's wind that moves them, their operation basically means running some motors and such to adjust the sails.
Which is to say, with some adjustments in our expectations of speed and a concerted effort of building the new system, there is no reason not to think that global trade could continue indefinitely without relying on oil.
No reason, that is, other than pirates, which is the one problem I have not solved in my daydreams about these ships of the future. The one essential ingredient for such a vision, is a world in which humans do not, or at least rarely, steal.
So this is not so much a counter to the article, as a lament. Humans can accomplish a lot with some effort, and they can prevent good things with even less effort, sadly...
Is there any data that backs the claim that the US is "protecting" the world's seas? Like a list of incidents where the US navy intervened to protect vs the times other countries intervened?
Without that I suspect "protect" really means "control" the seas. And if that's true - why would one country losing control of the sea mean the end of the world? Also not convinced that that automatically implies any sort of instabillity.
The US gains a lot through its ability to project power anywhere on Earth (including shipping). It's part of the total package that makes the US dollar the reserve currency for the world. There are simply too many vested interests in that status quo for the US to go full on isolationalist (aka "deglobalization").
Even if they do, China will step in to fill the void. This possibility alone will keep the US in the picture as it won't want to cede that ground.
What I really hope is with US foreign policy the left hand starts recognizing what the right hand is doing. For example, there is need for maritime esecurity in large part because of the regions the US has directly or indirectly destabilized to serve other goals.
Russia is of course the bad guy for invading Ukraine but the US sure did leave a lot of dry kindling lying around on a hot windy day (and is then shocked that a wildfire happened).
Take security around the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a key US ally and is using US weapons to commit genocide on the Yemenese people and those that don't die from weapons are getting starved out by famine.
Maybe there wouldn't be such a need for maritive security if the US had a different foreign policy.
I can definitely buy the argument that deglobalization is going to hit a lot of sectors that are increasingly viewed by domestic populations as 'critical' - things like food, medicine, energy, metals, and even computer chips. The pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains, just-in-time-manufacturing, and awareness of the results of 40 years of full-on neoliberal globalization policy (see The Rust Belt flipping for Trump in 2016 as evidence of this trend).
I think this is a very healthy development, because trade in goods is best thought of as a way for different countries to benefit from surplus production. There have been historical exceptions like the New World plantation economies set up to supply Europe with rum and sugar, Brazil's rubber plantations, resource extaction in the Congo, etc. but none of these resulted in what you'd call healthy economic development.
China may have the goal of becoming 'the next American Empire' but a more rational view is that the Age of Empires is quickly drawing to a close and there won't be any inheritors of the crown at all.
Has anyone else been noticing an increasing trend of people dooming & glooming over low population? Just seems like fear mongering to me. Specially with all the automation today
Interesting article. This has uni econ shit-lib professor written all over it though. Not discounting that view. I think there's a lot of truth to it but they're pulling a little hard at the teet of: if you're poor, don't blame global capital!
> Only those nations secluded from navigable waters – e.g. Afghanistan, Chad, Mongolia, Bolivia, etc – failed to prosper (note, the high coastal bluffs and lack of coastal protection throughout most of Africa slowed investment in most of the continent)..
> In the age of globalization, everyone could get in on global access, manufacturing, and mass consumption,” writes Zeihan in a chapter titled The Americanization of Trade.
As someone who grew up in an environment of multiculturalism, I’ve really appreciated the richness, friendship, and intellectual stimulation it’s brought into my life. I’d be quite hesitant to take that treasure away from the children of tomorrow.
People sometimes talk about this deep-seated immutable tribalism people supposedly have, but I find a lot of it comes from leadership that espouses that thinking.
I’d argue that multiculturalism is a misnomer. I can’t speak for GP, but I sympathize with the fear of cultures being eroded and replaced with a largely corporate global monoculture.
The problem is you're posting these bullets without a thoughtful explanation. You're going to need a fragmentation of the internet to truly stamp out diversity and multiculturalism. Why you would want to do that? I don't know, but good luck with embracing non-existent cultural purity.
I'll pick on the "less invasive nations" part which is wishful thinking. If you have America or any multilateral global order among democracies, you're more likely to have nations trying to get away with what they can with their neighbors. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the most recent glaring example of this, except the responsive was unexpected by many. We only have all of human history of empires and warring countries as examples. This doesn't result in a balanced less polarized global equilibrium. Less cooperation among countries would be worse for the environment even if you ignore the war aspect.
Russia say that it's Ukraine refusing to demine the waters that it, Ukraine, mined in the first place. I've also read that the impact of the (lack of) grain exports is drastically overblown
Well, those ports would not have been mined if it weren't for the Russian invasion. Without Russian ships roaming the coast and ready to attack or disembark soldiers and tanks the situation would come back to normal ASAP.
Anyway that's not the problem.
The grain shortage is not about an insufficient amount of grain worldwide, but because of less grain available on the markets prices went up and many poor countries cannot compete and/or afford to buy it at current prices. Also because those who can afford it are hoarding since well, you may never know.
So far this year we’ve had:
- A land war in Europe
- Food insecurity in the developing world
- Breakdown of supply chains and shipping routes
- Nation states resorting to seizing each other’s ships (see Greece-Iran issue recently).
Everything that he had talked about in the past and in his latest book.
The thing about Zeihan’s arguments is that you can’t really argue against demographics. You can procure any resource from any part of the world, but if you want an 18 year old to consume or work or fight, you HAVE to wait 18 years. Or import them from elsewhere - which causes all sorts of cultural and societal conflicts.