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.
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.