Number 1. struck me as well. I think the book's author is a victim of confirmation bias when it comes to the importance of geography for power and wealth - there were numerous examples given where geography helped, but no counterexamples seem to be addressed (China being one of the obvious ones).
If Zeihan’s predictions about 2030 are accurate, we should be starting to see them by now, 8 years into the 17 that he predicted. Frankly I’m not sure that I see them, and what I do see seem to be for reasons that aren’t what Zeihan predicted. The US is withdrawing somewhat militarily (particularly out of specific wars in the Middle East), but still only to a quite limited degree, with its overseas military bases still in full operation. Free trade too is basically operating the same as it was when the book came out, even if some groups in the US and other countries are against it.
I could give him more leniency if he were predicting further into the future, but his predictions expect this state of decay only 9 years from now. Perhaps there will be a rapid change, but we do not seem to be trending that way globally.
To add on, I think this review could’ve been more compelling if it had looked at the books claims about the future in this way. I do think the review was quite well-written otherwise, but it seems to have accepted Zeihan’s predictions too easily.
One of the things that I'm really cognizant of in terms of "predictors" is that they tend to be *right*, just not as fast as they would've thought. Ex. all of the Cyberpunk writers that we now are going "oh wait, these dudes actually were on to something" in terms of transhumanism and the connected world (as well as the critiques of capital led corporate states - can anyone say Amazon?) were writing in the 70s and 80s - and they were writing about the year 2000. Not the year 2020. I'd cut him some slack if significant pieces of the puzzle started to come into view over the next 9 years - even if the whole thing doesn't come to fruition.
We are however, with COVID and the Refugee Crisis seeing a *much* more fractured Europe - and while these aren't Immediate Symbols of the Apocalypse - Brexit was in fact a thing, and there are other nations that are getting in routine, very public fights with Brussels.
But a big piece of his argument is based on demographic pyramids. Those don't permit being off by 20 years. Like, yeah, he could be off by five. But even if the world does look like he predicted it would in 2030, at 2060, that sounds like a coincidence. The mechanisms he predicted didn't function.
>>Various articles in the popular media, speeches by policy-makers, and reports to Congress have stated that the United States graduates roughly 70,000 undergraduate engineers annually, whereas China graduates 600,000 and India 350,000. <<
The author's point is that those 600 thousand engineers are encumbered with supporting 600 MILLION elderly people (that's not supposed to be an exact figure). Now, look, does that prove what he wants it to prove? I'm not sure. But having this aging population does matter, and just pointing to the number of people graduating in China is confusing gross and net.
Uh huh. Well, if industry does become divorced from human labor, that certainly will have a profound effect on everything. But productivity growth is slowing, not accelerating.
More so than many other professions, engineers are the type that (1) cannot be replaced by robots and (2) are required to design and maintain the robots. So I’m not sure robotics advance leading to lower demand for engineers is valid in the same way it is for cashiers or factory workers.
Why does this aging population matter? If a situation cannot continue it won’t, bad in this case by the expedient that people who expected to retire and live like kings for 30 years will live adequately for 20 years. Diminished expectations, but that’s all.
This is not something that can be predicted by demographics. Will the aged of your society accept that it’s time to walk out onto the ice floe? Or will they insist on bringing down gotterdamerung on their grandkids? Different societies will make different choices; culture is what matters here, not demography.
I think that it's possible you're right. But it's not obvious to me that you're completely right, and other societies (Japan!) have had growth halt for a generation as they swallow the demographic elephant.
The extent to which this matters depends on the extent to which advances and production are driven by a few genius engineers vs armies of grunt engineers.
I think this is an unresolved question, but I lean more to the few genius engineers side. Compare, eg, what Apple has been able to do vs Intel in CPU design.
This holds more generally. It matters less whether 5% or 35% of your population are in college than that the one in a million geniuses can make a mark without being crushed by “the system”.
Demographic pyramids provide some insights and have important impacts, but Zeihan always makes his predictions too specific. I don't think it's coincidence that he will probably have some predictions come true in 2060.
Brexit is on its own. No Eastern European country is going to leave for fear of Russia. Central and Northern Europe are locked in. Grumbling in Southern Europe isn’t going to affect much.
>Grumbling in Southern Europe isn’t going to affect much.
Sovereign debt in S Europe could be a humdinger though. The EU managed to navigate it's way through Greece's problems, but the other 3 PIGS are looking pretty bad too, Covid made that much worse. Italy in particular has a LOT of debt with French banks, that could bring the whole Euro project tumbling down. If the Euro fails, what then for the EU?
Shadowrun, the 1980's released pen and paper RPG about people turning into elves and dwarves and hacking computers... One of the first uses of cyberpunk, was set in 2021
Shadowrun is absolutely not one of the first examples of cyberpunk. And if you're looking for RPG antecedents for cyberpunk, there is, y'know, Cyberpunk 2020.
Shadowrun was a fun game. I love how they completely missed predicting the wireless revolution and smart phones in the original edition. No one ever gets the future right, Zeihan included.
"We are however, with COVID and the Refugee Crisis seeing a *much* more fractured Europe"
Are you sure? Or was it much more fractured during the debt crisis around 2010? I could argue for your position (Brexit did happen), but as easily for the opposite position.
I mean, the debt crisis is also an example - I forgot about the whole austerity/bailouts for Greece and Spain business - those sorts of spats are just becoming more prevalent over time.
While those spats certainly happened, those aren't the only thing that happened.
After the financial crisis the EU gained increased authorities in monetary handling as well as an emergency fund to help out countries in immediate financial trouble.
After this much time with the Covid crisis, the EU recently gained increased spending authorities and allowance to gather some what more funds from countries, at least at times. This was to help particularly afflicted countries as well as to pursue reduction of Oil and Coal usage. But this also mean they effectively gain more influence on general European policy as they can now spend for certain policies.
Basically at each crisis point rather then just fighting, they also compromised and strengthened the EU and it is thus increasingly starting to look like a small government Confederacy. The only real thing lacking is a more central army, and there are certainly those trying for that in the EU right now, some what helped by Russian belligerence.
As such it isn't clear if the EU isn't thus also becoming more capable of withstanding greater crisis to the benefit of its member countries.
I agree that there are these compromises and advancements, and that it is unclear in which general direction the EU is going.
I would add that the EU is still lacking a bit more than just an army. For example, there is no foreign policy at central level. For example, a central government usually can decide on foreign policy, and can sign international treaties. The EU can only do that if all members agree.
Fair enough, though there is one area that is an exception on the treaties, which is for trade agreements, so interestingly enough it was granted such a competency in one area of foreign policy.
Still you're right that the central policy is mostly missing as such, though one suspect another aspect of it might start appearing if you did have an army, it would need a policy of use after all.
Well for now that's speculation though, what hasn't happened so far, hasn't happened.
I think that there's a lot of room for him to be directionally right and off by 5 years and still basically amazingly right about everything. I'd say that the predictions being off so far are a yellow flag, not a red one.
<i>If Zeihan’s predictions about 2030 are accurate, we should be starting to see them by now, 8 years into the 17 that he predicted.</i>
His Russian prediction has an eight-year timespan allotted to it:
"Its demographic decline is so steep, so far advanced, and so multivectored that for demographic reasons alone Russia is unlikely to survive as a state, and Russians are unlikely to survive as a people over the next couple of generations. Yet within Russia’s completely indefensible borders, it cannot possibly last even that long. Russia has at most eight years of relative strength to act. If it fails, it will have lost the capacity to man a military. To maintain a sizable missile fleet. To keep its roads and rail system in working order. To prevent its regional cities from collapsing. To monitor its frontier."
Perhaps somebody better-versed in Russian affairs than me can say whether the country really is on the verge of collapsing like this?
As an American who has lived in Russia for some years and speaks Russian, I know more than average about Russia, but don’t follow its economy, politics, or demographics especially carefully. For that, see Anatoly Karlin’s blog.
One should bear in mind that Russia does have structural economic and demographic problems, and that it has political problems insofar as the Russian government has too little rather too much effective authority within its own borders (reasonable presidential and ministerial decrees are routinely ignored outside the center), but also bear in mind that all of these problems are very much exaggerated in western news sources, which have predicted the last one hundred of zero Russian collapses.
Economy:
The Russian economy has mostly grown in the last 25 years, with some serious hiccups, the biggest being during 1998 sovereign default, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID epidemic:
Which of course makes it rather poorer in per capita GDP. In PPP terms, it is around 50th in the world, and classified as a middle income country by the World Bank:
Russia has been shrinking in population for many years, but TFR has been increasing since around 2000, and is somewhere between 1.7 and 1.8 right now, which is below replacement, but not particularly bad by developed country standards:
I don’t know how to find metrics on it, but in my experience recent improvements in online bureaucracy (“gosuslugi”, that is, “stateservices”) and tax-collection have very much improved day-to-day dealings with the government.
TLDR; Russia has problems, but most things have been consistently improving over the last twenty years. Rather than collapse, I predict that Russia will just fumble along, maintaining its mediocre position, and never quite realizing its potential.
For those who are interested in data based analysis of Russia spiced with powerful takes, I recommend Anatoly Karlin’s blog, an index for which can be found here:
FWIW, Russia precipitous baby bust was the result of despair. On a scale hard to fathom in the West. You can look at life expectancy and ponder a bit about the human experience behind the chart to get a glimpse of what it must have felt like.
If Russia economy normalizes somewhat, even at lower level than previously, people will adapt, expectations will adjust and babies will start being made again.
Russia was recovering from the 90s in 00s. The economic growth correlates with TFR as well with some lag. It is not clear how Russia can return to growth in the increasing isolation. Further institutions' improvements are either stopped or trying to roll back. Both due to internal political pressure (the number of options is limited if you are a thief president). So most probably TFR will slide to 1.5 or even return to the late 90s level(1.2) in the next 10-15 years.
Well noted, the power of the government is quite limited. It is more a collaboration of like-minded (corrupt) actors who find the current system the most appealing with an extremely high concentration of diminishing resources around "Moscow" (mostly extended "cooperative Ozero"). The current system can slowly degrade for the next 20-30 years at least. Will it end in a similar perturbation to the early 90s is hard to say. But a significant change in trajectory requires at least 20-30 years of constant growth which is less likely.
Can you quantify the "increasing isolation" of Russia? The majority of Russia's diplomatic problems are with the US, which is relatively unimportant to Russia as a trading-partner. A serious break-down of trade between Russia and the EU would be a bigger problem. However, the USSR continued to export oil and gas to Europe during the hottest moments of the Cold War, and the current minor tit-for-tat sanctions with the EU seem to have had little effect on the Russian economy, so the risk here seems manageable.
To get a sense of the scale of the possible risk of isolation, consider Russian exports by country:
One can argue, if you like, that dependence on trade with China is risky, but that's true of most countries.
Can you be more specific, and provide some evidence, concerning the halting or reversal of institutional improvements? I'm especially interested in evidence concerning concrete questions such as economy, industry, technology, infrastructure, health, and education, not nebulous issues concerning political preferences.
Tax-collection reform, for example, has been a major success, so far as I understand, and the man who led the reform, Mikhail Mishustin, has now replaced Medvedev as Prime Minister. As the PM’s office is responsible for economy, finance, health, and education, and Mishustin is widely seen as a technocrat, as opposed to Medvedev who was widely seen as a crony, the choice of Mishustin as PM seems like a signal for interest in further reform.
But it remains to be seen whether he’ll be effective as PM.
As for the trajectory, I gave evidence that along many axes it has been on average positive for the last twenty years, so you seem to want to argue not that a change of trajectory is needed, but that some radical reforms are necessary to maintain the current trajectory. I’d be interested in hearing such an argument, backed up by at least some kind of evidence.
For now, I repeat my modest prediction: Russia will continue to fumble along, slowly improving, with hiccups, as it has for the last twenty years. But as I have a lot of skin in the game, I am interested in considering serious arguments to the contrary.
Wars with Georgia and Ukraine, spy scandals in Czechia and Bulgaria, coup attempt in Montenegro, death of Poland delegation in Katyn and subsequent refuse of investigation, Dutch Boeing, Japan and Kuril islands dispute, constant alert of Baltic countries, mutual sanctions and visa problems with many countries - this is a way to isolation.
As for purely economic view, I think it's limited. It doesn't matter how much they earn overall if they can spend more on military and behave nastier. They see it as war, not as economy beauty contest. Historically and psychologically Russia is more averse to extreme scenarios rather than mediocre. For the last 20 years, in my observation (I'm Russian), it has been steadily declining culturally and technically, despite having some excellent results on IT side + they had money from oil to spend on some ineffective infrastructure. The poverty and disparity is growing very fast. Most and best of folks I worked with left the country for good.
It's probably not apocalyptical yet, but the trend is very much to famine, isolation, wars, dictatorship and North Korea.
Russian military actions have been relatively minor and predictable.
I'm familiar with this phenomenon of Russian inverse chauvinism: you don't live in the greatest country in the world, but you still want to feel special, so you pretend to live in the worst.
As far as I understand the sanctions pressure is estimated at 0.5-1.5% of Russia's GDP. Basically, there are two major points here: increased cost of capital and access to technology. These are mostly the long term capital investment related items and not immediately noticeable problems on GDP chart (though your themoscowtimes link shows stable GDP share decline after 2014). Plus for any Russian company, it is twice as hard to go abroad comparing to what it was 10 years ago.
When I speak about institutional reforms I mean mostly courts. They are too important in their corrupt state to do anything with them. But at the same time, you cannot substantially improve anything without them.
Mishustin probably is a much better admin than Putin's least ambitious and capable friend. Plus you are right he did a great job by diverting the 'rent' from state representatives to the state pocket (which is still redistributed between closest Putin's friends). The grey economy size didn't change though.
My point mostly is that slowly improving is something EU or US can afford. To survive in present borders in the long term Russia needs to run quite fast right now and it looks like it takes some 20 years break to dream about its very special mission.
The first author, Ben Aris, is the chief editor of bne intellinews, which specializes economic and business news for Eastern European and other developing economies:
"In GDP terms, Russia has recovered somewhat from the shock of low oil prices in 2014"
You might mean lowER oil prices ?
Because 2014 was oil coming down from it's all time high, to what seems to be the "new normal", itself still much higher than what we were used to during the 2nd half of the 20th century (oil shocks excluded) :
tldr; The number of available male recruits is expected to decrease by 20%, which might lead to a decrease in the number of active military men from 900 k to 720 k. As such a reduction is unlikely to inspire renewed invasions of the Grande Armée and the Wehrmacht, I hazard to suggest this will not lead to a collapse of the Russian state.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine coupled with *stares in everything about European energy* waves hello from 2022. Before the Middle East blows up or China notices the everything or we hit his 2024 deadline for capital shortages.
We'll see how that plays out, but right now we've got $5 gas in America so we can maybe kinda sorta ship oil overseas to heat British and German homes. And not nearly enough of them. So Fall and Winter will be breaking points somewhere.
He talks up US internal maritime trade a lot, but isn't that not much of a thing anymore? I thought due to the Jones Act and the decline of the US merchant marine it is very limited these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabotage
This was precisely my reaction. As of now we CANNOT build stuff the way China does. It will take 50 years to turn that around.
Tim Cook on why the iPhone is manufactured in China.
"China has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere, that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision and quality level that we like. The thing that most people focus on if they're a foreigner coming to China is the size of the market, and obviously it's the biggest market in the world in so many areas. But for us, the number one attraction is the quality of the people."
"There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is."
"The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."
"The vocational expertise is very very deep here, and I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational. Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. China called that right from the beginning."
Not to mention in terms of economic complexity - the highest-order industrial outputs are only capable of being made in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. The United States hasn't *lost* any of these intersections - it's just that at this point, the capital cost is already spent at Foxconn.
To give an example - Toyota plants and Ford plants are both in the US, and we produce more steel and aluminum than we did in 1970.
The fact is either that capital resources have been expended in China that cannot be easily shifted - or that the labor cost is cheaper. There's no story that says China is uniquely capable of doing advanced manufacturing.
Intel and GlobalFoundries are *both* in the United States, TSMC is in Taiwan with heavy US presence/support. So when it comes to Semiconductors, the USA is well ahead of China. There are many other advanced industries in which this is the case.
The "advanced manufacturing" as a sector story is a just-so story about a specific product in which Apple, Inc invested significant capital resources into developing the capabilities in China over many years. Probably because of cheap labor, Tim Cook is trying to explain his use of Foxconn factories that have to install suicide nets in this way to make himself look better.
Culture war discussion ban kicks in here. US universities (I'm UK, same happening here) are more keen about advancing 'elite signalling agendas'. The West has become sclerotic, to borrow a word from Ross Douthat
Given the way Humanities departments have comported themselves over the past 60 years, the claim of your article would be freaking fantastic — if it were true.
Of course it isn’t. The most that can be said is that # of Humanities students is flat, while STEM grows. If you include many professional schools (eg Law, Journalism, ever more Social “Science”) in the Humanities camp even that weak statement isn’t true.
We have plenty of football fields of engineers. They just get pulled in other directions--to software and computer engineering mostly, instead of "tooling", because the pay is better here.
"Tooling engineers" are fungible with other engineers the way "office managers" are fungible with other managers. It's a highly skilled trade, generally practiced by tradesmen (yes, gendered) with a trade-school or associates-degree education. We can puff up the title by adding the E-word, and we can maybe normalize a bachelor's degree, but that won't hide the grease stains.
We need football stadiums of good tool & die makers. We aren't losing them when our engineering students are pulled into the wrong kind of engineering. We're losing them when our high school guidance counselors, etc, tell them they're too good to be greasy tradesmen.
Americans are increasingly taught that the only jobs worth aspiring to are ones where you sit at a desk and tell other people what to do. Like non-tooling engineers, sitting at a desk telling other people what to build. So for all the stuff that we need to actually get done or built, we increasingly need to depend on not-Americans. Possibly including recent immigrants; I understand that most of the actual toolmakers we still have are from Eastern Europe.
China and India have billion+ populations. The pool of people in both countries capable of being trained for highly skilled labor is 3-4x what it is in the US.
It's debatable whether the US is maxing out its production of STEM human capital. I think there's room for improvement, but the incentives are there in terms of compensation compared to other countries for technical work. When I was in college there was a fair amount of weed out at the 100 and 200 level classes, so if anything STEM pipelines are initially oversubscribed.
India and China together have a talent pool about 8x what the US has. It's basically impossible to beef up the educational system here to overcome the numbers. The educational system isn't able to impart aptitude that isn't there.
You need several football fields of employers to have several football fields of people with practical expertise. It doesn't matter how many people graduate with engineering degrees, if they don't get jobs that teach them the actual practical issues in a particular specialized line of work. Apparently right now, most of those jobs are in China?
But I suppose 30 years ago that was not the case, so there's no particular reason to think this couldn't change over the next 30 years (possibly shifting to Africa, as the one part of the world with the cheap labor to bring the first companies, and the properly shaped demographic pyramid to sustain the growth).
You’ve started good but then moved into Africa and “cheap labour” but that’s the opposite of what Tim Cook was arguing. If it was just free labour then Africa would have the factories now. Clearly demographic growth isn’t enough.
China became this way because of heavy US subsidization schemes and massive amounts of capital investment. I would not be shocked if one of the more stable African countries starts to go this way over time. China itself is starting to see problems with increases in standard of living reducing it's ability to compete as an export-focused economy.
New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
After I read the article I told my employer that I wasn’t writing any more code till a got a biscuit. An hour later I came back from the restroom and I had one on my desk. She even warned it up in the microwave. Pretty funny stuff.
Compared to what? The alternative is not your life in America, it is life on the farm.
You only get the American alternative once you are wealthy enough, and you only get wealthy enough via an intermediate stage of this sort of hard work.
It’s not slave labor, get over yourself! It’s better than life 50 years ago and vastly better than life 500 years ago.
Marxist wannabe’s would do well to read what Marx actually wrote about the alternatives of what the bourgeoisie offered vs medieval life.
a pretty clear statement of our ability (and the failure of political bureaucracy). I am aware of several companies in the midwest that the Chinese are actively learning from and it they apparantly are still "seeking knowledge" in other ways.
Not only have we forgotten how to make things, we have forgotten how to make the things that make the things, a generation or more of tool makers, steamfitters, die grinders, boilermakers, metal fabricators, industrial electricians, welders, etc., all left to rot.
These are not skills that one can just pick up after a few days on the job.
yeah thought the same. the review cites Zeihan comparing cost of moving a container by sea vs. road, but surely on a river with much smaller tonnage vessels and a much more circuitous route (e.g. before railroads / the Erie canal people used to ship stuff from Chicago to New York by water via New Orleans, all the way round Florida and then up the coast again)
well, i also made another point which is you are not going to be moving down the ohio on a valemax, and that combined with shorter distances and more port stops/costs means your $ per mile figure is going to go up a lot. Conversely trucking could eventually become significantly cheaper once self-driving tech comes into the picture.
I don't think self-driving tech will make trucking much cheaper. If it did, this would mean that paying the driver is a major component of the current cost, and I just don't think that's the case.
Trucking (at least in the US and Canada) currently appears to be limited by the number of people willing to do the job for the wage that it pays. Its big advantage is that most stores are not located in a port, so you have to change mode to get cargo to the point where retail happens. Not sure if Amazon has any warehouses in ports yet...
so if you look at this link you'll see that driver wages come out to about 43% of the total. But that's not all, shifting to self-driving would also: 1) greatly increase utilization of your truck assets as the things don't need rest breaks (15% of costs today) 2) reduce insurance costs due to lower accident rate (5% of costs today) 3) impact fuel consumption and tire wear (26% of costs today) from smoother driving style and ability to latch trucks into close-driving convoys (less wind drag). It can impact almost everything in the cost base, and the impact will be very significant. Of course won't be so in the beginning cause you need to pay for the new tech + find solutions to other issues (vandalism, who's gonna change that blown tire if you have no driver, etc.)
The wages part of that article seems OK - 100k miles/year is 60 mph x 40 hours/week x just under 42 weeks. Assume that a driver doesn't spend all his work time on the highway and it's reasonable.
Rest breaks - agree. Reduce insurance costs - depends on how the legal system treats them. Impact fuel consumption - probably. Impact tire wear? Not sure about that - I assume that most drivers aren't currently drag racing.
Truck convoys? There were lots of fights over increasing trailer length to 53' and as far as I know there are a number of jurisdictions that still don't allow double trailers (or place total length restrictions so that you don't have two 53' trailers).
I don't think they are actually practical to put on the same road as human drivers. Yes, the reflexes will be better, but they would be using the same tires and brakes, so stopping distance wouldn't be that much better.
The stopping time of a truck on dry pavement at 55mph is about 4 seconds. The reaction time of a (somewhat) sleepy driver can be up to about 3.5 seconds. If you assume zero processing time for the self-driving truck you're still not going to get better than 4 seconds on dry pavement. A convoy would be much worse.
I think there would be a lot of things to sort out about security and maintenance with a self-driving fleet. When I didn't work from home I used to see fresh truck tire remains on the road every couple of weeks on my commute.
I think that would depend on how elastic the supply of truck drivers is - what are the training/bonding/etc. requirements to be a trucker? What's the length of the pipeline? Of course that affects the wage to some degree.
One also expects that the advantage of riverine transport dissipates as trade shifts increasingly to services or information rather than physical goods. Is this discussed?
I lived for a few years on the 21st floor of a Northside of Chicago building overlooking Lake Michigan. In all that time I only saw one freighter go by headed toward the port on the Illinois-Indiana border. I got the impression that Great Lakes shipping wasn't as bustling as I'd expected from the "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald."
That's not to say that navigation wasn't important in the past -- e.g., Chicago is a great city because it's near the portage connecting the St. Lawrence and Mississippi watersheds. But by the 1980s, internal shipping seemed less overwhelming.
The stylized fact I had always heard is that in the United States, goods move by steel wheels on rail, while people move by rubber tires on asphalt, while in Europe, people move by steel wheels on rail, while goods move by a combination of rubber tires on asphalt and internal waterways.
When I look up details I see that it's not quite like that - but in Europe, 41% of goods shipment is by water and 11% by rail, while in the United States, it's 43% by rail and 13% by water (see Table 2 here: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/ - I suspect this is by ton-mile rather than just by ton, because trucks dominate by ton (since everything is on a truck at least once) but rail and water give the distance)
The large destinations in Europe are on water because they've been around long enough for that to be why they exist in the first place. In the States there are (at least) medium-size cities that grew up around railroads.
'The author predicts that, once the U.S. becomes a net energy exporter, the infamous trade deficit with countries like China and Japan will shrink to the point that the U.S. could cut itself off from them at minimal economic cost. Advances in 3D printing (particularly metal printing) will also allow the U.S. to make its own goods instead of relying on foreign factories. Lacking any interest in affairs outside North America, the U.S. will withdraw from its military and trade alliances, bring all of its troops and ships home, and let high-seas pirates and undemocratic regional powers like Iran fill the vacuum.
Problematically, trends over the last five years since The Accidental Superpower‘s publishing haven’t gone the way the author predicted, which suggests the U.S. isn’t on track to being able to economically detach itself from the rest of the world. For example, even though the U.S. became the world’s #1 natural gas producer in 2013 and its #1 oil producer in 2018 and is now breaking all-time export records for both, the country's trade deficit has gotten WORSE over that period.
Moreover, 3D printers have not improved to the extent that the author seems to have predicted, nor are they starting to replace traditional manufacturing machines (e.g. – looms, presses, lathes) in factories that mass produce goods. Furthermore, there’s no indication that this will change anytime soon. Looking back, it’s clear now that the author wrote the book during a period of hype about 3D printers, and that rosy predictions in pop-sci articles and financial magazines about how the machines were poised to revolutionize the manufacturing industry probably influenced his thinking.'
3d printing seems like a technology where we are still a decade before the big inflection point and now it's just accumulating niches before the big takeoff. Like the computer mouse was invented in 1963 and someone in 1975 would be forgiven for thinking it wasn't important.
3D printing will always remain a niche. What enthusiasts don't understand about modern materials is that they are effectively engineered down to the atomic level. You can't do that with any imaginable printer, the printer introduces a level of chaos at a micrometer level that essentially cuts off what you may have achieved at the nanometer level from the macroscopic level, it's like a firebreak or moat. So when you need something made of the best steel (like a ship propellor or surgical instrument), or the best composite (like an F-22 wing), you're going to go with the manufacturing that can make use of these materials without perturbing their qualities on any length scale short of the macroscopic.
We already have, both in use by aerospace companies and to an even greater degree at various national labs (JPL, LLNL, ORNL), metal 3D printers that incorporate high speed thermal imaging cameras with software to enable local microstructural control over grain structure to modify mechanical properties, continuous variation between alloy grades without unwanted brittle phases, feedforward process control, and printing and repair of (for example) nonweldable alloys used in jet engines, with properties comparable to or greater than some conventional steel and titanium alloys. You're right that we don't have a path to nanoscale control, and you're not going to be 3D printing single crystal turbine blades, but applications with those kinds of needs are a tiny, tiny fraction of the world economy.
The bigger problem with 3D printing replacing other manufacturing is cost. It's expensive to make printable powders. Printers, especially metal printers, are slow and have high energy requirements. Also, some alloy classes, like most high performance aluminum grades, just don't print well with current processes, and right now the solutions all involve adding rare elements like Scandium to the mix.
I think he has not accounted for things like chip manufacturing. You might be able to 3D print a device, but it will be run by chips that still get manufactured on the other side of the world and have to be installed afterward.
Look for videos of houses being 3D printed! (I have no idea how different materials and conduits, for AC, water, electricity, … are handled, but there are a few different companies now doing this.)
Change never happens as fast as you expect — but once it starts…
That would be wrong in 1960. No actual expert would say it , these machines were Turing compatible. I’ve seen videos of the 3d house printers and it’s just a robot on a track pouring concrete, the whole thing needs to be set up to design a limited set of housing, has to be concrete, etc. Nice but probably not going to replace most house building, although it could generate low level social housing maybe.
I think he would do well to go further down the chain of the effects here. If US protection is holding world trade together, and everyone else is positively screwed without it:
>As of 2019, the total value of the annual world shipping trade had reached more than 14 trillion US Dollars.
How does 5% sound? 700 billion to continue US protection of global shipping. We could probably cover the direct expenses with a 1% fee, seems like a logical solution versus energy/food crisis
The problem is not the technology, the problem is they have tiny crews and they're not paid enough to take even small risks to their life in defense of cargo. I suppose you could have a small fleet of drones aboard, each armed with an RPG, operated by the owners' agents back in Amsterdam.
You are not imagining robot guns aimed by crew members in a secure location. Just like a video game. Advanced radar-guided Gatling guns would cut small pirate craft in half.
Of course attacks by states would be dealt with at the state level.
Yes, but they have no ability to control anything beyond their coastal waters - I believe the review has a sentence about that. Changing that would be difficult and costly. I think the EU is still depending on the US for that. China seems to be taking some steps towards a blue-water navy, but they're not there yet.
The Chinese navy has been conducting antipiracy patrol and escort missions off the East African coast for over a decade, and for most of that period have been I believe the largest and most effective antipiracy force in the region. China does in fact have oceangoing warships that can project power into the Indian ocean and unto the African coast, close to a hundred of them, and they are not shy about shooting pirates. Both because they really hate pirates, and because it's a cheap way to remind people that yes, they really can project power across oceans.
The European nations have ceremonial navies. They don't understand why a navy is necessary and any country that increased defense spending would be promptly voted out by its own population.
The Chinese have a navy that can't even break out of the first ring of containment out of three. Invading Taiwan is right out, they lack the necessary amphibious transports. There's a reason the hypothetical scenario is called "the million man swim" because that's the only way they'll ever get ashore. Even so, Taiwan has few beaches able to support an invasion and you bet the Taiwanese know exactly where they are.
And yet the Europeans helped suppress the Somalie pirates as well. Beyond that the EU military spending has been increasing by I believe 5% per year for 5 years, that's already a full election cycle, and they haven't been voted out.
The more logical conclusion is, is that the Europeans spend on defense what they perceive as necessary. It's getting more dangerous, their defense spending is going up as well.
A Phalanx CIWS is between 5 and14 million dollars, depending on the source you trust. 20mm rounds are, I don't know, $10-20 a round? And that thing goes through a LOT of them.
Now, you start to imagine cheaper options, cheaper automation, etc. And then you start to wonder how cheap does it have to be before the pirates have them too? Or the pirates have a cheap drone swarm that can overwhelm the defenses until they're out of expensive ammo, maybe?
My point is that defense is expensive and cargo ships are soft targets.
Another point: in the absence of US carrier groups keeping the sea lanes peaceful, the problem isn't so much pirates as state actors. So again, arming the cargo ships to protect against pirates is moot.
Nobody would pay you. They'd spend the money on their own navies to protect their commerce themselves. Waaay cheaper to do it yourself in this case than to contract with American mercenaries. Chinese mercs are cheaper and serve the Chinese national interest.
The reviewer contends that demand is infinite everywhere, and that it is the abundant supply present in the US that makes it a successful consumer economy. I’d like to add that infinite demand is not a universal phenomenon, and is primarily a cultural thing. For instance, excessive spending or consumption is frowned upon in most South Asian countries as unseemly, and people are mostly expected to save their earnings after taking care of their families or education. Hence, abundant consumption is indeed an American phenomenon, and has perhaps led to accelerated economic growth.
And there really is a kind of sense to it even if stated plainly it sounds unintuitive. If you have two idle people that don't particularly care to change anything they mill about and don't really produce any wealth. If suddenly they both want something the other can make and agree to make those things for each other you have wealth producing trade. It even works on a one person model, if you're in a state of nature the only way to get to where you have a homestead is to first desire one, the building of it comes second. The intuition that consumption is irrelevant to production comes from the belief that most people are already producing about as much stuff as they can, which is rarely the case.
Asians just have different things on which they splurge. If you want an Asian to spend absurd amounts of money that has a poor ROI, just offer him some real estate in an exclusive Zip Code, or a graduate degree from Famous University founded in 1664. You'll get the same result as when you offer a red-blooded American a pick-up truck with 600 hp that can tow a house, plus real leather seats and surround-sound stereo.
Could that be a history/demographic thing? People who grew up during the Great Depression were very frugal. In the US there was a big social stigma against credit cards when they were first introduced in the sixties. China is only 40 years into it's capitalist realignment and credit cards are still pretty rare there. As of 2019 only 30% of adults in China had a credit card. In the US it's 70%.
Conspicuous consumption happens in times and places where one will not be robbed or the results confiscated by the government. I submit that Asia has had a lot of that in the past; America not so much.
I've lived in three Asian countries (Singapore, HK, Philippines) and conspicuous consumption is definitely a thing among the elites and aspiring middle class.
In Scott's recent book review on neoliberalism, some of the comments said that part of the explanation for the book's response to neoliberalism is that the benefits of neoliberalism really started around 2000, when the book was published. Could that instead be, at least somewhat, explained by "the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital"?
The benefits of neoliberalism started c. 1982, at least, in Britain: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Ectc In some countries this was postponed; they became very clear after 2006 in Germany. Some countries appear to have had very little benefit (e.g., Mexico).
Are we sure Mexico hasn't seen any benefit? While poverty rates remain high, their GDP has quintupled since 1980, unemployment rate is among the world's lowest, and their median income by purchasing power remains higher than that of China, which is supposedly a great success story of Neoliberalism. They've also successfully transitioned from a one-party state to a multiparty democracy during that time period, and greatly increased funding to education and services (the former of which has raised their literacy rate from around 80% to 96% over the same time).
They haven't been exactly racing forward, and there are some definite structural problems that haven't been corrected, but I think it's safe to say they've seen some considerable benefits from this period as well.
Eharding's shows Mexican GDP as a fraction of the U.S. GDP, which, while informative, gives slightly different information than the one above (including ignoring differential population trends).
Let’s take one simple point about his geography claim. He says that the US is blessed by geography but it wasn’t a world power until Europeans conquered it.
The shale Revolution is no more likely to save the US than green energy, which is potentially abundant and not just in the US. (If green energy were not considered left wing it would be fetishised as the greatest technological marvel in the last decade).
And why, even without a US driven free trade agreement, would oil producers stop selling oil?
The supposed demographic crises in China has been talked about for years. I don’t buy it. Firstly the demographics are not that bad, the official tfr is the same as the US. Secondly China has a large reserve of rural workers who can add to the gdp as they move up the value chain , and the rural areas don’t have a population decline. Secondly the demographic “crisis” is man made and can be reversed. Thirdly they can import workers as guests, the Chinese won’t accept permanent immigration but plenty of countries allow in migrants without citizenship rights.
As for US immigration, Europe has dried up, China will dry up, which leaves relatively lower productive workers from Central America. If even that.
And the whole thing was written prior to the recent rise of wokeness which is tearing the US apart. Ending white supremacy in the US is a bit like the Chinese ending Han supremacism, it’s clearly something divisive. Ideologies matter. Successful nations have a story which glue them, CRT and anti white ideologies can only tear the US apart.
(As an aside, footnote 10 is baloney, sure investment immediately creates jobs and those jobs create demand, but the investment isn’t made to begin with without prior demand. A company that is losing sales doesn’t invest in production lines, it shuts them down).
>The supposed demographic crises in China has been talked about for years. I don’t buy it. Firstly the demographics are not that bad, the official tfr is the same as the US.
And that's why you need to take official Chinese statistics with several large grains of salt. They've claimed for decades that their TFR was about 1.7, comparable with the US, but last month they released the results of their 2020 census and revealed a TFR of only 1.3, and based on the numbers it likely has been lower than 1.7 for some time. Of course, I have to ask myself why I should trust 1.3 when it seems they were lying about 1.7.
It's a common refrain in America that official Chinese statistics should be treated with skepticism. Are you implying that there's a fake set of statistics that is released to the public, and a real set that is classified in their internal documents? Or that national statistics are difficult to accurately measure and will contain a large margin of error?
The last Chinese census before 2020 was 2010. It doesn't seem improbable to me that TFR could change by 0.4 in a decade, considering the general pace of change experienced in Chinese society in the last 30 years.
Implying that the national statistics are full of errors and unknowns, and that's the case for officials with full legal access to anything. James Palmer over at Foreign Policy had a good piece on this back in 2018:
"We don’t know how good Chinese schools really are because the much-quoted statistics provided by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) that placed China first in the world were taken from the study of a small group of elite Shanghai schools. As soon as that was expanded merely to Beijing — another metropolis — and two rich provinces, the results dropped sharply. (PISA’s willingness to accept only this limited sample is typical of the gullibility and compliance of many foreign NGOs, especially in education, when dealing with China; I have seen numerous foreign educators fall victim to obvious Potemkinism, including believing that Beijing No. 4 High School — the rough equivalent of Eton — was a “typical Chinese public school.”) We don’t know the extent of the collapse of rural education. We don’t know the real literacy figures, not least because rural and urban literacy is measured by different standards — a common trick for many figures."
Their demographic crisis hasn't been man made for a while. Every east Asian country , from Singapore to Taiwan to Japan, has seen their birth rate crash. No one child policy needed.
They reversed the policy five years ago and it did nothing because the law wasn't why people were avoiding kids for the past 20 years.
You seem to have a cartoon villain understanding of what states (even authoritarian states) can do. Even the Nazi’s couldn’t move the dial on this much:
People have kids primarily based on things like employment and the cost of housing. If a state could change those as much as is necessary, we could all do to learn that state…
I did say “if anybody can they can”. Which isn’t definite. I wonder though if a communist state could make housing cheaper if they needed to, or would it go against their philosophy?
No they just have to reduce prices, not go full communist on housing. And they can use cheaper housing for eugenic effect by targeting specific groups - in western countries with free housing for the poor, the poor have more babies. I don’t buy this demographic disaster anyway, the idea that the wealth of nations is determined by the birth rate (this reverse Malthusianism) is not borne out by the facts.
"As for US immigration, Europe has dried up, China will dry up, which leaves relatively lower productive workers from Central America. If even that. "
Here I must disagree, the U.S. has the best earnings for high-skilled workers, so it has the greatest ability to attract high-skilled immigrants. China has ability to attract immigrants as well, but its limited, and its human capital must primarily come from its own energies.
The vast majority of immigration to the US is unskilled. H1B is a few tens of thousands a year (and not even an immigrant visa - many go home). European immigration is a trickle. And China, which provides a lot of skilled migrants, will see that reduced. In fact it’s happening this year - chinese students are going elsewhere. That leaves India perhaps. But skilled immigration is fairly low.
China is a non-immigration country, like Israel. There is a green card program but it is a joke. The only people who "immigrate" to China are ethnic Chinese returnees.
Israel is definitely not non immigrant, it’s controlled of course. The Chinese won’t do immigration, if you see that as a permanent stay, but could open up to foreign workers a la Arab countries.
I just watched a talk from Zeihan this year about how America is declining. He seems worried about it and I can only assume it's because he *wants* America to win, not that he thinks it's inevitable. Seems like there's some bias going on here.
It's because without a clear enemy that is perceived to threaten America (European empires, Japan, communism, Islamic terrorism) it is actually too big to hold together and will collapse into internal divisions.
It remains to be seen if the American public will buy into the narrative that China is that threat, or if they prefer to focus on internal division.
Either way Zeihan is right that North America will be very wealthy, but it is uncertain whether it will still be United.
>>While China’s plummet in birth rates is heavily influenced by its tyrannical one-child policy, Zeihan attributes declining birth rates generally to the move away from farming and toward industrialization and urbanization. <<
When ever you hear anything about China's one-child policy, you need to keep this fact mind:
TAIWAN'S BIRTH RATE (WITH NO ONE-CHILD POLICY) HAS DECLINED FASTER THAN CHINA'S.
This does not conflict with the statement above; in fact it reinforces it.
It's a remarkable statistic, but do you really think that implanting 324 million IUDs (after having one child receiving an IUD was mandatory) and sterilizing 103 million more didn't have any effect on China's birth rate?
Sweden's TFR has been below 2.1 for decades, and if you look at cohort fertility (fertility at the end of the reproductive period) it is also below 2.1, and trailing downwards. As in the rest of the Nordics.
Zeihan's reputation tends to be polarizing; and he comes off as overly focused on demographics. Some consider him a hack. This is a good introduction to some basic ideas of geopolitics in general - it should be readily apparent that Britain and America's free political systems and empire-building stem from them being rich islands with virtually no risk of being invaded.
I don’t think he’s a hack, I think he writes in no small part for entertainment value as well. No one can predict the future, obviously, it would be tedious for him to precisely qualify every statement.
He reminds me a little of a geopolitical Jared Diamond; some interesting detail analysis that others miss, but too one-dimensional. He seems really obsessed with geostrategic matters that could easily become less relevant or completely irrelevant due to technological shifts - some of which are pretty obvious (like the aforementioned shift in manufacturing; similarly, rapid breakouts in advanced energy tech could make oil far less relevant, and we're already probably in the midst of a new generation of warfare in which our conventional weaponry is about as relevant as the Maginot Line was in WWII). I think he's definitely out to lunch on China - and like pretty much every prognosticator of the last 40 years, dangerously so.
I think Diamond's overall take is unfalsifiable, and pretty much certain to be correct - environments shaped culture shaping civilizational outcomes sounds very uncontroversial in general.
Zeihan`s issue is how he frames his theory of societal growth in terms of short term predictions, which become silly when bits don't work. I mean, obviously geography and demographics have a huge impact on national power, but these occur in conjunction with current national power and other general trends. When he's framed to say things like "China's demographics will doom it and ensure American ascendency, it sounds like he's forgetting that the Chinese and Indians each outnumber the Yanks 5:1. If the Yanks can import a billion people, sure, America will curbstomp anyone with their incredible geography and superior demographics, but he's not comparing like with like here.
And in a century there will be four billion Africans. An African nation or concert might have a good shot at world domination in a century or two, sure, but that's not a 2030 timeframe.
Do you actually believe there will be four billion Africans? I suggest writing a book titled something like "The Population Bomb," in which you could detail these predictions for posterity.
...Look, I'm pretty optimistic about America's geopolitical future, but this book sounds like standard pundit BS, and frankly the review should do a better job pointing it out.
The Ottoman empire "beginning its decline" in the 14th century, which is literally when it was founded? The Ayyubids and Mamluks apparently not qualifying as independent? (Neither was ruled by an Egyptian dynasty, but neither were the Ptolemys.) The assumption that the agricultural revolution made life "not suck"? (Industrialization was legitimately a massive rise in living standards; agriculture was... debatable, at best.)
River systems are very important historically, but my general impression has been that their importance has greatly declined in fractional terms. The first graphic I found shows multiple large interstates *each* transporting freight volumes comparable to the Mississippi. Certainly, Tulsa is not a seaport. The US does have defensible borders against any medium-term plausible rivals, but so does China; anyway, defensible borders and naval power may be somewhat less important in the age of ICBMs and space travel, though the textbooks of warfare are by their nature in a constant state of revision. And energy concerns are kind of massively diminished by renewable energy being economically favorable now.
The demographic problems faced by many developed countries, and the relative strength of the US there, are real. But "demographics is destiny" is bunk; demographics is the starting point of destiny, which policy then seeks to modify. Existential risk and/or singularity aside, European and East Asian leaders are fully aware of their demographic problems. Even Russia doesn't actually seem like it's collapsing next year, though I guess we'll see. Anyway, the American fertility advantage is due to immigration. Saying that the American housing market is somehow good for fertility is just ludicrously backwards.
Well, correction - looking things up, the American fertility advantage is basically pronounced in larger GenX and millennial cohorts, with current TFR being within the European range. Presumably Zeihan was referring to that time period, although it's not like America is the only country with postwar construction. Really I'd say it's religion, if anything.
Russia's demographic issues has in many ways been shunted off into a free flow of capital and labor between it and its former satellite republics. The Central Asian countries provide it with migrant labor, while its frustrated small but educated and skilled youth leave for greener pastures in Israel, Germany, Britain, and America, and its much less skilled youth have tended to take advantage of the socioeconomic power of the Russian minorities in the former satellite republics to look for chances to prosper there
But their biggest problem is failing to close the male-female life expectancy gap. Its over 10 years and has been for the last 25 years at least, even as life expectancy recovered after the collapse from the late 80s to the early 90s.
The political system, closed and sterile as it is, showed real life when there was an attempt to raise the pension age because of government revenue shortfalls after the oil price dropped. It was going to be raised to a level on par with life expectancy for men, and men were rather peeved by this.
These are all big problems, but nothing in them indicates a coming collapse as a state. The Russian state for reasons of necessity is an enormously powerful institution in most areas it controls and has been for multiple centuries. It isn't going anywhere. Now, it is true that there are areas where it is completely dysfunctional or where you have something akin to a third world existence, such as in the North Caucasus Republics or some deprived post-industrial areas on the far side of the Urals. However, the forces that were pushing Russia closer to dissolution when the Soviet Union broke up, most notably its constitutional structure and local elite power dynamics, are gone now and a more traditional pattern emerged soon after of personalistic rule backed by a strong, if not always capable, state.
Well...I don't know about Russia, but I am not sure what the reason will be for keeping Siberia as part of Russia if it's not valuable anymore (Oil etc.). After all, Siberia was not part of Russia until relatively recently...Also, the demographics of Russia show that non-Russian ethnicities are growing faster than Russians AFAIK, and I am not sure how well the Russians have integrated them into the mainstream society...
As for Germany, I am from there, and I think while Germany looks really stable and prosperous now, there are some serious problems in that country:
- Too much dependency on Exports (which many German economists like Stelter criticize), which leads to low domestic investments and possibly higher taxes.
- Demographics: Germany is aging fast, and while immigration is keeping the population at more or less the same level, or even providing growth (e.g. in 2015), immigration to Germany is not as beneficial as is the case in Canada, Switzerland, etc. This means that immigrants could become a net cost instead of net benefit to the social system. Of course this is mostly a political problem and thus solvable, though I don't see it being considered to be of much importance for German politicians...See e.g. the complains by the economist Stelter on immigration to Germany...
Climate Change - Overall, one would assume that Germany would benefit from Climate Change, but many recent summer have been quite dry in Germany, which causes problems for Agriculture etc. Also increased migration because of climate change...
Energy - Some of it is political (e.g. Nuclear Power and "Energiewende"), but some of it is the simple fact that Germany lacks natural resources and needs to import them...if Zeihan is right about the US becoming isolationist and ceasing to support its allies, then Germany will have lots of trouble with its weak military ...
Anyway, lastly Germany isn't really that old as an unified country, younger than the US, so it may break up again...same for Russia, which expanded a lot - more similar to the US - but then Moscow is very far from the Pacific, so there isn't that much holding the country together...
Esp. in the case of China, where they've purposefully limited productivity growth in order to keep their 800-million strong workforce employed. The US struggles to keep a workforce a quarter of that employed, and we're still technically the larger of the two economies. Simultaneously, China has been stocking up on all the tech that they will need to deploy to respond to a rapidly shrinking workforce; but no, there's no reason that the China of the 21st century will need 300 million people working in agriculture, when the US produces more food with fewer than 10 million.
Unlike Japan, whose labor pool is pretty much fully tapped by now (the biggest shift being the mass entry of women to the workplace over the last 20 years), China is nowhere near efficiently utilizing it's population.
My understanding is that children have always "failed" to pay for themselves, consuming more calories than they provide to their parents. Old people reduce the number of calories they consume as they get less productive. People had children for Darwinian reasons.
No, like I said old people would consume fewer calories over time so that they were always net positive even as they produced less. And they died sooner than now.
i looked at the article you linked above. It's a 2009 article citing a 1996 paper itself citing a source from the 1960s. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong but i mean data science has progressed a lot over time and a ton of things held for true 50 years ago have been upended since, so would have liked to see something more up to date.
Then it also makes some ridiculous assumptions in the calculations like "a parent who gave birth at age 20 and supported a child from age one to age 15 would receive a monetary rate of return of less than one percent on her investment if she retired at age 60 and was supported by the child until age 85 at the level of living that is normal for old people in peasant societies."
- where does 15 come from? kids in ag societies would start helping out from far far younger ages. Maybe not doing the most physical labor at first but hey someone has to feed the chickens & watch the goats, and if you didn't have free labor around to do these tasks your total calorie production could well be lower by a comparable amount to what the kid is consuming.
- the study assumes the entire return comes from after the parent retires at 60 until death at 85. Leaving aside that the age numbers seem really high, that's just not how things work. There are scale effects for one of having a larger family (same reason why today married couples can build wealth quicker by living together than single people could do apart) e.g. you can operate a larger farm with more diverse crops rather than a much smaller plot of land that a single man could handle on his own.
- children also have value as marriage currency to strengthen social ties with people around you that you may need to build alliances in. This is not just for nobles and kings.
btw. I do think that the equation for hunter gatherer societies is different, which is why i believe they didn't have as many kids, mothers only had a baby every 2-3 years etc.
You're right that it's unrealistic to assume parents are supported by their children when they retire at age 60: traditional peasants don't really retire.
In a society at the Malthusian margin, the price of labor is driven down to the minimum needed to reproduce itself at a constant population level. Acquiring additional labor is not really a problem. If the laborers were slaves, they wouldn't even be able to reproduce themselves (New World slavery, featuring "natural increase" was different from the classical type). They were typically acquired through military conquest, which meant you didn't have to pay to raise them (or compensate whoever did).
Hunter gatherers have fewer children because the same land area produces FAR more calories via farming. They can move around in order to get calories from a wider area, but that will also tend to slow down population growth.
If the younger generation of a tribe, taken as a whole, consistently failed to provide a positive return on investment to the entire tribe, then over time the tribe would become impoverished and cease to exist. That's not what we see. Except when we hit weird resource limits (e.g. Easter island perhaps), increasing population generally produces increasing wealth (even per capita), particularly under conditions like those we evolved in (e.g. 40,000 BC East Africa).
It may be that a nontrivial amount of the wealth (and investment) is distributed across nuclear family lines, meaning some of the wealth required to raise my children comes from your parents, and some of the wealth my children ultimately produce returns to you. That seems a priori likely, given how social a species we are, even in the absence of direct obvious mechanisms (e.g. Social Security taxes and old-age pensions). But that also means trying to evaluate the ROI for children within the strict boundaries of the nuclear family (and only two generations) might be a sterile exercise, not really reflective of what happens in the the real world.
I think we also have to be careful evaluating the calorie production one can reasonably attribute to old people -- of what value is a bank of wisdom acquired over 60 years? In the ordinary way, perhaps modest, but when semi-rare crisis arrives (a decadal drought, a rare encounter with a certain dangerous enemy) then that wisdom can mean the difference between survival and extinction of the whole tribe. But how would we measure the "calories produced" that we can trace to the banked wisdom of the elderly? That's as hard as estimating what fraction of the current GDP we can attribute to patents issued in the 1980s. I'd be surprised if anyone had a good solid handle on it.
In Darwinian terms, it can be a winning strategy to lay a bunch of eggs, die, and then be eaten by your own offspring*. There's no need for the younger generation to kick up any benefits to the older generation, instead they are a vehicle to pass genes down to yet another generation.
I picked an extreme example to make it obvious, but the Darwinian logic in any species which isn't immortal would involve parents prioritizing the survival of at least some offspring beyond their own lives. Any resource the parent consumes which isn't converted into raising the expected number of surviving offspring is thus a waste.
And currently we're dealing with a pandemic which hits old people especially hard. We can count the deaths, but I don't know of any way to measure the lost knowledge.
Geopolitical ambitions do not arise from need, they arise from ability. The US didn't start meddling in other countries at the turn of the 20th century because it suddenly needed to, it did because it could. As long as the US has the ability to be active abroad, it will be. This is true of most countries, but it is ESPECIALLY true of the US because of the moralistic strain that always runs through our conduct of foreign affairs.
"but it is ESPECIALLY true of the US because of the moralistic strain that always runs through our conduct of foreign affairs"
Solid agree, but geopolitical ambitions arise from will as well as ability. America had no will to be a superpower until the 1940s; Britain had one starting from the early nineteenth century, but lost it by the 1920s.
Did I miss the part where he explained why America would have no interest in maintaining free trade anymore? Sure maintaining a military does have significant costs, and the need to oppose the Soviets is no longer there, but the benefits of free trade are overwhelming. Free trade being good is one of the most commonly agreed on issues by economists as far as I know. America might do fine enough without free trade, but they do even better with free trade.
My other issue is that I feel like it ignores replacing rivers with trains as transportation. I don't know the exact cost comparison, but trains are a lot better than trucks for costs, and China and Europe love building trains. Surely that could alleviate their lack of rivers.
Free trade is one of those things that everyone values in the abstract, as long as it doesn't require any personal sacrifice. But when it's *your* job that's evaporating because some schmo in Malaysia can do it for 1/10 what you cost -- suddenly everybody becomes a mercantilism and we better stop exporting good jobs (like mine).
When the US and other developed countries sent all out manufacturing to China, etc, the economists all assured us that this would improve global efficiency, and create new high-paying jobs for the former factory workers. But this did not happen. The elite in the US have reaped all the gains, and people who once had high-paying blue-collar jobs have lost their homes and are now driving an Uber and hoping to make minimum wage.
Protectionism may well result in a mild increase in the cost of goods but it provides many with jobs that they wouldn't otherwise have. The benefits are largely felt by the working class.
1. US Manufacturing output actually increased substantially over this era.
2. Not sure economists have been aligned on this or any other opinion, ever. I guess some economists may have said this.
3. Global efficiencies did materialize as represented by how affordable physical products became over this time, especially things which could be imported by Walmart (and later Amazon).
3. New and higher paying jobs were created in the US and other dynamic economies. Tens of millions of them. It might be fairer to say that those without the education or skills (or in some cases, mobility or drive), were unable to fill them. This of course just further drove up "elite" wages and capital returns as demand chased supply. The state seems to have responded by making income taxes more progressive and increasing negative taxes and transfers to those not able to respond. Billions of human beings in China benefitted, the educated everywhere benefitted, and the less educated or intelligent gained partially in lower taxes and higher transfers. A billion plus person win/win/win?
4. By elite, do you mean those with the education, capital, risk tolerance, drive and intelligence to capitalize on these tens of millions of opportunities? Looking at what happened in the US, the lower income earners shrank during this era, the middle income families shrank even more, and the upper income group (over $75k) skyrocketed from 16% to 39% over this era (1969 to 2009]. Considering the massive increase in immigration during this same era, and the unprecedented reduction in family size, the US seems to have sailed through the rise of China, especially compared to other developed nations.
5. It simply is not true that a significant percentage of even semi skilled labor is "hoping" for minimum wages. Unemployment has been very low, and plumbers and truck drivers can make great incomes compared to most of the world.
I certainly agree that those unable or unwilling to respond to economic dynamism, tended to be left behind. But I am not sure the results would have been better with protectionism. I can argue they would might have even been much worse, but counterfactuals are probably not something we can resolve.
China and especially Europe optimize their rail infrastructure for passengers not freight. US is actually a world leader in moving goods by rail. Which is one reason our passenger rail sucks - the system gives priority in its design and operations to freight.
I didn't read the book, but from reading the review I got the impression that it wasn't as if the US would abandon free trade. What would happen is that the US would abandon their World Police stance, and therefore free trade would be less free than before. This would be allowable because we spend $700 billion a year on defense (a significant cost on the "free" trade), and because the US would be significantly self sufficient. With all the food and energy we needed being supplied at home, there would be less need to trade with others for survival, and therefore we could afford to be picky about where we engaged and to what level.
I'm not sure I agree with the argument, but I could see the US becoming more protectionist and less interested in one-sided trade deals just because it is more generically free.
That point about US waterways is really odd - it looks like in the US, only about 13% of goods movement is by water, and 43% is by rail, while within Europe 41% of goods movement is by water and 11% by rail, and within Japan 36% is by water and only 6% by rail: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/
It may well be that the US has better water resources for moving goods. But that doesn't seem to be particularly relevant for how goods are *actually* moved in the different regions.
It would be interesting to see if Zeihan pushes for more us immigration. That's a definite advantage, our nationalism is explicitly built on the idea that anyone can come choose to be an American in a way ethnonationalist countries like Slovakia or Thailand can't match.
We can take 10 million Bangladeshis and turn them into Americans in 1-2 generations.
However, advocating for immigration would probably alienate the conservatives who he wants to read and buy his books.
Pfft. We don't even insist on Americans being American any more, and you're evil if you say we should. Try going into any public grade school, large corporate HR department, or Congressional caucus and saying something like "Whoever you are at home, we have certain American public ideals of thrift, enterprise, self-reliance, and liberty to which we believe you can and ought subscribe, even if your cultural background and/or personal inclination includes none of these."
The best that would happen to you is that you would be savagely denounced for your privilege and signed up for some diversity is our strength training.
But even if you don't subscribe to those, as long as you do it by yourself not hurting anyone we don't care. We don't have an Orthodox Americanness.
American Nazis, American communists, American anarchists, we have them all.
Don't want to be an entrepreneur?
Great. Most people don't want to do it.
Alexander wrote a great thing about universal values. The values that naturally arise when lots of diverse people have to live together.
Your mom may be a hard core Hindu fundamentalist who rails against the slaughter of American cows. But chances are that you'll end up eating beef.
We can say that it's a salad bowl not melting pot, that doesn't reduce its power.
That's why I don't take that much umbrage to the whole... "There are immigrants who believe different things! And we can't say it is wrong because that would be offensive!"
The rough edges will sand off, we'll absorb them and in 40 years people will have very heated conversations about how Angolans or Kazakhs are the wrong kind of immigrant.
A very sunny view, and I sure hope you're right. But there are places -- e.g. South Africa comes to mind, or Pakistan, the Middle East, or some places in the former USSR -- where the rough edges show no signs of being sanded off after decades, indeed they have produced only increasing tribal violence and dysfunction. What is the difference? Some have argued that it is American arrogance, so to speak, the quality Americans have historically had of insisting that certain core American values are objectively The Best and you had all better at least pay dutiful lip service to them, and if possible actually adopt them, at least in your public behavior.
That may be true, maybe it's a cultural choice -- one we are in the process of reconsidering to our ultimate regret -- or maybe you are right and there is some natural virus in American drinking water that promotes ultimate fusion on the essential values that contribute to social function, and those idiots in Chechnya and Lebanon should just drink some Budweiser and they'll get infected and figure out a way to live in peace while still having different religious rituals at Christmas.
Often, yes. I live in a high immigration destination (Southern California), and have encountered many of these. Often I've wished we had some kind of trade program, wherein we'd accept N immigrants from country X if we could deport to them N native-born Americans who don't really deserve their birthright.
Hmm. Total fertility rate in 2018 was 1.69 children/woman/lifetime in China -- and 1.73 in the United States. If any shocking reversal in the relative economic first derivatives of China and the US is going to happen, based on demographics, it better happen quick, because in the second half of this century US demographics aren't going to be super different from China's or Japan's or Italy's -- we're on the same path, just a decade or so behind.
For a human being? I guess. Doesn't seem that long to me, but then I can recall 20 and 40 years ago with ease. For a country, or in terms of vast shifts in economic saliency on the world stage, it's an eyeblink.
Nope. I'm disputing your characterization of the relevant time scale as the time scale for an 18-year-old heading to college, to whom "four years from now" seems like forever. Short of a major war, I can't think of any change to the international order of nations that happened as fast as 20 years. Can you?
The collapse of the Soviet Union? I guess you could say that was a slow burn that played out over 20 years, but it seems like the rest of the world took the Soviets pretty seriously up until the end.
Also, the Great Depression? I guess that didn't change the international order so much (though it's not a strong area of history for me) but it certainly upended life for a lot of people and led to pretty dramatic changes within countries, not all of which were good.
I dunno, 20-25 years seems like plenty of time for a prosperous society to fracture. If the US is the last or second to last major power standing, maybe things develop in a similar way as post-WWII.
Well, let me suggest that if 20-25 years *were* plenty of time for a prosperous society to collapse and the international order to shift, it would be easy to call to mind a dozen examples, even with a cursory knowledge of history. But it's not. You have to think hard to come up with even a semi-plausible candidate. And it's easy-peasy to think of shifts -- the decline of the Spanish, the rise (and fall) of the British Empire, the rise and fall of the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottomans, and so on -- that took a generation or two. History is thickly scattered with them. So that's the norm.
Maybe I'm completely wrong about how many people _want_ to immigrate to China, but the US has the ability to fix it's demographics issues at literally any time by just being less stupid about immigration. And as the review pointed out, the US is _unusually_ good at assimilating immigrants, for reasons which I don't pretend to understand, but appear to be consistent across quite a large time scale.
Yes, I'm aware of the theory. But it rests on the untested (and inherently dubious) assumption that if we were to suddenly import half the next generation of Americans from Nigeria or Somalia or some other high-birth rate polity we would end up with a bigger America, instead of recreating vast patches of hideously dysfunctional countries and cultures transplanted to North American soil.
Sure. Doesn't even come close to today's high birthrate locales. This is the same Europe that bestrode the world's economy and politics like a colossus. When Nigeria runs an empire On Which The Sun Doesn't Set, we can suspect them of functional social mythology at least as good as 19th century Great Britain.
Was the US getting most of its immigrants in the mid-late 19th century from Britain? I think of that as peak immigration for eastern and southern Europe.
Also, on average, I don't think people leaving a dysfunctional society are going to be too keen on recreating it in their new home.
I was probably thinking of the Irish or something, but undoubtably there *were* a lot of immigrants from the Empire at the time -- whether they were the single largest group doesn't seem especially important. But I do not think 19th century Germany or even Italy was in the same category of social dysfunction as sub-Saharan Africa is today (with a few bright spots bucking the trend of course).
Yes, I'm sure people leaving a dysfunctional society would very much like *not* to recreate it wherever they go. But I submit that most people are not experts on *why* where they came from was in trouble, and so their ability to *not* contribute to it in the new place is inherently limited. Should Muslim immigrants bring with them the hijab, clitorectomies, honor killings? You'd think they wouldn't want to, but the experience of France in this regard says alas often enough they do, or at least enough of them do that it's a problem. If you've only got a small stream, it's a soluble problem, but if you've created a whole lot of Marseilles and expecting them to be Palo Alto or Manhattan it may not be.
We don't know yet. Poland probably had Marie Curie's born in 1400 who amounted to nothing... because the circumstances weren't right for them to use their intellect.
Same thing with Volta... imagine him 100 years earlier or a hundred years later.
Who says? If Curie had been born in the 1400s the most likely thing is that she would've been a Paracelsus or Brand or any number of famous intellectuals of the late Middle Ages. We know of brilliant people going as far back as writing, and it's more likely we know of fewer because of the perishability of records over centuries and millenia than that they didn't exist or weren't successful in their day.
A) You are dramatically overstating how many immigrants we _need_ to take while B) simultaneously underestimating how many we can succesfully take.
We have successful immigrants from every one of the countries you mentioned. Nigerian immigrants are literally poster children for successful immigrant communities. And I guarantee you that whatever you are imagining for immigrant communities, it pales to the mass immigration we had from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and China. And those countries were pretty similar at the time to whatever "high birthrate" country you are imagining.
I *said* I was familiar with the theory, there really is no need to repeat its axioms. The repetition doesn't make the hypothesis any more convincing to me.
I'm not hypothesizing or repeating axioms. I'm stating historical and present facts. That you don't find them convincing is unrelated to their truth. You clearly have your own views that _aren't_ based in the facts. So I suppose you are correct that there isn't any point in continuing.
Well if you're basic point of view is whatever you think is historical fact and whatever I think is strange delusion, yes, that is not the basis for a useful conversation.
Nigerians are poster children for successful immigrant communities in the US, but they are also very highly selected (Nigerians who've immigrated to South Africa are regarded very differently). Refugees from Somalia are a very different story, and my understanding is that they have an even higher unemployment rate in Europe. There's a limit to the number of additional immigrants that can be taken in while retaining the same degree of selectivity.
a slightly different point on same theme is that while 100 years ago there were lots of unskilled jobs and hence quality of immigrants didn't matter so much as anyone could become gainfully employed and in due course integrate, today we really don't have a big unfilled gap for unskilled labor and the needs are elsewhere. Bringing in people but not being able to offer them decent jobs is a recipe for disaster down the road. If the US just sucks in all the brightest/best trained people from other countries that's a crummy thing to do and causes brain drain / contributes to keep developing countries down.
I'm not quite that bothered by "brain drain" because many such people would be under-utilized back home, and may be able to do more good for their countries by coming back after they've "made good" in a more functional country. The "IQ shredder" argument is a counter to that though.
Actually, according to the 2020 census results that were just released last month, China's current TFR is 1.3. It probably has been for some time, given the numbers we're seeing from the 2020 census.
U.S. demographics will be different from China's because of immigration, but they won't be hugely different. The American White population is already declining.
Not really convinced by that number. The higher number matches the trends over the last few years, but we'll see. The US number has also been on a steep decline since 2008, and I would have wondered whether *that* was a blip, but it's been going on for a solid 10 years now.
Sorry, that was garbled. I mean, I'm not convinced that lower number is here to stay. It may be. It may be the US number will rebound. Who knows? But the numbers are far closer than most people think. The idea that the US is a high-birth rate country is left over from the 20th century, when it was indisputably true.
also need to consider the huge sex imbalances in current chinese population due to rampant selection by parents back when they could only have one. Mathematically that's going to drive down the number of matches possible in the next generation and further depress birth rates.
I'm sure we could have a very functional human planet with 1 billion people on it, and also with 10 billion or even 100 billion (or 100 million). Each would have different sorts of standards in terms of how people lived, the jobs they did and how those interlocked, and the demographic structure that kept it stable.
However, we don't have the luxury of being able to call the ideal world into existence shazam. We have to get from where we are right now to...some place else, and it is the journey that ends up in exactly the right stopping place that is hard to envision (still harder to execute even for a tyrant, and triply harder to execute when it requires buy-in from 50% + 1 of people within 0.5 standard deviations of IQ 100). Demographic change is almost never actually planned, it just happens chaotically, with all kinds of unplanned side-effects -- the Chinese are the major obvious exception here, and *their* results should give us pause, as the real-world consequences departed nontrivially from what the planners envisioned in 1970.
Sure we could. We could all live like Pierson's puppeteers, in enormous arcologies, and leave 98% of the planet a vast parkland which we visit. The only reason 10 billion humans is "a lot" is because we like to spread out. But we don't *have* to. The mid-day population density of Manhattan is about 70,000 km^-2, and if we were all willing to live like that we could fit 100 billion people on 1.4 million km^2, which is an area a bit bigger than Mongolia and a bit smaller than Iran. That would leave 99.3% of the land area of the planet uninhabited.
Obviously this would require a pretty amazing level of cooperation, and efficiency in distributing calories and energy, but those are just the conditions on the social structure needed for it to work. There are other social conditions for any other number to work. One could make the argument that there is some "natural" number that is easiest for unmodified take 'em as they naturall are H. sapiens to achieve, but I would be hard-pressed to know what that number is, since observationally people live in places with incredibly huge variations in population density.
Assumes facts not in evidence. For example the fraction of US land in agricultural use has declined from 63% in 1949 to a bit over 50% today[1], while the population has roughly doubled, which means the land required to feed each person has declined by roughly 60%, and probably more because the US has exported increasingly large chunks of its agricultural produce (particularly to Asia) over that time.
Similarly, we consume *far* more fish (e.g. salmon) than could ever be produced by fishing wild populations, but we have fish farms, which practice intense cultivation in tiny spaces. (Not so good for the fish, and there are serious other environmental consequences to be managed, but the point is -- way less surface area is needed.) We could eat like Trantorians, nothing but yeast grown in enormous tanks underground.
I'm sure there's an ultimate carrying capacity, based on the absolute sheer minimum surface area of land or sea needed to produce the number of calories each human needs. But what it is, is quite unclear. We only know what surface area each of us demands given our current tastes and preferences, and our current technology, and how we choose to allocate our resources. That's no basis for any kind of ultimate carrying capacity argument.
Carl, where you lose me is that you seem to think the decline in fertility which I advocate and predict is unlikely. In fact it is obvious and unstoppable in the next some decades.
Without having read it, I wouldn't think the book cares about the fertility rates right now.
The predictions seem to have a time horizon of 20 years or so. How many people retire in that time is independent of the current fertility ratio. Even for the number of 20-year olds in 20 years, the fertility ratio is only a third of the story. It also matter how large the cohorts of fertile women are, and how much migration there is. Demographics are really slow. Present fertility rates won't change the demographics for the next 20 years.
That's why I said any changes better happen quick, before current fertility rates affect the population structure. But anyway after hearing about how fusion is Just Ten Years Away for the past 40 years, and in 1969 that there's be regular commercial service (on Pan Am!) to the Moon by 2000, and any number of pop sci dazzling predictions over the years that have been now quietly forgotten -- I forgot The Singularity -- isn't that supposed to be Any Day Now? -- color me deeply skeptical of *any* massive social shift predicted to lie suspiciously close to the canonical book buyer's "not so soon that I need to prepare now but soon enough to make me hope for the future" horizon, which seems for human beings to be roughly 10 years, sometimes 20.
I liked this one a lot! It's a really engaging topic and the reviewer went beyond just discussing the book to actually analyzing the claims and how they purportedly have borne out in the world post-publication. I suspect that it could have been more critical, based on what I'm seeing in other comments, but a great jumping off point for a good discussion is laudable in itself.
I guess it's not really relevant to his point, but I am highly skeptical about the defensive value of Egypt's deserts. Egypt has been conquered over and over again. I think their early success in that regard was just because they were a state with an army in a world that didn't have many of those yet.
I am also highly skeptical that natural defenses are what's keeping out marauding Canadians.
I took the idea to be that Egypt's deserts were great defensive value earlier in history, leading to it being one of the earliest and most powerful civilizations, but advancing naval technology and the rise of major powers on the Mediterranean rendered the deserts defensive value largely obsolete.
And the Romans are a great example of "had no navy" to "we damn well want a navy and are going to work hard to get one". It's not like there is a magical limit on which nations get to have navies and which don't, though bean points out there are reasons why there are so few naval powers.
Could it be that demand-side stimulus works better at times when there's a ton of accumulated capital but a shortage of good investment opportunities, like the U.S. right now or the U.S. in the 1930s/40s, but supply side stimulus works better the rest of the time? Seems obvious, but I feel like I've never heard this view articulated before. Or am I missing something?
Stimulating aggregate demand can be useful when nominally sticky prices/wages are the problem (normally it's the job of the central bank to deal with that). That's leaning against the wind of the business cycle. It's not a long-run strategy for growth.
The same aging of societies that Zeihan thinks will cause economic problems will also likely prevent new wars from breaking out; wars are a young man's game.
I had trouble finding academic papers to back this up; the correlation between modern peace and people living into old age seems obvious, although usually people explain the modern decline of wars, particularly in advanced/long living societies, other ways. (Nuclear peace, richer societies are more peaceful, democratic societies are more peaceful, trading ties lead to fewer wars, etc.)
This has been studied more regarding terrorism and civil wars, where there is strong evidence that more youth is correlated with more likelihood of both: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092795?seq=1
I find his predictions that China and Russia dissolve risible. Both have been states for very long times, though not under present governments. For example, how could Russia split? All the wealth and power is in the west, and there aren't any strong internal tensions. Even in the 90s when going through desovietization, the country stayed essentially solvent.
China devolution is a fantasy. China is 93% Han, and of the 7% who are minorities, maybe only a quarter of those have any semblance of a separatist movement - most of them are members of southern hill tribes who have never had any national identity and have been Han tributaries for a thousand years. The last 70 years of Chinese nationalist indoctrination have left a country of people so devoted to the idea of "one China" that Shanghai's urban cosmopolitan elites are as patriotic as any American midwestern redneck (even the ones who loathe the CCP tend to be against "splittism" and tend to admire the old Kuomintang leaders). Even if, somehow and for some reason, a few of the fringe territories like Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia did split off... their notable assets would be owned by a local Han minority, all logistic and financial links remaining to the Chinese core.
The situation of Warlordist China in the early 20th century was peculiar to the conditions of the time (pseudo-colonialism, the breakup of an imperial system, opportunistic generals, a country in which the population was mostly still isolated and feudal) and none of those conditions exist in the 2020s.
I'm afraid we're going to be stuck with the dragon breathing down our necks for a long time to come.
Many of the things here are relevant to my interests, and I even have some expertise on a few of them. I will say that I think his thoughts on freedom of the seas haven't faired very well, because China has been building a Navy that is almost exactly what they'd need in case Zeihan's theories came to pass. They've built a bunch of frigates, and a significant blue-water capability, including aircraft carriers. But this was already well underway by 2014, with Liaoning commissioning in 2012. I talk more about what's going on here: https://www.navalgazing.net/A-Brief-Overview-of-the-Chinese-Fleet
More broadly, I don't think he's using Bretton Woods correctly, as I've always heard that used to refer to the specific dollar-gold peg that lasted until the 70s when Nixon got rid of it. There's definitely a broader western alliance system that the US has backed since WWII, but Bretton Woods isn't really the right term for it.
I'm also less certain it's going away. This thesis brings to mind Halford Mackinder's thesis that the railroad would end sea power and shift geopolitics towards continental powers, which didn't really happen either. I'm definitely in agreement with him on the importance of maritime power and such (and the thing about why there are so few naval powers is spot-on) but I think that US interests will at least run to keeping the seas open. It's too deep in our institutions to easily stop.
I concur: Bretton Woods was 1945–71, from then to 2008 was the Washington Consensus. Possibly it's still that, but I'd rather prefer to say that currently there is nothing guiding the Western countries.
China is just going to keep ramping up it's naval building until it surpasses the US or the US decides to enter a naval arms race (shades of pre-WW1) or unless China suffers internal collapse before then (I'm waiting for the messy transition point from catch-up growth to developed state growth rates, for Japan this happened in 1991).
I don't agree with China actually having a goal of surpassing the US. All the evidence I have points to them aiming for a smaller but still substantial force, with for to six carriers and other ships in proportion.
China's been commissioning warships at such a furious rate that they actually now have more armed vessels than the US Navy, though they lack supercarriers, helicarriers, and the systems of our more advanced destroyers and frigates.
Though you're right in that I don't believe their aims are for a global blue water navy, but merely to have an utterly impenetrable coastline and the ability to project power in their near-abroad, as well as into the Pacific and Indian oceans in order to safeguard their interests.
I'm aware of the raw numbers, but a lot of those are FACs and corvettes, which don't really count. And I'd point out that while they may not have supercarriers, they're one of somewhere between four and six navies that have serious carrier capabilities. As for combat systems, they may not have something as good as Aegis, but it's not like they're stuck with stuff from the 70s either.
I do think they're going for blue-water capability. They're not explicitly going for more than the US, but they're going for a close second. The days of the PLAN as a purely coastal-defense force are well over a decade behind us.
I have a rather different take on the carrier/missile dynamic. I won't say that there's no way to take out a carrier with missiles, but they're a much harder target than you might think, and the 200 missiles listed is my estimate for what it would take to breach the defenses of a normal CVBG. It would simply bounce off the 3-carrier group described there.
Well, the fiction narrative assumes (mostly ?) supersonic, not subsonic cruise missiles like in your link, not sure how realistic it is for China to get 200-500 of them ?
This sounds rather like Germany's policy under Tirpitz of building a Risikoflotte (risk fleet): not enough to surpass the leading naval power, but enough that they can't defeat it without suffering substantial losses.
More seriously, I doubt it. That was not a particularly good piece of strategic thought (mostly because it was rather ex post facto) and China seems to be being smart about it. They want the ability to secure their trade if the US doesn't, or even if the US tries to stop them.
Yes all signs currently point towards China aiming to only about match the US's Pacific Fleet, not total US Navy.
I think though that the fundamentals will change by the time they reach that such that they will set their sights higher. They could have twice the economy of the US (by PPP) then and I don't see them becoming less nationalistic.
That's the 50 billion dollar plan you lay out when you know your boss isn't going to approve the 100 billion dollar plan. Then once you've achieved it, you can say hey, for only 50 billion more we can have real parity...
It arrived at well-below-replacement birthrates much earlier in the economic transformation (and at much lower levels of wealth) than those other countries, that's one place where the influence might have shown up.
Does the author of the book really neglect the importance of nuclear weapons? (Both in terms of nuclear peace/mutually assured destruction as a cause of peace, and also in terms of nuclear countries being effectively guaranteed by the rest of the world against too-significant instability so as to avoid the possibility of rebels of any nation getting their hands on nuclear weapons?)
That was my thought throughout as well. Like, is this an alternate history book where no one ever developed nuclear weapons technology? They change the calculus of total war too dramatically to ignore.
I third this motion. They are a game changer. The resumption of history posited following America's withdrawal from the globe would look a lot different than pre-WWII history. It would be a nuclear arms race. Proliferation would abound. 'Which countries have uranium deposits?' would become a really important question. There would be actual nuclear wars. These would have material effects on global climate. America would not be able to sit it out, secure behind the oceans.
In fairness: ICBMs are much harder than fusion bombs, which are much harder than fission bombs. America wouldn't be totally secure, but it would be a lot more so than, say, anything in the neighborhood of Iran.
Nuclear weapons aren't something you can develop overnight, and they are pretty tough to develop (specifically, test) without detection. They require a ridiculous amount of infrastructure to make work, and even more so if you want rockets rather than bombs. So you're not very likely to invade a nation and then discover that, oops! They had nukes, everyone dies.
In general, I tend to think the existence of nuclear weapons has about as much stabilizing effect as the entirety of the global US military presence. The current nuclear powers (plus a half dozen or so countries that could become nuclear powers in a year or two if it looked necessary) simply can't risk total war scenarios with one another. That both tends to keep conflicts regional/massively unequal (e.g. China v Taiwan rather than China v India) and keep nations at the negotiating table (I posit that in a non-nuclear world, Iran would have gone the way of Iraq by now).
That said, I feel like North Korea's antics have demonstrated thoroughly that "I have nuclear weapons, and I might be willing to use them" can keep a nation nominally viable even when its geography is heavily against it.
ICBMs aren't hard enough to have kept a nearly-autarkic North Korea from building them when they felt the need; if ICBMs are what a nation needs to be secure in the 2030s or 2040s, then pretty much all the minor industrial powers will have them. Or the United States will declare Pax Americana to the extent of bombing any factory we think is building ICBMs. Pick one.
All true enough in a world where America maintains a large and looming international presence. But this posits a world where America does not do that. If say, Iran and Saudi Arabia get into an open arms race with each other, who is stepping in to stop them? If it’s America, then the world described here hasn’t come to pass. But if not America, then who? And why does Saudi Arabia not develop nukes? Largely because they expect America to maintain order. In a world where that isn’t the case to not have nukes is to be almost helpless; so many nations would seek and acquire nukes - the taboo would be broken.
In a world where the US is not the global police, I could definitely see smaller scale wars popping up around the world. I'm thinking Bosnian War and not WWIII, probably not even a Vietnam. I doubt the major European powers start engaging in warfare again, at least with each other.
The book - or the review - seem to completely neglect the significance of other ressources - lithium, rare earths, uranium and copper comes to mind : are the US a significant producer for any of those ressources ? Because they are just as necessary as oil...
A new rare earth processing facility is going to be built in Ketchikan, AK that's using a newish technique to supposedly process rare earths with less pollution. Ketchikan has a deep water port, and there's also a significant rare earth deposit nearby that will potentially be mined in the near future. The company is planning two more processing plants in the future.
Well, this seems to contradict the book predictions, since the author asserts that the US will become more and more isolationist and project less power outside to secure ressources.
the US shale oil bubble seems to finally be coming to an end, at least when looked at through a financial markets lens. given shale wells have much higher rates of decline if rate of new capex into the space declines production will follow not long after. So not totally sold on the whole america will be energy independent forever thesis. Separately though, i saw Zeihan speak at a conference once and he also had some interesting ideas about where american politics was going. talked about increasing divisiveness, and how trump would be just the first (and relatively moderate by comparison) in a long line of more and more extremist leaders from both left and right. That was probably 3-3.5 years ago so have to say looking at how Biden presidency is starting off and general tone of politics today that he seems to be well on his way to getting this one right.
Interesting review of what appears to be a highly uneven book.
Let me offer a supplementary prediction about the US: What we have been witnessing for more than three decades is the gradual americanization of the US.
By that I mean that the US is gradually becoming more similar, both in social structure and in party-political culture, to other large, mainly immigrant, american countries; in particular Brazil (but also Argentina).
Gradual americanization is sort-of what you would expect in the longue durée, if geographical position in the world is destiny. Across time, the effects of different colonial legacies and other national peculiarities (such as the unique US combination of a devastating civil war coinciding with the abolition of slavery) are likely to become less salient.
You see the tendency toward americanization in the changing US social structure, with very large income inequalities (and parts of the interior looking like the third world), growth in gated communities (micro-welfare states), inner cities ruled partly by gangs (I lived in Berkeley for a year and a half during the 1990s, including during the Rodney King riots), etc. etc.
Cf. Bill Leiter's (Leiter Reports) recent observation that the high level of police violence in the US to some extent can be explained by the police working in an urban environment resembling Latin America more than Europe.
With regard to politics, you find loose-coalition-type parties with a strong presence of established families (the Bushes, the Clintons); their dominance once in a while being interrupted by populist caudillo-types (Trump resembles a light version of Peron more than European populists).
It fits, once you start to think of the US as "just another big american country" rather than a separate planet (which US people sometimes do).
This is not meant as a dystopian observation, by the way. Brazil and Argentina are great countries, but like that other big american country, they have their american problems....
What would drive this shift? That's a bit much to chew on in a comments section;-).
...But if I were to write a book from this perspective ("The americanization of the US" - a likely bestseller?) I would start by turning the question around. If geography is destiny (a perspective I have some sympathy with, if it is not overdone - cf. Zeihan's ideas), then the puzzle that needs explaining is why the US has not always been similar to other big, immigrant-dominated american countries. Or, given that the US started out different, why it has taken the US so long to converge toward the social and political structure of the others.
Then the second chapter would be to check the facts, to see if there is really a convergence going on. (Before explaining what would eventually "drive the shift", it is necessary to firmly establish if a shift in this direction is indeed taking place.) In addition to the indicators I mentioned above (which would have to be elaborated and empirically documented in detail), I would check an eventual tendency toward chronic budget deficits, loose monetary policy, lack of investment in infrastructure (including lack of necessary upgrades of existing infrastructure, e.g. the New York subway), less trust in elite politicians, more political cynicism in the general population, that sort of thing.
...Then there would be chapters discussing if there has always been similarities, but that they have tended not to be conceptualized as such. The semi-corrupt machine politics of US cities before the 1960s comes to mind, as well as class structure-theories.
Following this, there would be chapters baktracing a bit, conceding that there are some idiosyncracies of US history that apparently take a very long time to be washed out by the river of geo-social destiny. My favorite in this regard is not the folk theory of different selection of initial immigrants, but the fact that abolishing slavery in the US was linked to a horrible civil war. The long shadows of this US idiosyncracy is still very much felt in the US today, perhaps in particular in these woke days.
..Compare this historical idiosyncracy to Brazil, and just about everywhere else, where abolishing slavery was mainly a peaceful affair, and where the relationship between the "races" is not as infested, probably because of this. (Digression: as a European, I balk but is also in a strange way fascinated that people in the US use the word "race" in civilized company; the only one who used the r-word in my past was my now long-dead mother-in-law, and when she did everyone else at the family table looked acutely embarassed and frantically tried to talk about something else.)
Coming back to your question of "forces", which would be the last chapter. It would necessarily be speculative, since it is difficult to identify "forces" empirically. My boring answer is that there is likely to be a ton of them. Mono-causal theories are fun to play with, but here we most likely face a multi-causal set of factors that gradually drive the US towards becoming a "normal" big american country.
..Many years ago I thought I'd write a book based on this narrative, but then my kids wanted me to come out and play with them, and I had a deadline coming up for that tenure-track paper, and the telephone rang, and...
<i>If geography is destiny (a perspective I have some sympathy with, if it is not overdone - cf. Zeihan's ideas), then the puzzle that needs explaining is why the US has not always been similar to other big, immigrant-dominated american countries.</i>
Is America's geography really that similar to, say, Brazil's or Argentina's, though?
I would say: To a sufficient degree that the argument is worth pursuing.
The US tendencies toward the political and social structure of these countries (maybe Mexico should be added) is pretty easy to see, once you start looking in that direction. Although, as said above, they must be empirically mapped in a serious way before making strong claims.
That said, part of my interest in Brazil and Argentina is that there might be a broader tendency toward the social structure of these countries, tied to the effects/impacts of economic globalization. That's not a geography-based argument, but one (or rather, a bundle) of the multi-causal factors to explore to make sense of observed empirical trends.
I'm not doubting that America's social and political structures are becoming more like those of Latin America; I'm doubting that America's geography is sufficiently similar to explain the convergence.
It is obviously difficult to distinguish and disentangle the number of possible distal, intermediate, and proximate factors that may drive the observed empirical tendency/tendencies toward convergence. Again, I am not a monocausal social scientist.
It may theoretically be something wholly unrelated to the US being located in the Americas, grant you that. It may even be temporary coincidences (in which case we might expect some regression toward the mean to set in at some point, that will break the present trend.)
But then it might also in various ways be tied to the fact that the US is an American country, rather than an Australasian country, or European country, or pick-your-geographical-region-with-some-important-historical-communalities country.
Since this is the ACT, let me tell the story of the hypothesis US-developments-have-something-to-do-with-the-US-being-an-american-country, as one of changing priors.
When I went to live temporarily in Berkeley back in the days, my prior was that "the US is a big European country on the other side of the Atlantic". I had to adjust my prior pretty quick. (Even when living in Berkeley. Or perhaps precisely because I was living in Berkeley.)
Noticing the differences from Europe, and looking for an alternative prior, there were two readily at hand.
One was what I will label the prior held by (almost all?) US people, although not necessarily at a fully conscious level. That's the prior that the US is an exception among countries. It is The Shining City On The Hill. (What I perhaps a bit derogatory label The-US-is-a-planet prior.)
For various reasons, including not having been exposed to this prior from kindergarten onwards, I kept on looking for an intuitively more convincing prior.
And the other prior that readily presented itself, was/is that "hey the US is a big country in the Americas, there are other countries here as well, how about thinking if the differences I observe have something to do with that?" And that sort-of-clicked.
Since then, including after the Rodney King riots, that prior appears increasingly useful in interpreting US social and political developments during the 1990s till the present day.
But exactly how the ins and outs of this geographical fact manifests itself in the behaviour of the people living in the territory (and remember here that geography is far more than physical geography; there is a large field labelled cultural geography), including how it interacts with "forces" and "tendencies" that are unrelated to geographical place, is not something I have strong priors about.
...but that there is "something here", I regard as a fruitful prior.
In which case the puzzle that needs explaining, is not why the US is gradually becoming more similar to Latin America (that's the puzzle if you choose the-US-is-an-exception-among-countries prior), but rather why it has not become similar earlier.
He's a writer who lived in Berkeley in the early 90s, who has a similar thought process about geopolitics. He wrote about wars under the pseudonym Gary Brecher for a long time.
My comment was perhaps a bit off-tangent relative to the book review, but since Zeihan's book apparently is about the US' (lucky) geopolitical position in the world, I wanted to add my pet theory (dating back to my Berkeley days) of what the US really is, and where the country for better or worse is heading...
> “three routes a country can take to economic growth: consumption-led, export-led, and investment-led.”
Assuming investment means foreign direct investment then these are all really the same source: a rich market somewhere. The first is relatively rich domestic consumers, the second is relatively rich foreign consumers, the third is the first again but they are looking for a return.
If investment led means investing in your country's infrastructure, education, etc, then, yeah, that's actually actively doing something to improve productivity.
I'll also say that Zeihan makes a pretty strong prediction here that money for investment (capital) is going to dry up. In fact the exact opposite has happened: there is a huge glut of money now floating around desperately seeking any home that will give it a return. That's why interest rates are so low.
I've become increasingly convinced over the years that demographic pyramids no longer matter much. Technology doing away with the need to have people work; increasingly the larger problem is finding jobs for prime age workers.
I feel like there's an implicit prediction here of "no WWIII" since I'm pretty sure a nuclear exchange would mess with things. Is this accurate, or are there disclaimers about this?
"I’ve never understood why people find this idea persuasive. Most of us would consume all the things if we could. Economists’ models often start from the idea that we have unlimited demand for goods and services."
"If the desire to consume actually gave us growth, one supposes that the richest places would be those that wished for it the most. If you say no, it’s the ability to consume that gives the growth, then you’re almost there; the ability to consume is another way of saying that you have already produced value for the world (i.e., you’re a supply-sider too)."
This misunderstands the Keynes' position. The economy has a certain capacity, based around available labour, resources, fixed capital etc. But there is no automatic mechanism that ensures that this capacity is always utilised to its maximum amount. You can have amazing transport links, factories, and enterprises; but if unemployment is high, and business managers don't want to invest, then all this *potential* consumption simply won't happen.
Keynesianism, properly understood, is about overcoming the collective-action problems inherent in a complex, free-market economy. Non-Keynesian economics ignores this problem by assuming it cannot exist.
"Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions."
because marginal demand was greater/less than marginal supply :P
also, I appreciate the shout-out, anonymous Astral Codex Ten contributor :)
I did a review of the Accidental Superpower as well. (https://wearenotsaved.com/2020/07/04/books-i-finished-in-june/#sp) I was similarly impressed though I think Zeihan has some big blind spots. In particular he imagines that Russia will go down without ever using it's nukes. For example this quote from the book:
[Quote]
[Japan’s] first military target is likely to be Russia’s Sakhalin Island. It is just off the coast of Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island, putting it well within Japan’s naval and air force power projection range. It’s infrastructure was largely built by Japanese firms, that infrastructure terminates on the island’s southern tip, the Japanese have the technical skill to keep all of Sakhalin’s offshore energy production running, the Russians do not, and Japanese nationalists still fume that the Russians seized it from Japan in the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Securing Sakhalin would place just under 300,000 bpd of crude production and 3 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas production into Japan’s output column. Seizing Sakhalin will also permanently sever any chance of having positive relations with Moscow, but to be blunt, Moscow is five thousand miles away, so the consequences of breaking that relationship aren’t very high.
[End Quote]
My response in my review: "Wait… what? The consequences for pissing off Moscow aren’t very high?! As I said I loved this book, but Zeihan has either completely ruled out the use of nukes, which is something he never even mentions, let alone explains. Or he has a major blind spot on that issue. Certainly no reference to nuclear weapons appears in the index."
Like, I've seen people argue that Russia is forced by its geography to seek to invade lots of its neighbors, to build an in-depth defense system given the North European plain is a highway to its heartland.
Okay, 'could be. Certainly up to the WWII era of tanks and planes. But ICBMs makes in depth defense pretty irrelevant. Or am I missing something?
I’m a bit less confident that you but overall, yes. That said, German tanks rushing to take Moscow or Chinese ones rushing to Omsk would qualify as existential threats to Russia… I’m less familiar with the Russian geography on its eastern side. If they felt they could stop a Chinese invasion without using nukes, I guess they would go for that. But the in-depth defense was really about Germany launching a fast attack on Moscow. Russian ICBMs make that kind of attack suicidal for Germany (assuming they’d bother rearming and somehow decided that invading Russia was a great idea, which feels pretty unlikely in the first place).
If you're a nuke country invaded by another nuke country, and the invading country hasn't already led with nukes, would you want to use yours, knowing they would respond in kind? So far nuke countries haven't tested that scenario, but it's possible one might.
I think we’d use nukes. Maybe smaller “tactical” ones first, to give the attacking country a chance to withdraw and deescalate but we’d use them. “Perdu pour perdu”, we’d take our invader down with us.
> Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.”
The numbers may be impressive, but mostly in their implausibility. Who writes that China's and Germany's waterway networks have the same total length without having an alarm bell going off in their head?
That seems more realistic to me. It also checks out with Wikipedia's list of countries by waterways length which also gives different numbers for the US (40,230 kilometers) and France (8,501 kilometers). The Arab world is not a country, but I'd expect Iraq's 4,600 kilometers to be included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_waterways_length
Read charitably, maybe Zeihan's figures were limited to some special category of waterway (maybe those suitable for very large ships?). But considering other weird claims (like southern China having "ports, but no rivers"—the Pearl River Delta would like to have a word) I'm more inclined to believe Zeihan just didn't put much effort into verifying the geographic facts he uses in his grand narrative.
And the claim that Japan lacks water ways is pretty funny too. Yes, they don't have large rivers, but maybe that's because most of japanese territory is within 50km of the see ?
I didn't check the figures about how much waterway there is, but just on how much they're used. It looks like Japan and Europe ship far more goods domestically by water than the United States, while the United States mainly uses rail: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/
(That said, I assumed that the claim about southern China having "ports, but no rivers" was somehow saying that the Pearl River isn't particularly navigable for shipping beyond its delta - I have no idea whether or not that's actually true, but it's plausible to me.)
"“the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.”
That is a statement that makes you think. Specifically, it make you think that the Nile alone stretches more than 500 miles from the Delta to the Aswan Dam, and I'm pretty sure boats have navigated their way up and down it for the last five thousand years. Does Egypt not count as part of the Arab world? What does the writer mean by "navigable"?
I wonder if the term "temperate zone" isn't doing a lot of invisible work here; if what he means is that "the entirety of the Arab world has but 120 (miles of navigable temperate-zone rivers)".
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some special pleading was going on; my sources are greatly outdated (Mark Twain) but the Mississippi was a pain to navigate because of its constantly shifting course due to carving out the soft earth of the river banks along its course. It seems like the river system is still hugely important for US commerce, and that it is the responsibility of the US Army Corps of Engineers to maintain that state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River_System#Flooding
So the Mississippi system needs a lot of federal government intervention to keep it going, and there is no reason why states elsewhere shouldn't do the same for their own river systems, if the need is "get our products from site A to port B where they can be shipped off for export".
America does have a lot of natural advantages, much of which are because it was settled and developed much later than the rest of the world, as well as sheer size.
I haven't read all the comments so sorry if someone else addressed it but the demographic argument bugs me. Especially as its supposed interplay with savings/interest rates.
Japan is ahead of us (Europe and USA) in its aging and, granted, Europe will get older faster than the USA. Are Japan interest rates rocketing upwards as its elderly population start de-saving?
Nope. Their interest rates are still sub zero, significantly below US ones. And so is Europe for that matter.
Is this a nitpick? Maybe but it shows that its demographic/economic model is wrong.
The reviewer is clearly a supply sider and I'm a post-Keynesian/institutional economist so we're unlikely to see eye to eye on the most important motors of growth, past and present, but the failed prediction of rising Japanese interest rates should be enough to make us all cautious about Zeihan's sweeping predictions.
That said, as a non-US professional investor, I focus almost exclusively on investing in the US out of choice. And that's partly because of generational safety concerns (and rates of return available). So, you know, that ought to be some kind of Taleb-like support for Zeihan on my side... :)
There are more valuable commodities other than oil. Like rare earths.
I am very skeptical of these type of predictions. So many moving parts. Just looking purely at oil, that is already brutally difficult to predict in the long run. Almost nobody predicted the enormous shale oil production in North America, and how low they could bring costs. Full cycle break even costs of $25-45 per barrel! That stuff was unthinkable 10 years ago!
Although a lot of these oil fields are in decline. Only major field that has yet to peak is the Permian. This is a good source to play around with it, lots of data:
To add here, I think at $100 oil there are more oil reserves globally for the authors projections to not play out for at least another 50 years. Peak oil has a long long trail of dead bodies. The amount of shale oil around the planet is probably humongous. In China as well. The only issue is that a lot of it is in remoter areas. That is really the big advantage of especially Texas shale oil, it is surrounded by loads of infrastructure and water access. But if it really gets that scarce, they will find a way to get that out of the ground at $100-150 per barrel.
Did the author mention buying oil stocks? I can't think of a better investment if what he says will really play out. He must be loaded up on oil stocks. Especially the way they are still priced now.
Tight oil has never been profitable, since it seems to act as the marginal supplier.
And it's not clear whether the US "success" can be replicated elsewhere - there are so many positive factors there, that even another country adopting USA's mineral rights and financing seems to be unlikely to result in the same oil rush.
Permian shale producers are profitable at $25-50 oil. So at $100 oil these guys would be printing money. OXY is slightly better than break even at current prices, Pioneer will generate 20% profit margins, Diamondback 30% etc.
That is why oil is not at $100 anymore. And why oil is in backwardation currently. My guess is that at $100 oil there are enormous shale reserves in the US alone. At $55-60 WTI prices shale can slowly raise production for another decade or two at least.
I'm talking about the US tight oil industry in general, which has not had a *single* profitable quarter ever ! Even when oil was around $100/barrel circa 2005-2015 !!
Oil is not at $100 any more because the Saudis tried to snuff out the US tight oil by increasing production, unsuccessfully... so far.
I really don't see where those enormous tight oil (not shale = kerogen) reserves would come from, and since the best spots have been already played out, and since depletion rates are so high for tight oil, and since US tight oil producers have slowed down their drilling, I very much doubt that the US crude+condensates oil production is *ever* going to come back to those ~13 Mb/d levels from 2019-2020...
Based on this review and not having read the book, I'll cut it some slack in that it comes from 2014.
But oh dear, this reminds *so* much of Francis Fukayama's "The End of History", where nothing more was ever going to happen again because now we were all fat and happy and Western Liberal Democracy was the all-conquering model that was changing all of the nations of the earth.
There is a lot here that makes me go "He got it *nearly* right". I have to choke a bit reading such nuggets as blaming the fall of Egypt on "stagnation as the increasingly centralized government devoted more labor to monument building rather than technological progress, eventually being conquered by seafaring people seeking to rule the Mediterranean".
Uhhhhh... the entire Sea Peoples thing is something still argued over, initial presentation of them on Egyptian records were as a band of pirates rather than a united, unified population; they seem to have been comprised of several nations or origins; and as for "seeking to rule the Mediterranean", it's hard to say that they had that sort of end-goal in sight, rather than reacting to things like environmental pressure - think in the later Roman Empire, the waves of migrations by barbarian tribes that encroached on Roman territory, which were driven by those tribes being displaced themselves by others and forced out of their own territories. The Bronze Age Collapse is a complex matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
As for "America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low", well colour me surprised. America is the one that has the romantic notion of the open road, of the endless highways, of possibility because of the ease of packing up and moving elsewhere to follow dreams and find your fortune. Route 66 from East to West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUYf6cekMA - America is the car civilisation, the one that developed highways and brought the advanced concept to the rest of us.
Water transport is easy and reliable but slow, and could be tricky - see Mark Twain's accounts of learning to be a pilot on the Mississippi, which because it changed course of often, could be a different route from one trip to the other. Road and air travel took over from it - who is going to travel by boat from the East Coast to the West if they need to get there fast?
As to the idea that America will do fine because it can pull up the drawbridge and fend for itself, I think the recent pandemic and the disruption of supply chains showed how that works out.
I agree that the various competitors set up in past analyses as replacements for the USA have fallen (see the hysteria at times during the 80s about the threat of Japan, which is ironic in the face of this book's claim that "better technology makes you a winner" - Japan's lead in technology was what was going to make it the replacement superpower over the sclerotic US) and I don't think American hegemony is going to topple soon.
But on the other hand, I am sure the various empires also, at the height of their power and influence, also thought they could never fall because of all the advantages they possessed. 19th century Britain, at the height of its Empire, often looked at the USA without realising that it was looking upon not alone its competitor but its replacement; even post the Second World War Britain was still claiming a place in the world it no longer owned - see the above mentioned "The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, which concluded with the Americans intentionally and publicly humiliating the English and French".
As to the claims that America never bothered empire-building because it didn't need to, well, ask Hawaii and the Philippines about that.
I would expect that Mr. Zeihan moderated his opinions in the later books; the "look inside" on Amazon for his 2020 book shows that he still believes Geography Is King and still seems, on that glimpse, to imagine a USA withdrawn from the world behind its own borders but still the biggest, strongest, and safest. I don't know if he takes into account that the USA is also a consumer: https://www.bea.gov/index.php/news/2021/us-international-trade-goods-and-services-march-2021
His most recent book is about what will the rest of the world do, scrambling around for a new order when the USA pulls away. Well, this has happened before - the US became the big dog as a successor to previous collapses - and there's no reason it shouldn't happen again, with things smoothing out eventually. Granted, it will be a very bumpy period until that happens.
But already he has modified his opinions, it would seem, from 2014 "America will continue to be the boss of everywhere" to 2020 "Insular America will leave the rest of the world to its own devices". Has he considered "America itself will one day be replaced by a successor empire, and we should think about what that will mean"?
I once amused myself, inspired by an episode of ST:TNG, with starting a story about the publication of a book by a very third-rate historian that was a summation of "the glory of our empire" and a justification of why it had panned out the way it did that this particular rule was the inevitable outcome of history. The irony of the story would be that literally the day after this book, which forecast that "our glorious empire will continue like this forever and ever", First Contact with an alien civilisation, more advanced, would be made - and the old certainties would be turned on their heads due to the completely different cultural and social assumptions of the aliens (as well as their advanced tech).
I never got anywhere with the story, getting side-tracked by the worldbuilding to back it up (I now understand why the Romans had a goddess of hinges because once you start, you can't just stop at the great numinous cosmic forces, you can descend down through the levels to the most nit-picky level of details) but I am being reminded here of my over-confident historian by this review.
"Zeihan gives us a story of the Ottoman Empire entering a prolonged decline as deepwater navigation technologies took off in the fourteenth century. These technologies enabled the European powers (first Portugal and Spain, and then England) to capture increasing shares of trade with Asia, dropping prices in Europe and depriving the Ottomans of much of the income to which they had grown accustomed."
As for the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this is something that happened over a long time scale and there is apparently now a revisionist school that refutes the idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Decline_Thesis
Even if we go with the traditional account, it wasn't the 14th century that saw this happen, it wasn't until the 19th that there was talk of "the sick man", and looking forward to European powers carving up the empire between them, and even the economic decline attributed above to Portugal becoming a maritime power in South Asia doesn't seem to be so steep; the Ottoman Empire found new goods and new markets:
"The discovery of new maritime trade routes by Western European states allowed them to avoid the Ottoman trade monopoly. The Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 initiated a series of Ottoman-Portuguese naval wars in the Indian Ocean throughout the 16th century. Despite the growing European presence in the Indian Ocean, Ottoman trade with the east continued to flourish. Cairo, in particular, benefitted from the rise of Yemeni coffee as a popular consumer commodity. As coffeehouses appeared in cities and towns across the empire, Cairo developed into a major center for its trade, contributing to its continued prosperity throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century".
Zeihan claims that « the only successful across-ocean/continental-scope invasion in world history was pulled off by America, not against it. »
If you count "before it was America" there was a *devastatingly* successful trans-Atlantic invasion going the other direction, but that one was helped along quite dramatically by a quirk of epidemiology.
One of the things that surprised the author was Zeihan's description of America's role in WW2, but as far as I can tell, that belief - that once the US entered the war, the Allied victory was inevitable, absent some truly amazing screwups - was pretty common, especially among the better-educated elites. According to his history of the war, Churchill's first reaction to Pearl Harbor was to send a message of support and sympathy to FDR; his second reaction was to get a good night's sleep, since things were finally going his way, and he thought Germany's decision to declare war on the US was the worst it ever made.
Similarly, Isoroku Yamamoto, one of the Japanese navy's leading lights, repeatedly and consistently argued against the war; he was the architect of Pearl Harbor (as "the only way we might be able to win this"); his famous quote, in the form given on Wikipedia, was "I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years." America's industrial power was so overwhelming compared to its rivals that the main Axis hope was for a short war, gotten either by knocking Russia out swiftly or by destroying American sea power so decisively it was forced to make peace, but though both prospects were *possible*, neither was all that likely.
To make a *very* tenuous connection between this post and what is happening tonight (Eurovision grand final), one of the best comments I've seen on Tumblr:
"To quote my housemate's work chat: I am all over Malta like an Ottoman armada" 😁
The importance of navigable waterways surprises me, as I was under the impression they had become much less important. Why are the cities founded on the Mississippi River, such as St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans, in such decline if this waterway is so important to the economy? The same can be said about Mid-West cities placed along Great Lakes. And as (I think) someone below was getting at, The Jones Act demonstrates we don't value the potential of the coasts to serve as internal waterways. For instance, when the Colonial Pipeline was shut down recently, the alternative for shipping oil to the East Coast was by truck, not because shipping by water wouldn't be theoretically cheaper, but because the US doesn't legally allow it.
I don't understand the following: "(Due to extensive waterways) we get cheap transportation for 'Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars.'" The US ships Texas oil cheaply around its interior through man-made pipelines not waterways. I know less about shipping steel, peaches and cars, but it would be interesting to know the breakdown of how much is shipped by river vs rail or truck.
I don't doubt that a lot of commerce is still done by riverway, but as a percentage of internal shipping, how important is it?
According to Wikipedia "630 million tons of cargo valued at over $73 billion annually" move on the inland waterways of the United States. It also says "According to research by the Tennessee Valley Authority, this cargo moves at an average transportation savings of $10.67 per ton over the cost of shipping by alternative modes. This translates into over $7 billion annually in transportation savings to the economy of the United States."
I really hate to be the first one to bring something like this up, and I truly apologize if this is not a site where this sort of thing is allowed, but demographics? The US is not in such a fantastic position.
It is true that we have more young people per capita than some other first world and near-first nations. But they are, um, well, not traditional first world workers.
Something like half of Americans will be Hispanic or black. The working-age population will be even more than the population overall. These are not people who occupy the upper reaches of the world economy in power, prestige, or importance. Nor are nations that are gifted in these populations exceptional performers in either current production or growth. Within the US, some regions that are heavily Hispanic are doing well, but it is not the Hispanics who occupy these highly productive positions. Blacks and Hispanics are not heavily represented in the lower echelons of exceptionally profitable companies, so it is unlikely that they are the exploited workforce upon whom highly paid whites and Asians depend.
It is likely, though technically uncertain, that increasing blacks and Hispanics in STEM jobs will improve output, though there will be considerable ‘demand’ for capable ones. The American low tax, low regulation system may not be exceptionally stable when a sizable majority of the workforce cannot benefit from high-end jobs, and when the majority of eligible voters do not understand laissez faire arguments.
Politically, we have saw the instability of populace and elite disagreeing strenuously with the election of Trump and his attempt at governing. Currently, the new administration has been a boon to political-class blacks, it will likely continue to disappoint lower-wage workers. Is America not only more stable, but obviously and indisputably more stable than China? We have more experience with democracy and (small ‘r’) Republican government than China, but around half of Americans will not be from first world populations.
I’ll leave off with the fact that our meritocratic system is not under assault in our most non-Hawaiian diverse state, the meritocracy in California colleges is dead. Without the SAT, or a functionally identical test, we will not be able to funnel the brightest to positions where their intelligence has the most social utility. In a diverse society, where the majority cannot directly benefit from meritocracy, does it have much chance of returning?
Please don't: first-past-the-post is the worst system.
Or do, but ask people to then fill out a ballot using a near-ideal voting system* and let's see how the result of that compares with the FPTP result. (* my idea of near-ideal is score voting on a scale of 0 to 10 with an option to abstain on a per-candidate basis; you then compute the average of these scores, and the variance could help detect 'near ties'—candidates that are not clearly distinguishable statistically.)
Comparing to my own models, I think Zeihan focuses on the right things (i.e. demographics and geography), and gets the big picture largely right as a result. But a lot of the specific analysis seems wrong.
Probably the biggest issue is in overweighting the importance of geography in the economics of developed countries. Large capital investments in infrastructure (i.e. rail and road) can make most river transport obsolete; I'm pretty sure the Mississippi river system doesn't actually carry that large a fraction of US inland freight these days. However, the capital investment required for that infrastructure is *big*: the list of largest capital investment areas in the US these days is roughly (1) real estate (i.e. buildings), (2) power grid, (3) shale oil wells, (4) rail and roads, (5) data infrastructure, so rail and road is definitely on the short list of major capital sinks. For e.g. Africa, this poses a big problem: the transportation infrastructure needed to modernize would be extremely expensive, and they don't have the rivers to modernize without it. So inland geography is definitely important as a determinant of industrialization and connection to global trade *for poor countries*, but it matters less once a country has made the developmental jump. This is especially relevant to the predictions for China - I doubt that their inland geography will be that large a factor, since infrastructure investments will substitute for navigable rivers.
Ocean access remains a big deal even for developed countries - the post correctly points out the order-of-magnitude difference in transportation cost for ocean vs overland. But ports are another place where capital investment can largely substitute for natural geography, so long as a country borders an ocean at all. In fact these days, in the container-shipping era, large capital outlays are needed for efficient ports anyway; I doubt that dredging is enough of a relative cost increase to block most such projects.
The review also complains about Zeihan's invocations of demand-side reasoning, and I basically endorse those complaints. Demand-side problems, to the extent that they make sense to worry about at all, are short-term; the topic here is decidedly long-term. The loss of savings/investment as demographics invert is the right problem to focus on; that will turn into a relatively higher cost of capital. (And for political purposes, the increase in elderly people dependent on entitlements and the relative decrease of working people to pay for them is the right problem to focus on.)
Interestingly, I came across echoes of this book in the years following its release but never the book itself. For example, this article by the private security firm Stratfor covers much of the geopolitical arguments about why the US became as strong as it is, and even has a similar title ("The Inevitable Empire"):
I feel like these geopolitical tools + basic demographics + reading Guns Germs and Steel just about covers all the knowledge in The Accidental Superpower (or at least what's mentioned here in the review), albeit very chaotically. Zeihan does seem to organize it all in a "tell it like it is" manner and presents a general toolkit for long-term analysis of global politics. Kudos for the great review.
Yeah, it seems Zeihan really leaned on Friedman and his opinions for his work...though I understand it, if you study geopolitics, then this seems like the logical conclusion...
> Some will merely decline, as they have some capacity to address challenges (Brazil, India, Canada). Some will cope (UK, France, Peru, Philippines). A few will join the US as “masters of the chaos,” as they have favorable geographies and other advantages (Australia, Argentina, Angola, Turkey, Indonesia, Uzbekistan).
This is in nitpick territory, but why would Zeihan think Canada will merely decline? Off the top of my head, it seems to have many of the traits that Zeihan's model favours - most of Canada's key population centers are on navigable rivers (either the St. Lawrence or Frasier River) with a number of ports on either rivers, plus one in Prince George (connected via railroad to the rest of the continent). It also borders 3 oceans, and has large reserves of fresh water and minerals. Demographics are aging for sure but heavily propped up by immigration with less political backlash than the US.
"Then there’s something like the CNBC effect. Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions. Some people go so far as to say that it’s the same reason that Wall Street provides market research; the demand is there, so someone will sell it."
Because markets are anti-inductive, isn't it possible that these analyses would be meaningful if no one had published them?
I enjoy the fact that I'm reading this piece in the same year that Singapore granted the first regulatory approval for the sale of lab-grown meat (cellular agriculture), to be manufactured domestically. Just because we're nowhere near Drexler territory doesn't mean countries can't find a way to reduce the need to ship stuff from place to place. 2030 is close, but there is a *lot* of work going into developing more flexible and distributed manufacturing and recycling infrastructure over the next 20 years to improve sustainability, enable adaptation to a more diverse mix of chemical feedstocks and changing regulatory demands, and allow more frequent changing to the mix of products produced. Between synbio/fermentation, chemical recycling, electrification of transportation, movement towards renewable fuels, plant- and cell-based meats, and so on, countries by 2050 could, if they want, have much less dependence on the import of physical goods. Zeihan's transportation argument mostly relates to materials and consumable goods. I doubt the difference in transportation cost matters much for long-lasting capital goods, or at all for digital goods.
I suspect we're going to see a lot more local toll manufacturing and licensing/royalty business models where the people developing the IP still make as much as they do now, but the physical production happens much closer to the end use point. Not for everything, by any means. Lots of high-value goods really do require highly specialized production tools/infrastructure/materials/etc. But much more than ever before.
The summary part of this review seemed good, but the critical analysis part was rather lacking.
"I’ve never understood why people find this idea persuasive. Most of us would consume all the things if we could."... would we? Once our basic needs are fulfilled, additional things don't really increase our happiness; incentives for wanting (and working for) additional things need to come from culture - e.g. having a new car every year will make people admire you in some cultures, and will make people think you're tacky and foolish in others.
Trying to do long term geopolitical projections without any concept of HBD is a bit like trying to do long term astrophysical projections without any concept of atoms and fusion. He predictably exaggerates geography's direct effects to pick up the slack. I'll push back on some of those.
>"the only successful across-ocean/continental-scope invasion in world history was pulled off by America, not against it."
Only if you ignore the conquistadors, the colonization of Australia, and the scramble for Africa. Advantages in technological/human capital overcome geographical defense bonuses as often in real history as in Civ4.
>"all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000."
Quoting Encyclopedia Britannica: "China's water transport potential is great, but it is still far from being fully developed. Nonetheless, China has more than 75,000 miles (some 125,000 km) of navigable inland waterways, the most extensive system of any country in the world."
It is not explained why he counted only "temperate-zone rivers". Half of china is south of the temperate zone, and the southern half has more rivers. Seems like he arbitrarily excluded the most river-y part of China.
>Blaming Africa's underdevelopment on its lack of harbors
A cursory glance at satellite photos on google maps shows an abundance of natural harbors in the 1200km stretch of west africa between Dakar and Monrovia -- a much higher density of harbors than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and many of them connect to rivers that go inland. Yet all these countries have GDP per capita below $1000 versus the subsaharan africa average of $1600. And anyway, harbors are not hard to construct artificially by piling up rocks to block the waves.
>"Almost all of the countries along China’s oil import route are also oil importers. All already have more than enough naval power necessary to interdict supertankers that go somewhere they don’t wish them to."
None of the countries along the route from the Persian gulf to China have anywhere near the economic might of China at present. China could probably build a large navy quickly if needed, just like how the US 20x'd its navy in a few years during WWII.
>predicting that economic interdependence for resources will lead to wars
I think this is exactly backwards. Economic interdependence and trade means playing a lots of positive-sum games with lots of other countries and having a lot more to lose in the event that you piss off those countries. See Robert Wright's Nonzero etc. (OTOH maybe the dependence gives politicians some levers to pull if they want to provoke a war that they wouldn't otherwise have the popular support to initiate, such as the US blockade of Japanese oil imports forcing Japan to attack pearl harbor, flipping US public opinion overnight. But I think this sort of thing is probably far outweighed by the positive-sum games.)
> Predicting China will balkanize because of mumble mumble geography.
China is fortunate to be 92% ethnically han chinese. Thus any attempted breakaway along ethnic lines would be far too weak to succeed. If not along ethnic lines, it's not clear what rallying flag would unify the rebels. Most breakaways in the last 100 years have been along ethnic lines.
> Predicting that Angola and Uzbekistan will prosper more than China and Russia due to mumble mumble geography.
If Angola and Uzbekistan end up richer than Russia and China despite the huge IQ gaps, I will donate half my net worth to malaria prevention.
All the right pieces are here-- the argument of the book presented cogently, the case made for the author having it right, and the skepticism noted that people who make these kinds of claims tend to be hacks. A solid review; unfortunately I just don't find the topic to be that interesting and I have strong priors against analysis of this kind being useful (to me at least). Still, it was easy and enjoyable reading.
If rivers are so important, can't China just terraform itself to have better rivers? They surely have the industry, the huge workforce and the command economy to do it.
> compare his comment on Africa, which has 16,000 miles of coast, “but in reality it has only ten locations with bays of sufficient protective capacity to justify port construction” with one on Texas, which “alone has thirteen world-class deepwater ports, only half of which see significant use, and room for at least three times more”
Is he saying there are only four around the rest of Africa? Or that there are more than 10 ports around Africa, but only 10 are justified? Or are there multiple ports per "location" (and this doesn't apply to Texas)? Or...?
I can well believe the general point here is accurate - South Africa's coastline is in the region of 5x Texas' - but it feels like it's probably overselling it?
(This isn't necessarily a fault of the book, which may have included more detail, or of the review, which can't include everything.)
Number 1. struck me as well. I think the book's author is a victim of confirmation bias when it comes to the importance of geography for power and wealth - there were numerous examples given where geography helped, but no counterexamples seem to be addressed (China being one of the obvious ones).
Yes that's true...I am not to sure what to think about China TBH, maybe combine China Hawks and China Bulls?
If Zeihan’s predictions about 2030 are accurate, we should be starting to see them by now, 8 years into the 17 that he predicted. Frankly I’m not sure that I see them, and what I do see seem to be for reasons that aren’t what Zeihan predicted. The US is withdrawing somewhat militarily (particularly out of specific wars in the Middle East), but still only to a quite limited degree, with its overseas military bases still in full operation. Free trade too is basically operating the same as it was when the book came out, even if some groups in the US and other countries are against it.
I could give him more leniency if he were predicting further into the future, but his predictions expect this state of decay only 9 years from now. Perhaps there will be a rapid change, but we do not seem to be trending that way globally.
and Biden's "Buy American" isn't exactly good for globalization...
To add on, I think this review could’ve been more compelling if it had looked at the books claims about the future in this way. I do think the review was quite well-written otherwise, but it seems to have accepted Zeihan’s predictions too easily.
One of the things that I'm really cognizant of in terms of "predictors" is that they tend to be *right*, just not as fast as they would've thought. Ex. all of the Cyberpunk writers that we now are going "oh wait, these dudes actually were on to something" in terms of transhumanism and the connected world (as well as the critiques of capital led corporate states - can anyone say Amazon?) were writing in the 70s and 80s - and they were writing about the year 2000. Not the year 2020. I'd cut him some slack if significant pieces of the puzzle started to come into view over the next 9 years - even if the whole thing doesn't come to fruition.
We are however, with COVID and the Refugee Crisis seeing a *much* more fractured Europe - and while these aren't Immediate Symbols of the Apocalypse - Brexit was in fact a thing, and there are other nations that are getting in routine, very public fights with Brussels.
But a big piece of his argument is based on demographic pyramids. Those don't permit being off by 20 years. Like, yeah, he could be off by five. But even if the world does look like he predicted it would in 2030, at 2060, that sounds like a coincidence. The mechanisms he predicted didn't function.
Really solid point that didn't click for me until reading this comment, thanks.
>>Various articles in the popular media, speeches by policy-makers, and reports to Congress have stated that the United States graduates roughly 70,000 undergraduate engineers annually, whereas China graduates 600,000 and India 350,000. <<
https://issues.org/wadhwa-engineers-education/
The author thinks demographics is on our side? Does he understand HOW BIG China is? And how focused on education China families are?
Nearly ten times as many engineers as the US.
You're using a different definition of demographics than the author is.
I believe Zeihan is concerned with demand. I'm addressing production. Two sides of the same coin. Both reflect demographics.
Focus, not definition. I don't think Zeihan thinks that "demographics" *excludes* education, he just doesn't think it's as important.
The author's point is that those 600 thousand engineers are encumbered with supporting 600 MILLION elderly people (that's not supposed to be an exact figure). Now, look, does that prove what he wants it to prove? I'm not sure. But having this aging population does matter, and just pointing to the number of people graduating in China is confusing gross and net.
One engineer per thusand persons? Given the rapid advance of robotics, that should not be a problem.
Uh huh. Well, if industry does become divorced from human labor, that certainly will have a profound effect on everything. But productivity growth is slowing, not accelerating.
More so than many other professions, engineers are the type that (1) cannot be replaced by robots and (2) are required to design and maintain the robots. So I’m not sure robotics advance leading to lower demand for engineers is valid in the same way it is for cashiers or factory workers.
Why does this aging population matter? If a situation cannot continue it won’t, bad in this case by the expedient that people who expected to retire and live like kings for 30 years will live adequately for 20 years. Diminished expectations, but that’s all.
This is not something that can be predicted by demographics. Will the aged of your society accept that it’s time to walk out onto the ice floe? Or will they insist on bringing down gotterdamerung on their grandkids? Different societies will make different choices; culture is what matters here, not demography.
I think that it's possible you're right. But it's not obvious to me that you're completely right, and other societies (Japan!) have had growth halt for a generation as they swallow the demographic elephant.
The extent to which this matters depends on the extent to which advances and production are driven by a few genius engineers vs armies of grunt engineers.
I think this is an unresolved question, but I lean more to the few genius engineers side. Compare, eg, what Apple has been able to do vs Intel in CPU design.
This holds more generally. It matters less whether 5% or 35% of your population are in college than that the one in a million geniuses can make a mark without being crushed by “the system”.
Demographic pyramids provide some insights and have important impacts, but Zeihan always makes his predictions too specific. I don't think it's coincidence that he will probably have some predictions come true in 2060.
Brexit is on its own. No Eastern European country is going to leave for fear of Russia. Central and Northern Europe are locked in. Grumbling in Southern Europe isn’t going to affect much.
The covid crisis is exaggerated.
>Grumbling in Southern Europe isn’t going to affect much.
Sovereign debt in S Europe could be a humdinger though. The EU managed to navigate it's way through Greece's problems, but the other 3 PIGS are looking pretty bad too, Covid made that much worse. Italy in particular has a LOT of debt with French banks, that could bring the whole Euro project tumbling down. If the Euro fails, what then for the EU?
Shadowrun, the 1980's released pen and paper RPG about people turning into elves and dwarves and hacking computers... One of the first uses of cyberpunk, was set in 2021
Shadowrun is absolutely not one of the first examples of cyberpunk. And if you're looking for RPG antecedents for cyberpunk, there is, y'know, Cyberpunk 2020.
It came to mid since someone mentioned we passed the date of the change to weird fantasy stuff recently.
Shadowrun was a fun game. I love how they completely missed predicting the wireless revolution and smart phones in the original edition. No one ever gets the future right, Zeihan included.
"We are however, with COVID and the Refugee Crisis seeing a *much* more fractured Europe"
Are you sure? Or was it much more fractured during the debt crisis around 2010? I could argue for your position (Brexit did happen), but as easily for the opposite position.
I mean, the debt crisis is also an example - I forgot about the whole austerity/bailouts for Greece and Spain business - those sorts of spats are just becoming more prevalent over time.
While those spats certainly happened, those aren't the only thing that happened.
After the financial crisis the EU gained increased authorities in monetary handling as well as an emergency fund to help out countries in immediate financial trouble.
After this much time with the Covid crisis, the EU recently gained increased spending authorities and allowance to gather some what more funds from countries, at least at times. This was to help particularly afflicted countries as well as to pursue reduction of Oil and Coal usage. But this also mean they effectively gain more influence on general European policy as they can now spend for certain policies.
Basically at each crisis point rather then just fighting, they also compromised and strengthened the EU and it is thus increasingly starting to look like a small government Confederacy. The only real thing lacking is a more central army, and there are certainly those trying for that in the EU right now, some what helped by Russian belligerence.
As such it isn't clear if the EU isn't thus also becoming more capable of withstanding greater crisis to the benefit of its member countries.
I agree that there are these compromises and advancements, and that it is unclear in which general direction the EU is going.
I would add that the EU is still lacking a bit more than just an army. For example, there is no foreign policy at central level. For example, a central government usually can decide on foreign policy, and can sign international treaties. The EU can only do that if all members agree.
Fair enough, though there is one area that is an exception on the treaties, which is for trade agreements, so interestingly enough it was granted such a competency in one area of foreign policy.
Still you're right that the central policy is mostly missing as such, though one suspect another aspect of it might start appearing if you did have an army, it would need a policy of use after all.
Well for now that's speculation though, what hasn't happened so far, hasn't happened.
I think that there's a lot of room for him to be directionally right and off by 5 years and still basically amazingly right about everything. I'd say that the predictions being off so far are a yellow flag, not a red one.
Think off by 50-100 years, not 5.
The overseas troop deployment is currently less than 100,000 troops, the lowest it's been since around the Spanish-American War.
<i>If Zeihan’s predictions about 2030 are accurate, we should be starting to see them by now, 8 years into the 17 that he predicted.</i>
His Russian prediction has an eight-year timespan allotted to it:
"Its demographic decline is so steep, so far advanced, and so multivectored that for demographic reasons alone Russia is unlikely to survive as a state, and Russians are unlikely to survive as a people over the next couple of generations. Yet within Russia’s completely indefensible borders, it cannot possibly last even that long. Russia has at most eight years of relative strength to act. If it fails, it will have lost the capacity to man a military. To maintain a sizable missile fleet. To keep its roads and rail system in working order. To prevent its regional cities from collapsing. To monitor its frontier."
Perhaps somebody better-versed in Russian affairs than me can say whether the country really is on the verge of collapsing like this?
As an American who has lived in Russia for some years and speaks Russian, I know more than average about Russia, but don’t follow its economy, politics, or demographics especially carefully. For that, see Anatoly Karlin’s blog.
One should bear in mind that Russia does have structural economic and demographic problems, and that it has political problems insofar as the Russian government has too little rather too much effective authority within its own borders (reasonable presidential and ministerial decrees are routinely ignored outside the center), but also bear in mind that all of these problems are very much exaggerated in western news sources, which have predicted the last one hundred of zero Russian collapses.
Economy:
The Russian economy has mostly grown in the last 25 years, with some serious hiccups, the biggest being during 1998 sovereign default, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID epidemic:
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-growth-annual
In GDP terms, Russia has recovered somewhat from the shock of low oil prices in 2014, but not yet to its pre 2014 boom level:
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp
In relative terms, Russia is 11th largest economy in the world by GDP, between Canada and South Korea:
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
Which of course makes it rather poorer in per capita GDP. In PPP terms, it is around 50th in the world, and classified as a middle income country by the World Bank:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Demographics:
Russia has been shrinking in population for many years, but TFR has been increasing since around 2000, and is somewhere between 1.7 and 1.8 right now, which is below replacement, but not particularly bad by developed country standards:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033851/fertility-rate-russia-1840-2020/
Governance and society:
Life expectancy has gone up, murder and crime rates down, ease of doing business index has increased precipitously:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=RU
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=RU
https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/data/exploreeconomies/russia
I don’t know how to find metrics on it, but in my experience recent improvements in online bureaucracy (“gosuslugi”, that is, “stateservices”) and tax-collection have very much improved day-to-day dealings with the government.
TLDR; Russia has problems, but most things have been consistently improving over the last twenty years. Rather than collapse, I predict that Russia will just fumble along, maintaining its mediocre position, and never quite realizing its potential.
For those who are interested in data based analysis of Russia spiced with powerful takes, I recommend Anatoly Karlin’s blog, an index for which can be found here:
https://akarlin.com/archive/
He writes about many things, with Russia specific pieces being further down the list.
Great post.
Famous Russian economist Guriev cites a succinct description: "Russian economy is in a swamp, thus it can't fall off a cliff."
Nice post, thanks for sharing.
FWIW, Russia precipitous baby bust was the result of despair. On a scale hard to fathom in the West. You can look at life expectancy and ponder a bit about the human experience behind the chart to get a glimpse of what it must have felt like.
If Russia economy normalizes somewhat, even at lower level than previously, people will adapt, expectations will adjust and babies will start being made again.
As you said, 1.7/1.8 is basically not that bad.
Russia was recovering from the 90s in 00s. The economic growth correlates with TFR as well with some lag. It is not clear how Russia can return to growth in the increasing isolation. Further institutions' improvements are either stopped or trying to roll back. Both due to internal political pressure (the number of options is limited if you are a thief president). So most probably TFR will slide to 1.5 or even return to the late 90s level(1.2) in the next 10-15 years.
Well noted, the power of the government is quite limited. It is more a collaboration of like-minded (corrupt) actors who find the current system the most appealing with an extremely high concentration of diminishing resources around "Moscow" (mostly extended "cooperative Ozero"). The current system can slowly degrade for the next 20-30 years at least. Will it end in a similar perturbation to the early 90s is hard to say. But a significant change in trajectory requires at least 20-30 years of constant growth which is less likely.
Can you quantify the "increasing isolation" of Russia? The majority of Russia's diplomatic problems are with the US, which is relatively unimportant to Russia as a trading-partner. A serious break-down of trade between Russia and the EU would be a bigger problem. However, the USSR continued to export oil and gas to Europe during the hottest moments of the Cold War, and the current minor tit-for-tat sanctions with the EU seem to have had little effect on the Russian economy, so the risk here seems manageable.
To get a sense of the scale of the possible risk of isolation, consider Russian exports by country:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1002015/russia-leading-export-partners/#:~:text=Russia's%20leading%20five%20export%20partners,billion%20U.S.%20dollars%20in%202020
As you see, the US is one of many middling trading partners, while China is dominant, followed by the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany:
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/exports
One can argue, if you like, that dependence on trade with China is risky, but that's true of most countries.
Can you be more specific, and provide some evidence, concerning the halting or reversal of institutional improvements? I'm especially interested in evidence concerning concrete questions such as economy, industry, technology, infrastructure, health, and education, not nebulous issues concerning political preferences.
Tax-collection reform, for example, has been a major success, so far as I understand, and the man who led the reform, Mikhail Mishustin, has now replaced Medvedev as Prime Minister. As the PM’s office is responsible for economy, finance, health, and education, and Mishustin is widely seen as a technocrat, as opposed to Medvedev who was widely seen as a crony, the choice of Mishustin as PM seems like a signal for interest in further reform.
But it remains to be seen whether he’ll be effective as PM.
As for the trajectory, I gave evidence that along many axes it has been on average positive for the last twenty years, so you seem to want to argue not that a change of trajectory is needed, but that some radical reforms are necessary to maintain the current trajectory. I’d be interested in hearing such an argument, backed up by at least some kind of evidence.
For now, I repeat my modest prediction: Russia will continue to fumble along, slowly improving, with hiccups, as it has for the last twenty years. But as I have a lot of skin in the game, I am interested in considering serious arguments to the contrary.
Wars with Georgia and Ukraine, spy scandals in Czechia and Bulgaria, coup attempt in Montenegro, death of Poland delegation in Katyn and subsequent refuse of investigation, Dutch Boeing, Japan and Kuril islands dispute, constant alert of Baltic countries, mutual sanctions and visa problems with many countries - this is a way to isolation.
As for purely economic view, I think it's limited. It doesn't matter how much they earn overall if they can spend more on military and behave nastier. They see it as war, not as economy beauty contest. Historically and psychologically Russia is more averse to extreme scenarios rather than mediocre. For the last 20 years, in my observation (I'm Russian), it has been steadily declining culturally and technically, despite having some excellent results on IT side + they had money from oil to spend on some ineffective infrastructure. The poverty and disparity is growing very fast. Most and best of folks I worked with left the country for good.
It's probably not apocalyptical yet, but the trend is very much to famine, isolation, wars, dictatorship and North Korea.
Russian military actions have been relatively minor and predictable.
I'm familiar with this phenomenon of Russian inverse chauvinism: you don't live in the greatest country in the world, but you still want to feel special, so you pretend to live in the worst.
As far as I understand the sanctions pressure is estimated at 0.5-1.5% of Russia's GDP. Basically, there are two major points here: increased cost of capital and access to technology. These are mostly the long term capital investment related items and not immediately noticeable problems on GDP chart (though your themoscowtimes link shows stable GDP share decline after 2014). Plus for any Russian company, it is twice as hard to go abroad comparing to what it was 10 years ago.
When I speak about institutional reforms I mean mostly courts. They are too important in their corrupt state to do anything with them. But at the same time, you cannot substantially improve anything without them.
Mishustin probably is a much better admin than Putin's least ambitious and capable friend. Plus you are right he did a great job by diverting the 'rent' from state representatives to the state pocket (which is still redistributed between closest Putin's friends). The grey economy size didn't change though.
My point mostly is that slowly improving is something EU or US can afford. To survive in present borders in the long term Russia needs to run quite fast right now and it looks like it takes some 20 years break to dream about its very special mission.
Here also is a long review of the last twenty years, good and bad:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/08/19/long-read-russias-economy-under-putin-in-numbers-a66924
The first author, Ben Aris, is the chief editor of bne intellinews, which specializes economic and business news for Eastern European and other developing economies:
https://www.intellinews.com/
Ben Aris is well worth following, and periodically writes a number of popular articles on Russian economy:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/ben-aris
FWIW, the Moscow Times is a foreign owned and Putin-skeptical newspaper, aimed at Westerners visiting or living in Russia.
As I learn more about Russian history; it gets sadder and sadder.
It's like that sideshow bob bit of him stepping on rakes, for 1200 years.
They don't seem to get lucky breaks as often as the rest of the planet.
Isn't Lake Baikal the Hellmouth?
Pelevin wrote in one of his novels: The cosmic purpose of Russian civilization is the processing of solar energy into a people's grief
"In GDP terms, Russia has recovered somewhat from the shock of low oil prices in 2014"
You might mean lowER oil prices ?
Because 2014 was oil coming down from it's all time high, to what seems to be the "new normal", itself still much higher than what we were used to during the 2nd half of the 20th century (oil shocks excluded) :
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart
Not well-versed in Russian affairs, but this article goes over the military implications of Russian demographic issues: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-military-facing-looming-demography-crisis-177414
tldr; The number of available male recruits is expected to decrease by 20%, which might lead to a decrease in the number of active military men from 900 k to 720 k. As such a reduction is unlikely to inspire renewed invasions of the Grande Armée and the Wehrmacht, I hazard to suggest this will not lead to a collapse of the Russian state.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine coupled with *stares in everything about European energy* waves hello from 2022. Before the Middle East blows up or China notices the everything or we hit his 2024 deadline for capital shortages.
We'll see how that plays out, but right now we've got $5 gas in America so we can maybe kinda sorta ship oil overseas to heat British and German homes. And not nearly enough of them. So Fall and Winter will be breaking points somewhere.
Any chance the footnote links can be made to work?
that would be nice yes
I know it's a little old-fashioned but you can read the footnotes by scrolling to the bottom of the review.
I don't mean to be snarky - I'm used to things in blue being links, too.
I can't figure out how to do this, sorry.
Maybe surround all footnotes and references with square brackets, so one can ctrl-f to footnotes and back?
Open the post an additional time in another tab. Seek the scroll bar to the footnotes. Ctrl+tab between the two when necessary.
You almost got it, and you can fix it quite easily!
To link something on the same page, you need two elements - the link and the anchor.
As far as I can tell, your links are fine, but there's a problem with anchors.
Your code in the footnotes looks like this:
< a href=\"#sdfootnote8anc\">8</ a>
(added spacing so that code shows here)
Looks like you wanted to make an anchor, but made another link. Happens to the best of us.
What you want to do here, is to write:
< a name="#sdfootnote8anc>8</ a>
(don't forget to delete spacing in the tag).
Fix all the footnotes in such a manner and that will do the trick.
He talks up US internal maritime trade a lot, but isn't that not much of a thing anymore? I thought due to the Jones Act and the decline of the US merchant marine it is very limited these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabotage
Similarly, the US has lost a lot of manufacturing knowledge, so undoing outsourcing will be very difficult.
This was precisely my reaction. As of now we CANNOT build stuff the way China does. It will take 50 years to turn that around.
Tim Cook on why the iPhone is manufactured in China.
"China has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere, that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision and quality level that we like. The thing that most people focus on if they're a foreigner coming to China is the size of the market, and obviously it's the biggest market in the world in so many areas. But for us, the number one attraction is the quality of the people."
"There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is."
"The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."
"The vocational expertise is very very deep here, and I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational. Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. China called that right from the beginning."
https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-is-number-1-reason-we-make-iphones-in-china-its-not-what-you-think.html
Turning a room full of tooling engineers into multiple football fields. Keep that image in mind when you imagine competing with Chinese manufacturing.
Not to mention in terms of economic complexity - the highest-order industrial outputs are only capable of being made in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. The United States hasn't *lost* any of these intersections - it's just that at this point, the capital cost is already spent at Foxconn.
To give an example - Toyota plants and Ford plants are both in the US, and we produce more steel and aluminum than we did in 1970.
The fact is either that capital resources have been expended in China that cannot be easily shifted - or that the labor cost is cheaper. There's no story that says China is uniquely capable of doing advanced manufacturing.
Except the one that Tim Cook mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Complexity_Index#Country_rankings
Intel and GlobalFoundries are *both* in the United States, TSMC is in Taiwan with heavy US presence/support. So when it comes to Semiconductors, the USA is well ahead of China. There are many other advanced industries in which this is the case.
The "advanced manufacturing" as a sector story is a just-so story about a specific product in which Apple, Inc invested significant capital resources into developing the capabilities in China over many years. Probably because of cheap labor, Tim Cook is trying to explain his use of Foxconn factories that have to install suicide nets in this way to make himself look better.
Culture war discussion ban kicks in here. US universities (I'm UK, same happening here) are more keen about advancing 'elite signalling agendas'. The West has become sclerotic, to borrow a word from Ross Douthat
That is the reverse of what's happening. Humanities are being squeezed in favor of STEM in the United States.
What makes it worse is the basic hollowing out of universities as teaching and research institutions into becoming adult finishing schools.
This is a goof article on this. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/why-state-universities-have-no-other-choice-but-to-reopen/615565/
Given the way Humanities departments have comported themselves over the past 60 years, the claim of your article would be freaking fantastic — if it were true.
Of course it isn’t. The most that can be said is that # of Humanities students is flat, while STEM grows. If you include many professional schools (eg Law, Journalism, ever more Social “Science”) in the Humanities camp even that weak statement isn’t true.
Engineering is “hard” and “boring”. You need football fields of willing trainees first.
We have plenty of football fields of engineers. They just get pulled in other directions--to software and computer engineering mostly, instead of "tooling", because the pay is better here.
"Tooling engineers" are fungible with other engineers the way "office managers" are fungible with other managers. It's a highly skilled trade, generally practiced by tradesmen (yes, gendered) with a trade-school or associates-degree education. We can puff up the title by adding the E-word, and we can maybe normalize a bachelor's degree, but that won't hide the grease stains.
We need football stadiums of good tool & die makers. We aren't losing them when our engineering students are pulled into the wrong kind of engineering. We're losing them when our high school guidance counselors, etc, tell them they're too good to be greasy tradesmen.
Americans are increasingly taught that the only jobs worth aspiring to are ones where you sit at a desk and tell other people what to do. Like non-tooling engineers, sitting at a desk telling other people what to build. So for all the stuff that we need to actually get done or built, we increasingly need to depend on not-Americans. Possibly including recent immigrants; I understand that most of the actual toolmakers we still have are from Eastern Europe.
China and India have billion+ populations. The pool of people in both countries capable of being trained for highly skilled labor is 3-4x what it is in the US.
It's debatable whether the US is maxing out its production of STEM human capital. I think there's room for improvement, but the incentives are there in terms of compensation compared to other countries for technical work. When I was in college there was a fair amount of weed out at the 100 and 200 level classes, so if anything STEM pipelines are initially oversubscribed.
India and China together have a talent pool about 8x what the US has. It's basically impossible to beef up the educational system here to overcome the numbers. The educational system isn't able to impart aptitude that isn't there.
One billion Americans?
You need several football fields of employers to have several football fields of people with practical expertise. It doesn't matter how many people graduate with engineering degrees, if they don't get jobs that teach them the actual practical issues in a particular specialized line of work. Apparently right now, most of those jobs are in China?
But I suppose 30 years ago that was not the case, so there's no particular reason to think this couldn't change over the next 30 years (possibly shifting to Africa, as the one part of the world with the cheap labor to bring the first companies, and the properly shaped demographic pyramid to sustain the growth).
You’ve started good but then moved into Africa and “cheap labour” but that’s the opposite of what Tim Cook was arguing. If it was just free labour then Africa would have the factories now. Clearly demographic growth isn’t enough.
China became this way because of heavy US subsidization schemes and massive amounts of capital investment. I would not be shocked if one of the more stable African countries starts to go this way over time. China itself is starting to see problems with increases in standard of living reducing it's ability to compete as an export-focused economy.
A very interesting observation, thanks.
Those jobs aren't coming back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html
I’m still awed by the effectiveness of Google search.
I thought the article would be relevant but I read it 7 years ago. I did a search on ‘biscuit tea iPhones NYT’.
It was the first result.
New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
After I read the article I told my employer that I wasn’t writing any more code till a got a biscuit. An hour later I came back from the restroom and I had one on my desk. She even warned it up in the microwave. Pretty funny stuff.
Compared to what? The alternative is not your life in America, it is life on the farm.
You only get the American alternative once you are wealthy enough, and you only get wealthy enough via an intermediate stage of this sort of hard work.
It’s not slave labor, get over yourself! It’s better than life 50 years ago and vastly better than life 500 years ago.
Marxist wannabe’s would do well to read what Marx actually wrote about the alternatives of what the bourgeoisie offered vs medieval life.
Oops. 9 years ago
But see this: https://nautil.us/issue/100/outsiders/the-profound-potential-of-elon-musks-new-rocket?mc_cid=6fdadb8dfb&mc_eid=0897ed67fb
a pretty clear statement of our ability (and the failure of political bureaucracy). I am aware of several companies in the midwest that the Chinese are actively learning from and it they apparantly are still "seeking knowledge" in other ways.
Not only have we forgotten how to make things, we have forgotten how to make the things that make the things, a generation or more of tool makers, steamfitters, die grinders, boilermakers, metal fabricators, industrial electricians, welders, etc., all left to rot.
These are not skills that one can just pick up after a few days on the job.
yeah thought the same. the review cites Zeihan comparing cost of moving a container by sea vs. road, but surely on a river with much smaller tonnage vessels and a much more circuitous route (e.g. before railroads / the Erie canal people used to ship stuff from Chicago to New York by water via New Orleans, all the way round Florida and then up the coast again)
the advantage dissipates?
Yeah it would eventually, but 0.17 vs 2.40 means the water route has to be roughly 14 times as long.
well, i also made another point which is you are not going to be moving down the ohio on a valemax, and that combined with shorter distances and more port stops/costs means your $ per mile figure is going to go up a lot. Conversely trucking could eventually become significantly cheaper once self-driving tech comes into the picture.
Presumably those figures are actual cost of shipped goods per mile.
I don't think self-driving tech will make trucking much cheaper. If it did, this would mean that paying the driver is a major component of the current cost, and I just don't think that's the case.
Trucking (at least in the US and Canada) currently appears to be limited by the number of people willing to do the job for the wage that it pays. Its big advantage is that most stores are not located in a port, so you have to change mode to get cargo to the point where retail happens. Not sure if Amazon has any warehouses in ports yet...
so if you look at this link you'll see that driver wages come out to about 43% of the total. But that's not all, shifting to self-driving would also: 1) greatly increase utilization of your truck assets as the things don't need rest breaks (15% of costs today) 2) reduce insurance costs due to lower accident rate (5% of costs today) 3) impact fuel consumption and tire wear (26% of costs today) from smoother driving style and ability to latch trucks into close-driving convoys (less wind drag). It can impact almost everything in the cost base, and the impact will be very significant. Of course won't be so in the beginning cause you need to pay for the new tech + find solutions to other issues (vandalism, who's gonna change that blown tire if you have no driver, etc.)
https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-us/blog/post/want-optimize-your-fleet-know-your-average-trucking-cost-mile/ forgot to paste the link
The wages part of that article seems OK - 100k miles/year is 60 mph x 40 hours/week x just under 42 weeks. Assume that a driver doesn't spend all his work time on the highway and it's reasonable.
Rest breaks - agree. Reduce insurance costs - depends on how the legal system treats them. Impact fuel consumption - probably. Impact tire wear? Not sure about that - I assume that most drivers aren't currently drag racing.
Truck convoys? There were lots of fights over increasing trailer length to 53' and as far as I know there are a number of jurisdictions that still don't allow double trailers (or place total length restrictions so that you don't have two 53' trailers).
I don't think they are actually practical to put on the same road as human drivers. Yes, the reflexes will be better, but they would be using the same tires and brakes, so stopping distance wouldn't be that much better.
From this: https://www.stephanpeskin.com/ny-truck-accidents/driving-a-truck-safely/#:~:text=At%2055%20MPH%20a%20truck,3%2F4%20of%20a%20second.&text=At%2055%20MPH%20on%20dry,have%20traveled%20about%20512%20feet.
The stopping time of a truck on dry pavement at 55mph is about 4 seconds. The reaction time of a (somewhat) sleepy driver can be up to about 3.5 seconds. If you assume zero processing time for the self-driving truck you're still not going to get better than 4 seconds on dry pavement. A convoy would be much worse.
I think there would be a lot of things to sort out about security and maintenance with a self-driving fleet. When I didn't work from home I used to see fresh truck tire remains on the road every couple of weeks on my commute.
Just on priors, I think it would be quite surprising if both parts of this are true. That is, if it's the case that both
1. Paying the driver is not a major part of the cost;
2. And, trucking is bottlenecked on the number of drivers willing to do it for the wage;
Then why not raise the wage, which would widen a bottleneck at only a small cost increase?
I think that would depend on how elastic the supply of truck drivers is - what are the training/bonding/etc. requirements to be a trucker? What's the length of the pipeline? Of course that affects the wage to some degree.
One also expects that the advantage of riverine transport dissipates as trade shifts increasingly to services or information rather than physical goods. Is this discussed?
I lived for a few years on the 21st floor of a Northside of Chicago building overlooking Lake Michigan. In all that time I only saw one freighter go by headed toward the port on the Illinois-Indiana border. I got the impression that Great Lakes shipping wasn't as bustling as I'd expected from the "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald."
That's not to say that navigation wasn't important in the past -- e.g., Chicago is a great city because it's near the portage connecting the St. Lawrence and Mississippi watersheds. But by the 1980s, internal shipping seemed less overwhelming.
The stylized fact I had always heard is that in the United States, goods move by steel wheels on rail, while people move by rubber tires on asphalt, while in Europe, people move by steel wheels on rail, while goods move by a combination of rubber tires on asphalt and internal waterways.
When I look up details I see that it's not quite like that - but in Europe, 41% of goods shipment is by water and 11% by rail, while in the United States, it's 43% by rail and 13% by water (see Table 2 here: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/ - I suspect this is by ton-mile rather than just by ton, because trucks dominate by ton (since everything is on a truck at least once) but rail and water give the distance)
The large destinations in Europe are on water because they've been around long enough for that to be why they exist in the first place. In the States there are (at least) medium-size cities that grew up around railroads.
Here's another in-depth review of the book: https://www.militantfuturist.com/the-accidental-superpower-and-my-volcanic-epiphany/
Excerpt:
'The author predicts that, once the U.S. becomes a net energy exporter, the infamous trade deficit with countries like China and Japan will shrink to the point that the U.S. could cut itself off from them at minimal economic cost. Advances in 3D printing (particularly metal printing) will also allow the U.S. to make its own goods instead of relying on foreign factories. Lacking any interest in affairs outside North America, the U.S. will withdraw from its military and trade alliances, bring all of its troops and ships home, and let high-seas pirates and undemocratic regional powers like Iran fill the vacuum.
Problematically, trends over the last five years since The Accidental Superpower‘s publishing haven’t gone the way the author predicted, which suggests the U.S. isn’t on track to being able to economically detach itself from the rest of the world. For example, even though the U.S. became the world’s #1 natural gas producer in 2013 and its #1 oil producer in 2018 and is now breaking all-time export records for both, the country's trade deficit has gotten WORSE over that period.
Moreover, 3D printers have not improved to the extent that the author seems to have predicted, nor are they starting to replace traditional manufacturing machines (e.g. – looms, presses, lathes) in factories that mass produce goods. Furthermore, there’s no indication that this will change anytime soon. Looking back, it’s clear now that the author wrote the book during a period of hype about 3D printers, and that rosy predictions in pop-sci articles and financial magazines about how the machines were poised to revolutionize the manufacturing industry probably influenced his thinking.'
Qatar and Saudi Arabia can't afford to cut themselves off from China, either.
3d printing seems like a technology where we are still a decade before the big inflection point and now it's just accumulating niches before the big takeoff. Like the computer mouse was invented in 1963 and someone in 1975 would be forgiven for thinking it wasn't important.
3D printing will always remain a niche. What enthusiasts don't understand about modern materials is that they are effectively engineered down to the atomic level. You can't do that with any imaginable printer, the printer introduces a level of chaos at a micrometer level that essentially cuts off what you may have achieved at the nanometer level from the macroscopic level, it's like a firebreak or moat. So when you need something made of the best steel (like a ship propellor or surgical instrument), or the best composite (like an F-22 wing), you're going to go with the manufacturing that can make use of these materials without perturbing their qualities on any length scale short of the macroscopic.
Thanks.
Why don't you predict that 3d printing will resolve these issues?
We are now doing adequate 3d prints of metal that weren't possible 5 years ago.
There are also plenty of really important things that are built using ordinary-components.
Atomic scale 3D printers already exist, though they are super slow and super expensive right now.
>3D printing will always remain a niche
I think the niche is custom production. Do you need a medical device that must be precisely contoured to one body? 3D printing.
Do you need a cell phone? Conventional manufacturing techniques.
If you plan to make one million identical objects, 3D printing is not the way to go.
Your argument seems a bit inconsistent with GE #D printing jet engine components: https://www.ge.com/additive/stories/3d-printed-jet-engine-meet-team-young-engineers-brought-3d-printing-inside-ge9x-worlds-largest
Am I missing something?
We already have, both in use by aerospace companies and to an even greater degree at various national labs (JPL, LLNL, ORNL), metal 3D printers that incorporate high speed thermal imaging cameras with software to enable local microstructural control over grain structure to modify mechanical properties, continuous variation between alloy grades without unwanted brittle phases, feedforward process control, and printing and repair of (for example) nonweldable alloys used in jet engines, with properties comparable to or greater than some conventional steel and titanium alloys. You're right that we don't have a path to nanoscale control, and you're not going to be 3D printing single crystal turbine blades, but applications with those kinds of needs are a tiny, tiny fraction of the world economy.
The bigger problem with 3D printing replacing other manufacturing is cost. It's expensive to make printable powders. Printers, especially metal printers, are slow and have high energy requirements. Also, some alloy classes, like most high performance aluminum grades, just don't print well with current processes, and right now the solutions all involve adding rare elements like Scandium to the mix.
I think he has not accounted for things like chip manufacturing. You might be able to 3D print a device, but it will be run by chips that still get manufactured on the other side of the world and have to be installed afterward.
Look for videos of houses being 3D printed! (I have no idea how different materials and conduits, for AC, water, electricity, … are handled, but there are a few different companies now doing this.)
Change never happens as fast as you expect — but once it starts…
Those are very specialised devices with a limited application. Some concrete houses of a certain size.
Anyway who is to say that the US would dominate in 3D printing and not China.
Perhaps so.
Or perhaps this is as prescient a comment as saying in 1960 that computers are very specialized devices with limited application...
That would be wrong in 1960. No actual expert would say it , these machines were Turing compatible. I’ve seen videos of the 3d house printers and it’s just a robot on a track pouring concrete, the whole thing needs to be set up to design a limited set of housing, has to be concrete, etc. Nice but probably not going to replace most house building, although it could generate low level social housing maybe.
3D printing is a toy.
I think he would do well to go further down the chain of the effects here. If US protection is holding world trade together, and everyone else is positively screwed without it:
>As of 2019, the total value of the annual world shipping trade had reached more than 14 trillion US Dollars.
How does 5% sound? 700 billion to continue US protection of global shipping. We could probably cover the direct expenses with a 1% fee, seems like a logical solution versus energy/food crisis
Let's imagine every container ship had to protect itself from pirates... How hard would that be?
Robot guns along the gunwales. (There's a reason they were called gunwales.)
Sounds like it would be a good way for an ambitious young man to earn his chops—I’m all for it
The problem is not the technology, the problem is they have tiny crews and they're not paid enough to take even small risks to their life in defense of cargo. I suppose you could have a small fleet of drones aboard, each armed with an RPG, operated by the owners' agents back in Amsterdam.
You are not imagining robot guns aimed by crew members in a secure location. Just like a video game. Advanced radar-guided Gatling guns would cut small pirate craft in half.
Of course attacks by states would be dealt with at the state level.
You do realize the Chinese and EU have navies too, right?
Yes, but they have no ability to control anything beyond their coastal waters - I believe the review has a sentence about that. Changing that would be difficult and costly. I think the EU is still depending on the US for that. China seems to be taking some steps towards a blue-water navy, but they're not there yet.
You're up against pirates. Any two-bit coast guard ship with a helo will do.
The Chinese have a hundred patrol corvettes which could be press-ganged into the job if necessary.
What's to stop the corvettes from throwing their captains overboard and joining the pirates once they're armed and out to sea?
I presume the Chinese vet their officers at least as well as the British did theirs in the Napoleonic wars.
For a fine documentary on this, check out Wolf Warrior 2 🤣
The Chinese navy has been conducting antipiracy patrol and escort missions off the East African coast for over a decade, and for most of that period have been I believe the largest and most effective antipiracy force in the region. China does in fact have oceangoing warships that can project power into the Indian ocean and unto the African coast, close to a hundred of them, and they are not shy about shooting pirates. Both because they really hate pirates, and because it's a cheap way to remind people that yes, they really can project power across oceans.
Your understanding of the Chinese navy is at least a generation out of date; https://www.navalgazing.net/A-Brief-Overview-of-the-Chinese-Fleet would be a good and ACX-friendly place to start though it doesn't deal specifically with the antipiracy work.
They don’t need that. They just need soldiers on the boats. How much anti piracy does the US engage in anyway?
EU has a navy?
The European nations have ceremonial navies. They don't understand why a navy is necessary and any country that increased defense spending would be promptly voted out by its own population.
The Chinese have a navy that can't even break out of the first ring of containment out of three. Invading Taiwan is right out, they lack the necessary amphibious transports. There's a reason the hypothetical scenario is called "the million man swim" because that's the only way they'll ever get ashore. Even so, Taiwan has few beaches able to support an invasion and you bet the Taiwanese know exactly where they are.
And yet the Europeans helped suppress the Somalie pirates as well. Beyond that the EU military spending has been increasing by I believe 5% per year for 5 years, that's already a full election cycle, and they haven't been voted out.
The more logical conclusion is, is that the Europeans spend on defense what they perceive as necessary. It's getting more dangerous, their defense spending is going up as well.
https://youtu.be/Zsf38NYzo5Q
Can you imagine how unpopular piracy would become with an autocannon on every container ship?
A Phalanx CIWS is between 5 and14 million dollars, depending on the source you trust. 20mm rounds are, I don't know, $10-20 a round? And that thing goes through a LOT of them.
Now, you start to imagine cheaper options, cheaper automation, etc. And then you start to wonder how cheap does it have to be before the pirates have them too? Or the pirates have a cheap drone swarm that can overwhelm the defenses until they're out of expensive ammo, maybe?
My point is that defense is expensive and cargo ships are soft targets.
Another point: in the absence of US carrier groups keeping the sea lanes peaceful, the problem isn't so much pirates as state actors. So again, arming the cargo ships to protect against pirates is moot.
I agree, all the costs and liabilities associated with that are probably more than my proposed 1% tribute
Nobody would pay you. They'd spend the money on their own navies to protect their commerce themselves. Waaay cheaper to do it yourself in this case than to contract with American mercenaries. Chinese mercs are cheaper and serve the Chinese national interest.
The reviewer contends that demand is infinite everywhere, and that it is the abundant supply present in the US that makes it a successful consumer economy. I’d like to add that infinite demand is not a universal phenomenon, and is primarily a cultural thing. For instance, excessive spending or consumption is frowned upon in most South Asian countries as unseemly, and people are mostly expected to save their earnings after taking care of their families or education. Hence, abundant consumption is indeed an American phenomenon, and has perhaps led to accelerated economic growth.
And there really is a kind of sense to it even if stated plainly it sounds unintuitive. If you have two idle people that don't particularly care to change anything they mill about and don't really produce any wealth. If suddenly they both want something the other can make and agree to make those things for each other you have wealth producing trade. It even works on a one person model, if you're in a state of nature the only way to get to where you have a homestead is to first desire one, the building of it comes second. The intuition that consumption is irrelevant to production comes from the belief that most people are already producing about as much stuff as they can, which is rarely the case.
Asians just have different things on which they splurge. If you want an Asian to spend absurd amounts of money that has a poor ROI, just offer him some real estate in an exclusive Zip Code, or a graduate degree from Famous University founded in 1664. You'll get the same result as when you offer a red-blooded American a pick-up truck with 600 hp that can tow a house, plus real leather seats and surround-sound stereo.
LOL!
Of course the ROI on the degree or the real estate is probably higher than the pickup.
Could that be a history/demographic thing? People who grew up during the Great Depression were very frugal. In the US there was a big social stigma against credit cards when they were first introduced in the sixties. China is only 40 years into it's capitalist realignment and credit cards are still pretty rare there. As of 2019 only 30% of adults in China had a credit card. In the US it's 70%.
This sounds plausible. I do see a global tend towards more consumerism.
Uhhh... the Chinese spend using phone-based transactions. Credit cards are uncompetitive.
That's an interesting point. Is that really relevant though?
It's not the techology that matters here (physical card), but the idea of credit itself.
Do these apps allow buying on credit? If that's the case, then it's functionally the same as using credit cards.
If credit is not an option with these apps, that's quite different story, of course.
Conspicuous consumption happens in times and places where one will not be robbed or the results confiscated by the government. I submit that Asia has had a lot of that in the past; America not so much.
I've lived in three Asian countries (Singapore, HK, Philippines) and conspicuous consumption is definitely a thing among the elites and aspiring middle class.
Once again there is a documentary, namely Crazy Rich Asians…
In Scott's recent book review on neoliberalism, some of the comments said that part of the explanation for the book's response to neoliberalism is that the benefits of neoliberalism really started around 2000, when the book was published. Could that instead be, at least somewhat, explained by "the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital"?
The benefits of neoliberalism started c. 1982, at least, in Britain: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Ectc In some countries this was postponed; they became very clear after 2006 in Germany. Some countries appear to have had very little benefit (e.g., Mexico).
Are we sure Mexico hasn't seen any benefit? While poverty rates remain high, their GDP has quintupled since 1980, unemployment rate is among the world's lowest, and their median income by purchasing power remains higher than that of China, which is supposedly a great success story of Neoliberalism. They've also successfully transitioned from a one-party state to a multiparty democracy during that time period, and greatly increased funding to education and services (the former of which has raised their literacy rate from around 80% to 96% over the same time).
They haven't been exactly racing forward, and there are some definite structural problems that haven't been corrected, but I think it's safe to say they've seen some considerable benefits from this period as well.
China is a success story of the mixed economy, but that's not necessarily neoliberalism. Mexico's economy has stagnated since 1980:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EcvW
An easier graph to see that Mexico's real GDP/capita has "only" risen by 30% since 1980 can be found here.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EeQN
Eharding's shows Mexican GDP as a fraction of the U.S. GDP, which, while informative, gives slightly different information than the one above (including ignoring differential population trends).
Mexico has clearly grown, but not explosively.
Let’s take one simple point about his geography claim. He says that the US is blessed by geography but it wasn’t a world power until Europeans conquered it.
The shale Revolution is no more likely to save the US than green energy, which is potentially abundant and not just in the US. (If green energy were not considered left wing it would be fetishised as the greatest technological marvel in the last decade).
And why, even without a US driven free trade agreement, would oil producers stop selling oil?
The supposed demographic crises in China has been talked about for years. I don’t buy it. Firstly the demographics are not that bad, the official tfr is the same as the US. Secondly China has a large reserve of rural workers who can add to the gdp as they move up the value chain , and the rural areas don’t have a population decline. Secondly the demographic “crisis” is man made and can be reversed. Thirdly they can import workers as guests, the Chinese won’t accept permanent immigration but plenty of countries allow in migrants without citizenship rights.
As for US immigration, Europe has dried up, China will dry up, which leaves relatively lower productive workers from Central America. If even that.
And the whole thing was written prior to the recent rise of wokeness which is tearing the US apart. Ending white supremacy in the US is a bit like the Chinese ending Han supremacism, it’s clearly something divisive. Ideologies matter. Successful nations have a story which glue them, CRT and anti white ideologies can only tear the US apart.
(As an aside, footnote 10 is baloney, sure investment immediately creates jobs and those jobs create demand, but the investment isn’t made to begin with without prior demand. A company that is losing sales doesn’t invest in production lines, it shuts them down).
>The supposed demographic crises in China has been talked about for years. I don’t buy it. Firstly the demographics are not that bad, the official tfr is the same as the US.
And that's why you need to take official Chinese statistics with several large grains of salt. They've claimed for decades that their TFR was about 1.7, comparable with the US, but last month they released the results of their 2020 census and revealed a TFR of only 1.3, and based on the numbers it likely has been lower than 1.7 for some time. Of course, I have to ask myself why I should trust 1.3 when it seems they were lying about 1.7.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-2020-census-shows-slowest-population-growth-since-1-child-policy-2021-05-11/
The fact that they revealed 1.3 indicates the previous TFR might have been true. It looks like this is calculated every year.
It's a common refrain in America that official Chinese statistics should be treated with skepticism. Are you implying that there's a fake set of statistics that is released to the public, and a real set that is classified in their internal documents? Or that national statistics are difficult to accurately measure and will contain a large margin of error?
The last Chinese census before 2020 was 2010. It doesn't seem improbable to me that TFR could change by 0.4 in a decade, considering the general pace of change experienced in Chinese society in the last 30 years.
Implying that the national statistics are full of errors and unknowns, and that's the case for officials with full legal access to anything. James Palmer over at Foreign Policy had a good piece on this back in 2018:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/21/nobody-knows-anything-about-china/
To include an excerpt:
"We don’t know how good Chinese schools really are because the much-quoted statistics provided by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) that placed China first in the world were taken from the study of a small group of elite Shanghai schools. As soon as that was expanded merely to Beijing — another metropolis — and two rich provinces, the results dropped sharply. (PISA’s willingness to accept only this limited sample is typical of the gullibility and compliance of many foreign NGOs, especially in education, when dealing with China; I have seen numerous foreign educators fall victim to obvious Potemkinism, including believing that Beijing No. 4 High School — the rough equivalent of Eton — was a “typical Chinese public school.”) We don’t know the extent of the collapse of rural education. We don’t know the real literacy figures, not least because rural and urban literacy is measured by different standards — a common trick for many figures."
Their demographic crisis hasn't been man made for a while. Every east Asian country , from Singapore to Taiwan to Japan, has seen their birth rate crash. No one child policy needed.
They reversed the policy five years ago and it did nothing because the law wasn't why people were avoiding kids for the past 20 years.
If anybody can turn that around the Chinese can. Authoritarian states have an advantage there.
You seem to have a cartoon villain understanding of what states (even authoritarian states) can do. Even the Nazi’s couldn’t move the dial on this much:
https://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/leb/leb-gbr.html
People have kids primarily based on things like employment and the cost of housing. If a state could change those as much as is necessary, we could all do to learn that state…
I did say “if anybody can they can”. Which isn’t definite. I wonder though if a communist state could make housing cheaper if they needed to, or would it go against their philosophy?
All they can do is what the Soviets did — make housing NOMINALLY cheap — but gated by a long long queue.
Which doesn’t change the dynamic I described…
No they just have to reduce prices, not go full communist on housing. And they can use cheaper housing for eugenic effect by targeting specific groups - in western countries with free housing for the poor, the poor have more babies. I don’t buy this demographic disaster anyway, the idea that the wealth of nations is determined by the birth rate (this reverse Malthusianism) is not borne out by the facts.
"As for US immigration, Europe has dried up, China will dry up, which leaves relatively lower productive workers from Central America. If even that. "
Here I must disagree, the U.S. has the best earnings for high-skilled workers, so it has the greatest ability to attract high-skilled immigrants. China has ability to attract immigrants as well, but its limited, and its human capital must primarily come from its own energies.
> its human capital must primarily come from its own energies.
Which are enormous.
The vast majority of immigration to the US is unskilled. H1B is a few tens of thousands a year (and not even an immigrant visa - many go home). European immigration is a trickle. And China, which provides a lot of skilled migrants, will see that reduced. In fact it’s happening this year - chinese students are going elsewhere. That leaves India perhaps. But skilled immigration is fairly low.
China is a non-immigration country, like Israel. There is a green card program but it is a joke. The only people who "immigrate" to China are ethnic Chinese returnees.
Israel is definitely not non immigrant, it’s controlled of course. The Chinese won’t do immigration, if you see that as a permanent stay, but could open up to foreign workers a la Arab countries.
Krikey! I thought I was going to have to take Modafinal just to finish the review. [Joke]
A very good review IMO. I could pick a few nits with the book author but the review was AOne.
I’m going to need to read this book. It is in my reading queue now and I am looking forward to the experience.
I just watched a talk from Zeihan this year about how America is declining. He seems worried about it and I can only assume it's because he *wants* America to win, not that he thinks it's inevitable. Seems like there's some bias going on here.
(Bias, and also possibly that his predictions were wrong and he changed his mind since he wrote the book in 2014)
It's because without a clear enemy that is perceived to threaten America (European empires, Japan, communism, Islamic terrorism) it is actually too big to hold together and will collapse into internal divisions.
It remains to be seen if the American public will buy into the narrative that China is that threat, or if they prefer to focus on internal division.
Either way Zeihan is right that North America will be very wealthy, but it is uncertain whether it will still be United.
>>While China’s plummet in birth rates is heavily influenced by its tyrannical one-child policy, Zeihan attributes declining birth rates generally to the move away from farming and toward industrialization and urbanization. <<
When ever you hear anything about China's one-child policy, you need to keep this fact mind:
TAIWAN'S BIRTH RATE (WITH NO ONE-CHILD POLICY) HAS DECLINED FASTER THAN CHINA'S.
This does not conflict with the statement above; in fact it reinforces it.
It's a remarkable statistic, but do you really think that implanting 324 million IUDs (after having one child receiving an IUD was mandatory) and sterilizing 103 million more didn't have any effect on China's birth rate?
Whatever Taiwan did (person by person) was apparently more effective.
Educate women，not subsidize birth and child rearing. It wasn't intended but it's happening everywhere that's not Sweden.
Sweden's TFR has been below 2.1 for decades, and if you look at cohort fertility (fertility at the end of the reproductive period) it is also below 2.1, and trailing downwards. As in the rest of the Nordics.
Sweden's is less than 2.1, but it's not 1.1 like Japan or Taiwan.
True. But everything below 2.1 is "moment of truth time", in the long run.
Zeihan's reputation tends to be polarizing; and he comes off as overly focused on demographics. Some consider him a hack. This is a good introduction to some basic ideas of geopolitics in general - it should be readily apparent that Britain and America's free political systems and empire-building stem from them being rich islands with virtually no risk of being invaded.
I don’t think he’s a hack, I think he writes in no small part for entertainment value as well. No one can predict the future, obviously, it would be tedious for him to precisely qualify every statement.
He reminds me a little of a geopolitical Jared Diamond; some interesting detail analysis that others miss, but too one-dimensional. He seems really obsessed with geostrategic matters that could easily become less relevant or completely irrelevant due to technological shifts - some of which are pretty obvious (like the aforementioned shift in manufacturing; similarly, rapid breakouts in advanced energy tech could make oil far less relevant, and we're already probably in the midst of a new generation of warfare in which our conventional weaponry is about as relevant as the Maginot Line was in WWII). I think he's definitely out to lunch on China - and like pretty much every prognosticator of the last 40 years, dangerously so.
I think Diamond's overall take is unfalsifiable, and pretty much certain to be correct - environments shaped culture shaping civilizational outcomes sounds very uncontroversial in general.
Zeihan`s issue is how he frames his theory of societal growth in terms of short term predictions, which become silly when bits don't work. I mean, obviously geography and demographics have a huge impact on national power, but these occur in conjunction with current national power and other general trends. When he's framed to say things like "China's demographics will doom it and ensure American ascendency, it sounds like he's forgetting that the Chinese and Indians each outnumber the Yanks 5:1. If the Yanks can import a billion people, sure, America will curbstomp anyone with their incredible geography and superior demographics, but he's not comparing like with like here.
And in a century there will be four billion Africans. An African nation or concert might have a good shot at world domination in a century or two, sure, but that's not a 2030 timeframe.
Do you actually believe there will be four billion Africans? I suggest writing a book titled something like "The Population Bomb," in which you could detail these predictions for posterity.
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm
Actually from what I've seen he just rephrases lot of stuff from George Friedman...except for the Mexico Reconquista stuff maybe...
...Look, I'm pretty optimistic about America's geopolitical future, but this book sounds like standard pundit BS, and frankly the review should do a better job pointing it out.
The Ottoman empire "beginning its decline" in the 14th century, which is literally when it was founded? The Ayyubids and Mamluks apparently not qualifying as independent? (Neither was ruled by an Egyptian dynasty, but neither were the Ptolemys.) The assumption that the agricultural revolution made life "not suck"? (Industrialization was legitimately a massive rise in living standards; agriculture was... debatable, at best.)
River systems are very important historically, but my general impression has been that their importance has greatly declined in fractional terms. The first graphic I found shows multiple large interstates *each* transporting freight volumes comparable to the Mississippi. Certainly, Tulsa is not a seaport. The US does have defensible borders against any medium-term plausible rivals, but so does China; anyway, defensible borders and naval power may be somewhat less important in the age of ICBMs and space travel, though the textbooks of warfare are by their nature in a constant state of revision. And energy concerns are kind of massively diminished by renewable energy being economically favorable now.
The demographic problems faced by many developed countries, and the relative strength of the US there, are real. But "demographics is destiny" is bunk; demographics is the starting point of destiny, which policy then seeks to modify. Existential risk and/or singularity aside, European and East Asian leaders are fully aware of their demographic problems. Even Russia doesn't actually seem like it's collapsing next year, though I guess we'll see. Anyway, the American fertility advantage is due to immigration. Saying that the American housing market is somehow good for fertility is just ludicrously backwards.
Well, correction - looking things up, the American fertility advantage is basically pronounced in larger GenX and millennial cohorts, with current TFR being within the European range. Presumably Zeihan was referring to that time period, although it's not like America is the only country with postwar construction. Really I'd say it's religion, if anything.
Yes; the coming collapse of Russia is about as real as the coming collapse of Germany. Both are here to stay, demographics or not.
Russia's demographic issues has in many ways been shunted off into a free flow of capital and labor between it and its former satellite republics. The Central Asian countries provide it with migrant labor, while its frustrated small but educated and skilled youth leave for greener pastures in Israel, Germany, Britain, and America, and its much less skilled youth have tended to take advantage of the socioeconomic power of the Russian minorities in the former satellite republics to look for chances to prosper there
But their biggest problem is failing to close the male-female life expectancy gap. Its over 10 years and has been for the last 25 years at least, even as life expectancy recovered after the collapse from the late 80s to the early 90s.
The political system, closed and sterile as it is, showed real life when there was an attempt to raise the pension age because of government revenue shortfalls after the oil price dropped. It was going to be raised to a level on par with life expectancy for men, and men were rather peeved by this.
These are all big problems, but nothing in them indicates a coming collapse as a state. The Russian state for reasons of necessity is an enormously powerful institution in most areas it controls and has been for multiple centuries. It isn't going anywhere. Now, it is true that there are areas where it is completely dysfunctional or where you have something akin to a third world existence, such as in the North Caucasus Republics or some deprived post-industrial areas on the far side of the Urals. However, the forces that were pushing Russia closer to dissolution when the Soviet Union broke up, most notably its constitutional structure and local elite power dynamics, are gone now and a more traditional pattern emerged soon after of personalistic rule backed by a strong, if not always capable, state.
Well...I don't know about Russia, but I am not sure what the reason will be for keeping Siberia as part of Russia if it's not valuable anymore (Oil etc.). After all, Siberia was not part of Russia until relatively recently...Also, the demographics of Russia show that non-Russian ethnicities are growing faster than Russians AFAIK, and I am not sure how well the Russians have integrated them into the mainstream society...
As for Germany, I am from there, and I think while Germany looks really stable and prosperous now, there are some serious problems in that country:
- Too much dependency on Exports (which many German economists like Stelter criticize), which leads to low domestic investments and possibly higher taxes.
- Demographics: Germany is aging fast, and while immigration is keeping the population at more or less the same level, or even providing growth (e.g. in 2015), immigration to Germany is not as beneficial as is the case in Canada, Switzerland, etc. This means that immigrants could become a net cost instead of net benefit to the social system. Of course this is mostly a political problem and thus solvable, though I don't see it being considered to be of much importance for German politicians...See e.g. the complains by the economist Stelter on immigration to Germany...
Climate Change - Overall, one would assume that Germany would benefit from Climate Change, but many recent summer have been quite dry in Germany, which causes problems for Agriculture etc. Also increased migration because of climate change...
Energy - Some of it is political (e.g. Nuclear Power and "Energiewende"), but some of it is the simple fact that Germany lacks natural resources and needs to import them...if Zeihan is right about the US becoming isolationist and ceasing to support its allies, then Germany will have lots of trouble with its weak military ...
Anyway, lastly Germany isn't really that old as an unified country, younger than the US, so it may break up again...same for Russia, which expanded a lot - more similar to the US - but then Moscow is very far from the Pacific, so there isn't that much holding the country together...
Some people are worried about not having enough workers and others (more I wager) are worried about not having enough jobs.
One problem cancels the other.
Esp. in the case of China, where they've purposefully limited productivity growth in order to keep their 800-million strong workforce employed. The US struggles to keep a workforce a quarter of that employed, and we're still technically the larger of the two economies. Simultaneously, China has been stocking up on all the tech that they will need to deploy to respond to a rapidly shrinking workforce; but no, there's no reason that the China of the 21st century will need 300 million people working in agriculture, when the US produces more food with fewer than 10 million.
Unlike Japan, whose labor pool is pretty much fully tapped by now (the biggest shift being the mass entry of women to the workplace over the last 20 years), China is nowhere near efficiently utilizing it's population.
My understanding is that children have always "failed" to pay for themselves, consuming more calories than they provide to their parents. Old people reduce the number of calories they consume as they get less productive. People had children for Darwinian reasons.
another practical use for kids was that they were also a form of reserves / social security for old age.
No, like I said old people would consume fewer calories over time so that they were always net positive even as they produced less. And they died sooner than now.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/was_having_kids.html
There's more to life than calories-- there's being taken care of. Did the demographic calculus take that into account?
Also, I'm not sure how you compute the input-output that kids (what age?) contribute to a farm.
i looked at the article you linked above. It's a 2009 article citing a 1996 paper itself citing a source from the 1960s. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong but i mean data science has progressed a lot over time and a ton of things held for true 50 years ago have been upended since, so would have liked to see something more up to date.
Then it also makes some ridiculous assumptions in the calculations like "a parent who gave birth at age 20 and supported a child from age one to age 15 would receive a monetary rate of return of less than one percent on her investment if she retired at age 60 and was supported by the child until age 85 at the level of living that is normal for old people in peasant societies."
- where does 15 come from? kids in ag societies would start helping out from far far younger ages. Maybe not doing the most physical labor at first but hey someone has to feed the chickens & watch the goats, and if you didn't have free labor around to do these tasks your total calorie production could well be lower by a comparable amount to what the kid is consuming.
- the study assumes the entire return comes from after the parent retires at 60 until death at 85. Leaving aside that the age numbers seem really high, that's just not how things work. There are scale effects for one of having a larger family (same reason why today married couples can build wealth quicker by living together than single people could do apart) e.g. you can operate a larger farm with more diverse crops rather than a much smaller plot of land that a single man could handle on his own.
- children also have value as marriage currency to strengthen social ties with people around you that you may need to build alliances in. This is not just for nobles and kings.
btw. I do think that the equation for hunter gatherer societies is different, which is why i believe they didn't have as many kids, mothers only had a baby every 2-3 years etc.
You're right that it's unrealistic to assume parents are supported by their children when they retire at age 60: traditional peasants don't really retire.
In a society at the Malthusian margin, the price of labor is driven down to the minimum needed to reproduce itself at a constant population level. Acquiring additional labor is not really a problem. If the laborers were slaves, they wouldn't even be able to reproduce themselves (New World slavery, featuring "natural increase" was different from the classical type). They were typically acquired through military conquest, which meant you didn't have to pay to raise them (or compensate whoever did).
Hunter gatherers have fewer children because the same land area produces FAR more calories via farming. They can move around in order to get calories from a wider area, but that will also tend to slow down population growth.
If the younger generation of a tribe, taken as a whole, consistently failed to provide a positive return on investment to the entire tribe, then over time the tribe would become impoverished and cease to exist. That's not what we see. Except when we hit weird resource limits (e.g. Easter island perhaps), increasing population generally produces increasing wealth (even per capita), particularly under conditions like those we evolved in (e.g. 40,000 BC East Africa).
It may be that a nontrivial amount of the wealth (and investment) is distributed across nuclear family lines, meaning some of the wealth required to raise my children comes from your parents, and some of the wealth my children ultimately produce returns to you. That seems a priori likely, given how social a species we are, even in the absence of direct obvious mechanisms (e.g. Social Security taxes and old-age pensions). But that also means trying to evaluate the ROI for children within the strict boundaries of the nuclear family (and only two generations) might be a sterile exercise, not really reflective of what happens in the the real world.
I think we also have to be careful evaluating the calorie production one can reasonably attribute to old people -- of what value is a bank of wisdom acquired over 60 years? In the ordinary way, perhaps modest, but when semi-rare crisis arrives (a decadal drought, a rare encounter with a certain dangerous enemy) then that wisdom can mean the difference between survival and extinction of the whole tribe. But how would we measure the "calories produced" that we can trace to the banked wisdom of the elderly? That's as hard as estimating what fraction of the current GDP we can attribute to patents issued in the 1980s. I'd be surprised if anyone had a good solid handle on it.
In Darwinian terms, it can be a winning strategy to lay a bunch of eggs, die, and then be eaten by your own offspring*. There's no need for the younger generation to kick up any benefits to the older generation, instead they are a vehicle to pass genes down to yet another generation.
* http://thatslifesci.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/2019-02-11-Live-Fast-Die-Young-LGuo/
It certainly can be. That isn't how humans generally work though.
I picked an extreme example to make it obvious, but the Darwinian logic in any species which isn't immortal would involve parents prioritizing the survival of at least some offspring beyond their own lives. Any resource the parent consumes which isn't converted into raising the expected number of surviving offspring is thus a waste.
And currently we're dealing with a pandemic which hits old people especially hard. We can count the deaths, but I don't know of any way to measure the lost knowledge.
Geopolitical ambitions do not arise from need, they arise from ability. The US didn't start meddling in other countries at the turn of the 20th century because it suddenly needed to, it did because it could. As long as the US has the ability to be active abroad, it will be. This is true of most countries, but it is ESPECIALLY true of the US because of the moralistic strain that always runs through our conduct of foreign affairs.
"but it is ESPECIALLY true of the US because of the moralistic strain that always runs through our conduct of foreign affairs"
Solid agree, but geopolitical ambitions arise from will as well as ability. America had no will to be a superpower until the 1940s; Britain had one starting from the early nineteenth century, but lost it by the 1920s.
Did I miss the part where he explained why America would have no interest in maintaining free trade anymore? Sure maintaining a military does have significant costs, and the need to oppose the Soviets is no longer there, but the benefits of free trade are overwhelming. Free trade being good is one of the most commonly agreed on issues by economists as far as I know. America might do fine enough without free trade, but they do even better with free trade.
My other issue is that I feel like it ignores replacing rivers with trains as transportation. I don't know the exact cost comparison, but trains are a lot better than trucks for costs, and China and Europe love building trains. Surely that could alleviate their lack of rivers.
Free trade is one of those things that everyone values in the abstract, as long as it doesn't require any personal sacrifice. But when it's *your* job that's evaporating because some schmo in Malaysia can do it for 1/10 what you cost -- suddenly everybody becomes a mercantilism and we better stop exporting good jobs (like mine).
When the US and other developed countries sent all out manufacturing to China, etc, the economists all assured us that this would improve global efficiency, and create new high-paying jobs for the former factory workers. But this did not happen. The elite in the US have reaped all the gains, and people who once had high-paying blue-collar jobs have lost their homes and are now driving an Uber and hoping to make minimum wage.
Protectionism may well result in a mild increase in the cost of goods but it provides many with jobs that they wouldn't otherwise have. The benefits are largely felt by the working class.
On the other hand...
1. US Manufacturing output actually increased substantially over this era.
2. Not sure economists have been aligned on this or any other opinion, ever. I guess some economists may have said this.
3. Global efficiencies did materialize as represented by how affordable physical products became over this time, especially things which could be imported by Walmart (and later Amazon).
3. New and higher paying jobs were created in the US and other dynamic economies. Tens of millions of them. It might be fairer to say that those without the education or skills (or in some cases, mobility or drive), were unable to fill them. This of course just further drove up "elite" wages and capital returns as demand chased supply. The state seems to have responded by making income taxes more progressive and increasing negative taxes and transfers to those not able to respond. Billions of human beings in China benefitted, the educated everywhere benefitted, and the less educated or intelligent gained partially in lower taxes and higher transfers. A billion plus person win/win/win?
4. By elite, do you mean those with the education, capital, risk tolerance, drive and intelligence to capitalize on these tens of millions of opportunities? Looking at what happened in the US, the lower income earners shrank during this era, the middle income families shrank even more, and the upper income group (over $75k) skyrocketed from 16% to 39% over this era (1969 to 2009]. Considering the massive increase in immigration during this same era, and the unprecedented reduction in family size, the US seems to have sailed through the rise of China, especially compared to other developed nations.
5. It simply is not true that a significant percentage of even semi skilled labor is "hoping" for minimum wages. Unemployment has been very low, and plumbers and truck drivers can make great incomes compared to most of the world.
I certainly agree that those unable or unwilling to respond to economic dynamism, tended to be left behind. But I am not sure the results would have been better with protectionism. I can argue they would might have even been much worse, but counterfactuals are probably not something we can resolve.
China and especially Europe optimize their rail infrastructure for passengers not freight. US is actually a world leader in moving goods by rail. Which is one reason our passenger rail sucks - the system gives priority in its design and operations to freight.
I didn't read the book, but from reading the review I got the impression that it wasn't as if the US would abandon free trade. What would happen is that the US would abandon their World Police stance, and therefore free trade would be less free than before. This would be allowable because we spend $700 billion a year on defense (a significant cost on the "free" trade), and because the US would be significantly self sufficient. With all the food and energy we needed being supplied at home, there would be less need to trade with others for survival, and therefore we could afford to be picky about where we engaged and to what level.
I'm not sure I agree with the argument, but I could see the US becoming more protectionist and less interested in one-sided trade deals just because it is more generically free.
That point about US waterways is really odd - it looks like in the US, only about 13% of goods movement is by water, and 43% is by rail, while within Europe 41% of goods movement is by water and 11% by rail, and within Japan 36% is by water and only 6% by rail: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/
It may well be that the US has better water resources for moving goods. But that doesn't seem to be particularly relevant for how goods are *actually* moved in the different regions.
It would be interesting to see if Zeihan pushes for more us immigration. That's a definite advantage, our nationalism is explicitly built on the idea that anyone can come choose to be an American in a way ethnonationalist countries like Slovakia or Thailand can't match.
We can take 10 million Bangladeshis and turn them into Americans in 1-2 generations.
However, advocating for immigration would probably alienate the conservatives who he wants to read and buy his books.
Pfft. We don't even insist on Americans being American any more, and you're evil if you say we should. Try going into any public grade school, large corporate HR department, or Congressional caucus and saying something like "Whoever you are at home, we have certain American public ideals of thrift, enterprise, self-reliance, and liberty to which we believe you can and ought subscribe, even if your cultural background and/or personal inclination includes none of these."
The best that would happen to you is that you would be savagely denounced for your privilege and signed up for some diversity is our strength training.
You left out "family" and "community."
But even if you don't subscribe to those, as long as you do it by yourself not hurting anyone we don't care. We don't have an Orthodox Americanness.
American Nazis, American communists, American anarchists, we have them all.
Don't want to be an entrepreneur?
Great. Most people don't want to do it.
Alexander wrote a great thing about universal values. The values that naturally arise when lots of diverse people have to live together.
Your mom may be a hard core Hindu fundamentalist who rails against the slaughter of American cows. But chances are that you'll end up eating beef.
We can say that it's a salad bowl not melting pot, that doesn't reduce its power.
That's why I don't take that much umbrage to the whole... "There are immigrants who believe different things! And we can't say it is wrong because that would be offensive!"
The rough edges will sand off, we'll absorb them and in 40 years people will have very heated conversations about how Angolans or Kazakhs are the wrong kind of immigrant.
A very sunny view, and I sure hope you're right. But there are places -- e.g. South Africa comes to mind, or Pakistan, the Middle East, or some places in the former USSR -- where the rough edges show no signs of being sanded off after decades, indeed they have produced only increasing tribal violence and dysfunction. What is the difference? Some have argued that it is American arrogance, so to speak, the quality Americans have historically had of insisting that certain core American values are objectively The Best and you had all better at least pay dutiful lip service to them, and if possible actually adopt them, at least in your public behavior.
That may be true, maybe it's a cultural choice -- one we are in the process of reconsidering to our ultimate regret -- or maybe you are right and there is some natural virus in American drinking water that promotes ultimate fusion on the essential values that contribute to social function, and those idiots in Chechnya and Lebanon should just drink some Budweiser and they'll get infected and figure out a way to live in peace while still having different religious rituals at Christmas.
>American public ideals of thrift, enterprise, self-reliance, and liberty
Seems to me that immigrants exhibit these ideals much more reliably than long-term Americans.
Often, yes. I live in a high immigration destination (Southern California), and have encountered many of these. Often I've wished we had some kind of trade program, wherein we'd accept N immigrants from country X if we could deport to them N native-born Americans who don't really deserve their birthright.
;-)
Wow, that's racist as hell.
The remark may be judgemental and based on meritocracy, but it is not racist.
Hmm. Total fertility rate in 2018 was 1.69 children/woman/lifetime in China -- and 1.73 in the United States. If any shocking reversal in the relative economic first derivatives of China and the US is going to happen, based on demographics, it better happen quick, because in the second half of this century US demographics aren't going to be super different from China's or Japan's or Italy's -- we're on the same path, just a decade or so behind.
We're more like 20-25 years behind. That's a pretty long time.
For a human being? I guess. Doesn't seem that long to me, but then I can recall 20 and 40 years ago with ease. For a country, or in terms of vast shifts in economic saliency on the world stage, it's an eyeblink.
So, what, your claim that we're "a decade or so behind" had truthiness because you've suddenly pivoted to discussing the grand sweep of history?
Nope. I'm disputing your characterization of the relevant time scale as the time scale for an 18-year-old heading to college, to whom "four years from now" seems like forever. Short of a major war, I can't think of any change to the international order of nations that happened as fast as 20 years. Can you?
The collapse of the Soviet Union? I guess you could say that was a slow burn that played out over 20 years, but it seems like the rest of the world took the Soviets pretty seriously up until the end.
Also, the Great Depression? I guess that didn't change the international order so much (though it's not a strong area of history for me) but it certainly upended life for a lot of people and led to pretty dramatic changes within countries, not all of which were good.
I dunno, 20-25 years seems like plenty of time for a prosperous society to fracture. If the US is the last or second to last major power standing, maybe things develop in a similar way as post-WWII.
Well, let me suggest that if 20-25 years *were* plenty of time for a prosperous society to collapse and the international order to shift, it would be easy to call to mind a dozen examples, even with a cursory knowledge of history. But it's not. You have to think hard to come up with even a semi-plausible candidate. And it's easy-peasy to think of shifts -- the decline of the Spanish, the rise (and fall) of the British Empire, the rise and fall of the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottomans, and so on -- that took a generation or two. History is thickly scattered with them. So that's the norm.
Maybe I'm completely wrong about how many people _want_ to immigrate to China, but the US has the ability to fix it's demographics issues at literally any time by just being less stupid about immigration. And as the review pointed out, the US is _unusually_ good at assimilating immigrants, for reasons which I don't pretend to understand, but appear to be consistent across quite a large time scale.
Yes, I'm aware of the theory. But it rests on the untested (and inherently dubious) assumption that if we were to suddenly import half the next generation of Americans from Nigeria or Somalia or some other high-birth rate polity we would end up with a bigger America, instead of recreating vast patches of hideously dysfunctional countries and cultures transplanted to North American soil.
Are you familiar with how dysfunctional most of Europe was when we had waves of European immigrants?
Sure. Doesn't even come close to today's high birthrate locales. This is the same Europe that bestrode the world's economy and politics like a colossus. When Nigeria runs an empire On Which The Sun Doesn't Set, we can suspect them of functional social mythology at least as good as 19th century Great Britain.
Was the US getting most of its immigrants in the mid-late 19th century from Britain? I think of that as peak immigration for eastern and southern Europe.
Also, on average, I don't think people leaving a dysfunctional society are going to be too keen on recreating it in their new home.
I was probably thinking of the Irish or something, but undoubtably there *were* a lot of immigrants from the Empire at the time -- whether they were the single largest group doesn't seem especially important. But I do not think 19th century Germany or even Italy was in the same category of social dysfunction as sub-Saharan Africa is today (with a few bright spots bucking the trend of course).
Yes, I'm sure people leaving a dysfunctional society would very much like *not* to recreate it wherever they go. But I submit that most people are not experts on *why* where they came from was in trouble, and so their ability to *not* contribute to it in the new place is inherently limited. Should Muslim immigrants bring with them the hijab, clitorectomies, honor killings? You'd think they wouldn't want to, but the experience of France in this regard says alas often enough they do, or at least enough of them do that it's a problem. If you've only got a small stream, it's a soluble problem, but if you've created a whole lot of Marseilles and expecting them to be Palo Alto or Manhattan it may not be.
Germany had Gauss; Italy had Volta, Poland had Curie. What does SSA have?
We don't know yet. Poland probably had Marie Curie's born in 1400 who amounted to nothing... because the circumstances weren't right for them to use their intellect.
Same thing with Volta... imagine him 100 years earlier or a hundred years later.
Copernicus was from Poland, Galileo was from Italy.
Who says? If Curie had been born in the 1400s the most likely thing is that she would've been a Paracelsus or Brand or any number of famous intellectuals of the late Middle Ages. We know of brilliant people going as far back as writing, and it's more likely we know of fewer because of the perishability of records over centuries and millenia than that they didn't exist or weren't successful in their day.
A) You are dramatically overstating how many immigrants we _need_ to take while B) simultaneously underestimating how many we can succesfully take.
We have successful immigrants from every one of the countries you mentioned. Nigerian immigrants are literally poster children for successful immigrant communities. And I guarantee you that whatever you are imagining for immigrant communities, it pales to the mass immigration we had from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and China. And those countries were pretty similar at the time to whatever "high birthrate" country you are imagining.
I *said* I was familiar with the theory, there really is no need to repeat its axioms. The repetition doesn't make the hypothesis any more convincing to me.
I'm not hypothesizing or repeating axioms. I'm stating historical and present facts. That you don't find them convincing is unrelated to their truth. You clearly have your own views that _aren't_ based in the facts. So I suppose you are correct that there isn't any point in continuing.
Well if you're basic point of view is whatever you think is historical fact and whatever I think is strange delusion, yes, that is not the basis for a useful conversation.
Nigerians are poster children for successful immigrant communities in the US, but they are also very highly selected (Nigerians who've immigrated to South Africa are regarded very differently). Refugees from Somalia are a very different story, and my understanding is that they have an even higher unemployment rate in Europe. There's a limit to the number of additional immigrants that can be taken in while retaining the same degree of selectivity.
a slightly different point on same theme is that while 100 years ago there were lots of unskilled jobs and hence quality of immigrants didn't matter so much as anyone could become gainfully employed and in due course integrate, today we really don't have a big unfilled gap for unskilled labor and the needs are elsewhere. Bringing in people but not being able to offer them decent jobs is a recipe for disaster down the road. If the US just sucks in all the brightest/best trained people from other countries that's a crummy thing to do and causes brain drain / contributes to keep developing countries down.
I'm not quite that bothered by "brain drain" because many such people would be under-utilized back home, and may be able to do more good for their countries by coming back after they've "made good" in a more functional country. The "IQ shredder" argument is a counter to that though.
Actually, according to the 2020 census results that were just released last month, China's current TFR is 1.3. It probably has been for some time, given the numbers we're seeing from the 2020 census.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-2020-census-shows-slowest-population-growth-since-1-child-policy-2021-05-11/
China's TFR in 2020 was 1.3: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1223141.shtml
U.S.'s was 1.64.
U.S. demographics will be different from China's because of immigration, but they won't be hugely different. The American White population is already declining.
Not really convinced by that number. The higher number matches the trends over the last few years, but we'll see. The US number has also been on a steep decline since 2008, and I would have wondered whether *that* was a blip, but it's been going on for a solid 10 years now.
Sorry, that was garbled. I mean, I'm not convinced that lower number is here to stay. It may be. It may be the US number will rebound. Who knows? But the numbers are far closer than most people think. The idea that the US is a high-birth rate country is left over from the 20th century, when it was indisputably true.
also need to consider the huge sex imbalances in current chinese population due to rampant selection by parents back when they could only have one. Mathematically that's going to drive down the number of matches possible in the next generation and further depress birth rates.
“The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth.” by Peter Rodes Robinson
https://link.medium.com/u1ILr0lUcab
I'm sure we could have a very functional human planet with 1 billion people on it, and also with 10 billion or even 100 billion (or 100 million). Each would have different sorts of standards in terms of how people lived, the jobs they did and how those interlocked, and the demographic structure that kept it stable.
However, we don't have the luxury of being able to call the ideal world into existence shazam. We have to get from where we are right now to...some place else, and it is the journey that ends up in exactly the right stopping place that is hard to envision (still harder to execute even for a tyrant, and triply harder to execute when it requires buy-in from 50% + 1 of people within 0.5 standard deviations of IQ 100). Demographic change is almost never actually planned, it just happens chaotically, with all kinds of unplanned side-effects -- the Chinese are the major obvious exception here, and *their* results should give us pause, as the real-world consequences departed nontrivially from what the planners envisioned in 1970.
Yes, I imagine we could have an Earth with 100 billion persons -- and no nature. I wouldn't want to live there.
We don't have to talk people into having a fertility rate lower than 2. It's happening.
Sure we could. We could all live like Pierson's puppeteers, in enormous arcologies, and leave 98% of the planet a vast parkland which we visit. The only reason 10 billion humans is "a lot" is because we like to spread out. But we don't *have* to. The mid-day population density of Manhattan is about 70,000 km^-2, and if we were all willing to live like that we could fit 100 billion people on 1.4 million km^2, which is an area a bit bigger than Mongolia and a bit smaller than Iran. That would leave 99.3% of the land area of the planet uninhabited.
Obviously this would require a pretty amazing level of cooperation, and efficiency in distributing calories and energy, but those are just the conditions on the social structure needed for it to work. There are other social conditions for any other number to work. One could make the argument that there is some "natural" number that is easiest for unmodified take 'em as they naturall are H. sapiens to achieve, but I would be hard-pressed to know what that number is, since observationally people live in places with incredibly huge variations in population density.
More people means less nature, not because of our living space, but because of our farms.
Assumes facts not in evidence. For example the fraction of US land in agricultural use has declined from 63% in 1949 to a bit over 50% today[1], while the population has roughly doubled, which means the land required to feed each person has declined by roughly 60%, and probably more because the US has exported increasingly large chunks of its agricultural produce (particularly to Asia) over that time.
Similarly, we consume *far* more fish (e.g. salmon) than could ever be produced by fishing wild populations, but we have fish farms, which practice intense cultivation in tiny spaces. (Not so good for the fish, and there are serious other environmental consequences to be managed, but the point is -- way less surface area is needed.) We could eat like Trantorians, nothing but yeast grown in enormous tanks underground.
I'm sure there's an ultimate carrying capacity, based on the absolute sheer minimum surface area of land or sea needed to produce the number of calories each human needs. But what it is, is quite unclear. We only know what surface area each of us demands given our current tastes and preferences, and our current technology, and how we choose to allocate our resources. That's no basis for any kind of ultimate carrying capacity argument.
Carl, where you lose me is that you seem to think the decline in fertility which I advocate and predict is unlikely. In fact it is obvious and unstoppable in the next some decades.
Without having read it, I wouldn't think the book cares about the fertility rates right now.
The predictions seem to have a time horizon of 20 years or so. How many people retire in that time is independent of the current fertility ratio. Even for the number of 20-year olds in 20 years, the fertility ratio is only a third of the story. It also matter how large the cohorts of fertile women are, and how much migration there is. Demographics are really slow. Present fertility rates won't change the demographics for the next 20 years.
That's why I said any changes better happen quick, before current fertility rates affect the population structure. But anyway after hearing about how fusion is Just Ten Years Away for the past 40 years, and in 1969 that there's be regular commercial service (on Pan Am!) to the Moon by 2000, and any number of pop sci dazzling predictions over the years that have been now quietly forgotten -- I forgot The Singularity -- isn't that supposed to be Any Day Now? -- color me deeply skeptical of *any* massive social shift predicted to lie suspiciously close to the canonical book buyer's "not so soon that I need to prepare now but soon enough to make me hope for the future" horizon, which seems for human beings to be roughly 10 years, sometimes 20.
"I’m probably an outlier in mocking the consumption-led model as a route to growth."
You're right; all fast-growing countries have high investment rates (though not all countries with high investment rates have fast growth):
https://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2015/12/28/a-closer-look-at-saving-and-investment/
I’ve been liking your contributions!
I liked this one a lot! It's a really engaging topic and the reviewer went beyond just discussing the book to actually analyzing the claims and how they purportedly have borne out in the world post-publication. I suspect that it could have been more critical, based on what I'm seeing in other comments, but a great jumping off point for a good discussion is laudable in itself.
1st Ol Trbetr
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3rd Ur pnyyrq uvf Whzob
4th Tnaqnys naq Rmrxvry
5th Bbcfvr Qnvfl Nzrevpn
6th Obbx fgnoovat gvzr
7th Ab, ohg jr pna yrnea n ybg fgvyy
8th Orrc obbc V nz na nqqvpg
9th Ebzr jnfa'g qrfgeblrq va n qnl
10th *Qha Qha*
11th Jung qvq gur theh fnl gb gur ubgqbt iraqbe?
Really enjoyed this one.
Quick typo correction: This is labeled as #11, but in the intro bracket part it says that this is the tenth entry.
I guess it's not really relevant to his point, but I am highly skeptical about the defensive value of Egypt's deserts. Egypt has been conquered over and over again. I think their early success in that regard was just because they were a state with an army in a world that didn't have many of those yet.
I am also highly skeptical that natural defenses are what's keeping out marauding Canadians.
I took the idea to be that Egypt's deserts were great defensive value earlier in history, leading to it being one of the earliest and most powerful civilizations, but advancing naval technology and the rise of major powers on the Mediterranean rendered the deserts defensive value largely obsolete.
Egypt had a mighty navy in ye olde days, until the Romans conquered it after beating the Egyptian navy.
Egypt was stable for a very, very long time. Modern humans are closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the time of the great pyramids.
What? No. The Empires lasted a thousand years in theory. In practice, you had little civil wars every century or three.
Chinese dynasties lasted three centuries on average.
And the Romans are a great example of "had no navy" to "we damn well want a navy and are going to work hard to get one". It's not like there is a magical limit on which nations get to have navies and which don't, though bean points out there are reasons why there are so few naval powers.
To be fair, ancient triremes were a good deal easier to make than modern warships, even accounting for our improved shipbuilding technology.
Could it be that demand-side stimulus works better at times when there's a ton of accumulated capital but a shortage of good investment opportunities, like the U.S. right now or the U.S. in the 1930s/40s, but supply side stimulus works better the rest of the time? Seems obvious, but I feel like I've never heard this view articulated before. Or am I missing something?
Stimulating aggregate demand can be useful when nominally sticky prices/wages are the problem (normally it's the job of the central bank to deal with that). That's leaning against the wind of the business cycle. It's not a long-run strategy for growth.
The same aging of societies that Zeihan thinks will cause economic problems will also likely prevent new wars from breaking out; wars are a young man's game.
I had trouble finding academic papers to back this up; the correlation between modern peace and people living into old age seems obvious, although usually people explain the modern decline of wars, particularly in advanced/long living societies, other ways. (Nuclear peace, richer societies are more peaceful, democratic societies are more peaceful, trading ties lead to fewer wars, etc.)
In the United States, I couldn't find data on the Korean War, but older people were more likely to oppose the Vietnam, Gulf, and Iraq wars: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2002/10/17/generations-divide-over-military-action-in-iraq/
This has been studied more regarding terrorism and civil wars, where there is strong evidence that more youth is correlated with more likelihood of both: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092795?seq=1
I find his predictions that China and Russia dissolve risible. Both have been states for very long times, though not under present governments. For example, how could Russia split? All the wealth and power is in the west, and there aren't any strong internal tensions. Even in the 90s when going through desovietization, the country stayed essentially solvent.
Russia did break up... the Russian empire of 1914 compared to modern Russia was much bigger.
It did not break up, it lost it's domination on neighbouring countries. Just like France did not break up when it lost it's colonial empire.
China devolution is a fantasy. China is 93% Han, and of the 7% who are minorities, maybe only a quarter of those have any semblance of a separatist movement - most of them are members of southern hill tribes who have never had any national identity and have been Han tributaries for a thousand years. The last 70 years of Chinese nationalist indoctrination have left a country of people so devoted to the idea of "one China" that Shanghai's urban cosmopolitan elites are as patriotic as any American midwestern redneck (even the ones who loathe the CCP tend to be against "splittism" and tend to admire the old Kuomintang leaders). Even if, somehow and for some reason, a few of the fringe territories like Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia did split off... their notable assets would be owned by a local Han minority, all logistic and financial links remaining to the Chinese core.
The situation of Warlordist China in the early 20th century was peculiar to the conditions of the time (pseudo-colonialism, the breakup of an imperial system, opportunistic generals, a country in which the population was mostly still isolated and feudal) and none of those conditions exist in the 2020s.
I'm afraid we're going to be stuck with the dragon breathing down our necks for a long time to come.
Many of the things here are relevant to my interests, and I even have some expertise on a few of them. I will say that I think his thoughts on freedom of the seas haven't faired very well, because China has been building a Navy that is almost exactly what they'd need in case Zeihan's theories came to pass. They've built a bunch of frigates, and a significant blue-water capability, including aircraft carriers. But this was already well underway by 2014, with Liaoning commissioning in 2012. I talk more about what's going on here: https://www.navalgazing.net/A-Brief-Overview-of-the-Chinese-Fleet
More broadly, I don't think he's using Bretton Woods correctly, as I've always heard that used to refer to the specific dollar-gold peg that lasted until the 70s when Nixon got rid of it. There's definitely a broader western alliance system that the US has backed since WWII, but Bretton Woods isn't really the right term for it.
I'm also less certain it's going away. This thesis brings to mind Halford Mackinder's thesis that the railroad would end sea power and shift geopolitics towards continental powers, which didn't really happen either. I'm definitely in agreement with him on the importance of maritime power and such (and the thing about why there are so few naval powers is spot-on) but I think that US interests will at least run to keeping the seas open. It's too deep in our institutions to easily stop.
I concur: Bretton Woods was 1945–71, from then to 2008 was the Washington Consensus. Possibly it's still that, but I'd rather prefer to say that currently there is nothing guiding the Western countries.
China is just going to keep ramping up it's naval building until it surpasses the US or the US decides to enter a naval arms race (shades of pre-WW1) or unless China suffers internal collapse before then (I'm waiting for the messy transition point from catch-up growth to developed state growth rates, for Japan this happened in 1991).
I don't agree with China actually having a goal of surpassing the US. All the evidence I have points to them aiming for a smaller but still substantial force, with for to six carriers and other ships in proportion.
China's been commissioning warships at such a furious rate that they actually now have more armed vessels than the US Navy, though they lack supercarriers, helicarriers, and the systems of our more advanced destroyers and frigates.
Though you're right in that I don't believe their aims are for a global blue water navy, but merely to have an utterly impenetrable coastline and the ability to project power in their near-abroad, as well as into the Pacific and Indian oceans in order to safeguard their interests.
I'm aware of the raw numbers, but a lot of those are FACs and corvettes, which don't really count. And I'd point out that while they may not have supercarriers, they're one of somewhere between four and six navies that have serious carrier capabilities. As for combat systems, they may not have something as good as Aegis, but it's not like they're stuck with stuff from the 70s either.
I do think they're going for blue-water capability. They're not explicitly going for more than the US, but they're going for a close second. The days of the PLAN as a purely coastal-defense force are well over a decade behind us.
In a war using today's weapons, a supercarrier might not last long against cruise missiles, and therefore end up being way too expensive :
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-it-could-happen-part-one-hubris.html
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-it-could-happen-part-two-nemesis.html
I have a rather different take on the carrier/missile dynamic. I won't say that there's no way to take out a carrier with missiles, but they're a much harder target than you might think, and the 200 missiles listed is my estimate for what it would take to breach the defenses of a normal CVBG. It would simply bounce off the 3-carrier group described there.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-2
Well, the fiction narrative assumes (mostly ?) supersonic, not subsonic cruise missiles like in your link, not sure how realistic it is for China to get 200-500 of them ?
This sounds rather like Germany's policy under Tirpitz of building a Risikoflotte (risk fleet): not enough to surpass the leading naval power, but enough that they can't defeat it without suffering substantial losses.
Because that worked so well for Germany.
More seriously, I doubt it. That was not a particularly good piece of strategic thought (mostly because it was rather ex post facto) and China seems to be being smart about it. They want the ability to secure their trade if the US doesn't, or even if the US tries to stop them.
Sure, for now...
Yes all signs currently point towards China aiming to only about match the US's Pacific Fleet, not total US Navy.
I think though that the fundamentals will change by the time they reach that such that they will set their sights higher. They could have twice the economy of the US (by PPP) then and I don't see them becoming less nationalistic.
That's the 50 billion dollar plan you lay out when you know your boss isn't going to approve the 100 billion dollar plan. Then once you've achieved it, you can say hey, for only 50 billion more we can have real parity...
Great article Bean, thanks!
> While China’s plummet in birth rates is heavily influenced by its tyrannical one-child policy
Is it? How different are China's birth rates from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan? The policy looks very different, but... where's the influence?
It arrived at well-below-replacement birthrates much earlier in the economic transformation (and at much lower levels of wealth) than those other countries, that's one place where the influence might have shown up.
Does the author of the book really neglect the importance of nuclear weapons? (Both in terms of nuclear peace/mutually assured destruction as a cause of peace, and also in terms of nuclear countries being effectively guaranteed by the rest of the world against too-significant instability so as to avoid the possibility of rebels of any nation getting their hands on nuclear weapons?)
That was my thought throughout as well. Like, is this an alternate history book where no one ever developed nuclear weapons technology? They change the calculus of total war too dramatically to ignore.
I third this motion. They are a game changer. The resumption of history posited following America's withdrawal from the globe would look a lot different than pre-WWII history. It would be a nuclear arms race. Proliferation would abound. 'Which countries have uranium deposits?' would become a really important question. There would be actual nuclear wars. These would have material effects on global climate. America would not be able to sit it out, secure behind the oceans.
In fairness: ICBMs are much harder than fusion bombs, which are much harder than fission bombs. America wouldn't be totally secure, but it would be a lot more so than, say, anything in the neighborhood of Iran.
Nuclear weapons aren't something you can develop overnight, and they are pretty tough to develop (specifically, test) without detection. They require a ridiculous amount of infrastructure to make work, and even more so if you want rockets rather than bombs. So you're not very likely to invade a nation and then discover that, oops! They had nukes, everyone dies.
In general, I tend to think the existence of nuclear weapons has about as much stabilizing effect as the entirety of the global US military presence. The current nuclear powers (plus a half dozen or so countries that could become nuclear powers in a year or two if it looked necessary) simply can't risk total war scenarios with one another. That both tends to keep conflicts regional/massively unequal (e.g. China v Taiwan rather than China v India) and keep nations at the negotiating table (I posit that in a non-nuclear world, Iran would have gone the way of Iraq by now).
That said, I feel like North Korea's antics have demonstrated thoroughly that "I have nuclear weapons, and I might be willing to use them" can keep a nation nominally viable even when its geography is heavily against it.
ICBMs aren't hard enough to have kept a nearly-autarkic North Korea from building them when they felt the need; if ICBMs are what a nation needs to be secure in the 2030s or 2040s, then pretty much all the minor industrial powers will have them. Or the United States will declare Pax Americana to the extent of bombing any factory we think is building ICBMs. Pick one.
They had trouble making a proper ICBM, but then they had "help"...
https://lidblog.com/north-korea/
All true enough in a world where America maintains a large and looming international presence. But this posits a world where America does not do that. If say, Iran and Saudi Arabia get into an open arms race with each other, who is stepping in to stop them? If it’s America, then the world described here hasn’t come to pass. But if not America, then who? And why does Saudi Arabia not develop nukes? Largely because they expect America to maintain order. In a world where that isn’t the case to not have nukes is to be almost helpless; so many nations would seek and acquire nukes - the taboo would be broken.
I've heard that the Saudis expect to be able to call on Pakistan for backup in a nuclear situation, but I don't know how much truth there is to that.
In a world where the US is not the global police, I could definitely see smaller scale wars popping up around the world. I'm thinking Bosnian War and not WWIII, probably not even a Vietnam. I doubt the major European powers start engaging in warfare again, at least with each other.
The book - or the review - seem to completely neglect the significance of other ressources - lithium, rare earths, uranium and copper comes to mind : are the US a significant producer for any of those ressources ? Because they are just as necessary as oil...
I don't know about rare earths but the US definitely has the others you mention. I grew up near this lithium mine https://www.wfae.org/energy-environment/2020-10-02/gaston-lithium-mines-first-customer-is-a-big-one-tesla
Having them is good, having them cheap and enough is better of course. I guess you can get lithium from saltwater anyway.
Rare earths aren't actually rare. We don't mine them much in wealthy countries because extraction is a toxic mess.
A new rare earth processing facility is going to be built in Ketchikan, AK that's using a newish technique to supposedly process rare earths with less pollution. Ketchikan has a deep water port, and there's also a significant rare earth deposit nearby that will potentially be mined in the near future. The company is planning two more processing plants in the future.
https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/story/2018/02/02/news/ketchikan-to-be-home-of-rare-earth-plant/5034.html
Yeah they are not rare but right now the only significant mining operations are in China and Australia if I remember correctly.
We just enacted regime change in Bolivia without firing a shot. A neo-liberal replaced the indigenous person, and the lithium is ours to command.
Well, this seems to contradict the book predictions, since the author asserts that the US will become more and more isolationist and project less power outside to secure ressources.
the US shale oil bubble seems to finally be coming to an end, at least when looked at through a financial markets lens. given shale wells have much higher rates of decline if rate of new capex into the space declines production will follow not long after. So not totally sold on the whole america will be energy independent forever thesis. Separately though, i saw Zeihan speak at a conference once and he also had some interesting ideas about where american politics was going. talked about increasing divisiveness, and how trump would be just the first (and relatively moderate by comparison) in a long line of more and more extremist leaders from both left and right. That was probably 3-3.5 years ago so have to say looking at how Biden presidency is starting off and general tone of politics today that he seems to be well on his way to getting this one right.
Yeah, this immediately made me suspicious of the rest of the book...
Interesting review of what appears to be a highly uneven book.
Let me offer a supplementary prediction about the US: What we have been witnessing for more than three decades is the gradual americanization of the US.
By that I mean that the US is gradually becoming more similar, both in social structure and in party-political culture, to other large, mainly immigrant, american countries; in particular Brazil (but also Argentina).
Gradual americanization is sort-of what you would expect in the longue durée, if geographical position in the world is destiny. Across time, the effects of different colonial legacies and other national peculiarities (such as the unique US combination of a devastating civil war coinciding with the abolition of slavery) are likely to become less salient.
You see the tendency toward americanization in the changing US social structure, with very large income inequalities (and parts of the interior looking like the third world), growth in gated communities (micro-welfare states), inner cities ruled partly by gangs (I lived in Berkeley for a year and a half during the 1990s, including during the Rodney King riots), etc. etc.
Cf. Bill Leiter's (Leiter Reports) recent observation that the high level of police violence in the US to some extent can be explained by the police working in an urban environment resembling Latin America more than Europe.
With regard to politics, you find loose-coalition-type parties with a strong presence of established families (the Bushes, the Clintons); their dominance once in a while being interrupted by populist caudillo-types (Trump resembles a light version of Peron more than European populists).
It fits, once you start to think of the US as "just another big american country" rather than a separate planet (which US people sometimes do).
This is not meant as a dystopian observation, by the way. Brazil and Argentina are great countries, but like that other big american country, they have their american problems....
What would drive this shift? That's a bit much to chew on in a comments section;-).
...But if I were to write a book from this perspective ("The americanization of the US" - a likely bestseller?) I would start by turning the question around. If geography is destiny (a perspective I have some sympathy with, if it is not overdone - cf. Zeihan's ideas), then the puzzle that needs explaining is why the US has not always been similar to other big, immigrant-dominated american countries. Or, given that the US started out different, why it has taken the US so long to converge toward the social and political structure of the others.
Then the second chapter would be to check the facts, to see if there is really a convergence going on. (Before explaining what would eventually "drive the shift", it is necessary to firmly establish if a shift in this direction is indeed taking place.) In addition to the indicators I mentioned above (which would have to be elaborated and empirically documented in detail), I would check an eventual tendency toward chronic budget deficits, loose monetary policy, lack of investment in infrastructure (including lack of necessary upgrades of existing infrastructure, e.g. the New York subway), less trust in elite politicians, more political cynicism in the general population, that sort of thing.
...Then there would be chapters discussing if there has always been similarities, but that they have tended not to be conceptualized as such. The semi-corrupt machine politics of US cities before the 1960s comes to mind, as well as class structure-theories.
Following this, there would be chapters baktracing a bit, conceding that there are some idiosyncracies of US history that apparently take a very long time to be washed out by the river of geo-social destiny. My favorite in this regard is not the folk theory of different selection of initial immigrants, but the fact that abolishing slavery in the US was linked to a horrible civil war. The long shadows of this US idiosyncracy is still very much felt in the US today, perhaps in particular in these woke days.
..Compare this historical idiosyncracy to Brazil, and just about everywhere else, where abolishing slavery was mainly a peaceful affair, and where the relationship between the "races" is not as infested, probably because of this. (Digression: as a European, I balk but is also in a strange way fascinated that people in the US use the word "race" in civilized company; the only one who used the r-word in my past was my now long-dead mother-in-law, and when she did everyone else at the family table looked acutely embarassed and frantically tried to talk about something else.)
Coming back to your question of "forces", which would be the last chapter. It would necessarily be speculative, since it is difficult to identify "forces" empirically. My boring answer is that there is likely to be a ton of them. Mono-causal theories are fun to play with, but here we most likely face a multi-causal set of factors that gradually drive the US towards becoming a "normal" big american country.
..Many years ago I thought I'd write a book based on this narrative, but then my kids wanted me to come out and play with them, and I had a deadline coming up for that tenure-track paper, and the telephone rang, and...
<i>If geography is destiny (a perspective I have some sympathy with, if it is not overdone - cf. Zeihan's ideas), then the puzzle that needs explaining is why the US has not always been similar to other big, immigrant-dominated american countries.</i>
Is America's geography really that similar to, say, Brazil's or Argentina's, though?
I would say: To a sufficient degree that the argument is worth pursuing.
The US tendencies toward the political and social structure of these countries (maybe Mexico should be added) is pretty easy to see, once you start looking in that direction. Although, as said above, they must be empirically mapped in a serious way before making strong claims.
That said, part of my interest in Brazil and Argentina is that there might be a broader tendency toward the social structure of these countries, tied to the effects/impacts of economic globalization. That's not a geography-based argument, but one (or rather, a bundle) of the multi-causal factors to explore to make sense of observed empirical trends.
I'm not doubting that America's social and political structures are becoming more like those of Latin America; I'm doubting that America's geography is sufficiently similar to explain the convergence.
That's a fair point.
It is obviously difficult to distinguish and disentangle the number of possible distal, intermediate, and proximate factors that may drive the observed empirical tendency/tendencies toward convergence. Again, I am not a monocausal social scientist.
It may theoretically be something wholly unrelated to the US being located in the Americas, grant you that. It may even be temporary coincidences (in which case we might expect some regression toward the mean to set in at some point, that will break the present trend.)
But then it might also in various ways be tied to the fact that the US is an American country, rather than an Australasian country, or European country, or pick-your-geographical-region-with-some-important-historical-communalities country.
Since this is the ACT, let me tell the story of the hypothesis US-developments-have-something-to-do-with-the-US-being-an-american-country, as one of changing priors.
When I went to live temporarily in Berkeley back in the days, my prior was that "the US is a big European country on the other side of the Atlantic". I had to adjust my prior pretty quick. (Even when living in Berkeley. Or perhaps precisely because I was living in Berkeley.)
Noticing the differences from Europe, and looking for an alternative prior, there were two readily at hand.
One was what I will label the prior held by (almost all?) US people, although not necessarily at a fully conscious level. That's the prior that the US is an exception among countries. It is The Shining City On The Hill. (What I perhaps a bit derogatory label The-US-is-a-planet prior.)
For various reasons, including not having been exposed to this prior from kindergarten onwards, I kept on looking for an intuitively more convincing prior.
And the other prior that readily presented itself, was/is that "hey the US is a big country in the Americas, there are other countries here as well, how about thinking if the differences I observe have something to do with that?" And that sort-of-clicked.
Since then, including after the Rodney King riots, that prior appears increasingly useful in interpreting US social and political developments during the 1990s till the present day.
But exactly how the ins and outs of this geographical fact manifests itself in the behaviour of the people living in the territory (and remember here that geography is far more than physical geography; there is a large field labelled cultural geography), including how it interacts with "forces" and "tendencies" that are unrelated to geographical place, is not something I have strong priors about.
...but that there is "something here", I regard as a fruitful prior.
In which case the puzzle that needs explaining, is not why the US is gradually becoming more similar to Latin America (that's the puzzle if you choose the-US-is-an-exception-among-countries prior), but rather why it has not become similar earlier.
Apologies for random question, but are you John Dolan?
No. He has similar views?
He's a writer who lived in Berkeley in the early 90s, who has a similar thought process about geopolitics. He wrote about wars under the pseudonym Gary Brecher for a long time.
Ok, nice to know!
My comment was perhaps a bit off-tangent relative to the book review, but since Zeihan's book apparently is about the US' (lucky) geopolitical position in the world, I wanted to add my pet theory (dating back to my Berkeley days) of what the US really is, and where the country for better or worse is heading...
Yeah, it's a take I hadn't ever considered, and it's convincing.
> “three routes a country can take to economic growth: consumption-led, export-led, and investment-led.”
Assuming investment means foreign direct investment then these are all really the same source: a rich market somewhere. The first is relatively rich domestic consumers, the second is relatively rich foreign consumers, the third is the first again but they are looking for a return.
If investment led means investing in your country's infrastructure, education, etc, then, yeah, that's actually actively doing something to improve productivity.
I'll also say that Zeihan makes a pretty strong prediction here that money for investment (capital) is going to dry up. In fact the exact opposite has happened: there is a huge glut of money now floating around desperately seeking any home that will give it a return. That's why interest rates are so low.
I've become increasingly convinced over the years that demographic pyramids no longer matter much. Technology doing away with the need to have people work; increasingly the larger problem is finding jobs for prime age workers.
I feel like there's an implicit prediction here of "no WWIII" since I'm pretty sure a nuclear exchange would mess with things. Is this accurate, or are there disclaimers about this?
I think my review of this book is better--or at least it's a whole lot shorter.
https://trotskyschildren.blogspot.com/2017/10/book-review-accidental-superpower.html
"I’ve never understood why people find this idea persuasive. Most of us would consume all the things if we could. Economists’ models often start from the idea that we have unlimited demand for goods and services."
"If the desire to consume actually gave us growth, one supposes that the richest places would be those that wished for it the most. If you say no, it’s the ability to consume that gives the growth, then you’re almost there; the ability to consume is another way of saying that you have already produced value for the world (i.e., you’re a supply-sider too)."
This misunderstands the Keynes' position. The economy has a certain capacity, based around available labour, resources, fixed capital etc. But there is no automatic mechanism that ensures that this capacity is always utilised to its maximum amount. You can have amazing transport links, factories, and enterprises; but if unemployment is high, and business managers don't want to invest, then all this *potential* consumption simply won't happen.
Keynesianism, properly understood, is about overcoming the collective-action problems inherent in a complex, free-market economy. Non-Keynesian economics ignores this problem by assuming it cannot exist.
Yep.
The way I put it : demand is infinite ; solvent demand, on the other hand...
"Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions."
because marginal demand was greater/less than marginal supply :P
also, I appreciate the shout-out, anonymous Astral Codex Ten contributor :)
I did a review of the Accidental Superpower as well. (https://wearenotsaved.com/2020/07/04/books-i-finished-in-june/#sp) I was similarly impressed though I think Zeihan has some big blind spots. In particular he imagines that Russia will go down without ever using it's nukes. For example this quote from the book:
[Quote]
[Japan’s] first military target is likely to be Russia’s Sakhalin Island. It is just off the coast of Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island, putting it well within Japan’s naval and air force power projection range. It’s infrastructure was largely built by Japanese firms, that infrastructure terminates on the island’s southern tip, the Japanese have the technical skill to keep all of Sakhalin’s offshore energy production running, the Russians do not, and Japanese nationalists still fume that the Russians seized it from Japan in the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Securing Sakhalin would place just under 300,000 bpd of crude production and 3 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas production into Japan’s output column. Seizing Sakhalin will also permanently sever any chance of having positive relations with Moscow, but to be blunt, Moscow is five thousand miles away, so the consequences of breaking that relationship aren’t very high.
[End Quote]
My response in my review: "Wait… what? The consequences for pissing off Moscow aren’t very high?! As I said I loved this book, but Zeihan has either completely ruled out the use of nukes, which is something he never even mentions, let alone explains. Or he has a major blind spot on that issue. Certainly no reference to nuclear weapons appears in the index."
That was also something I noted.
Like, I've seen people argue that Russia is forced by its geography to seek to invade lots of its neighbors, to build an in-depth defense system given the North European plain is a highway to its heartland.
Okay, 'could be. Certainly up to the WWII era of tanks and planes. But ICBMs makes in depth defense pretty irrelevant. Or am I missing something?
I’m a bit less confident that you but overall, yes. That said, German tanks rushing to take Moscow or Chinese ones rushing to Omsk would qualify as existential threats to Russia… I’m less familiar with the Russian geography on its eastern side. If they felt they could stop a Chinese invasion without using nukes, I guess they would go for that. But the in-depth defense was really about Germany launching a fast attack on Moscow. Russian ICBMs make that kind of attack suicidal for Germany (assuming they’d bother rearming and somehow decided that invading Russia was a great idea, which feels pretty unlikely in the first place).
It's funny to compare this to recurrent saber rattling by Russians : "We've already taken Berlin once, we can do it again!".
It's just posturing of course, you just don't declare war on a NATO member... (nukes !)
If you're a nuke country invaded by another nuke country, and the invading country hasn't already led with nukes, would you want to use yours, knowing they would respond in kind? So far nuke countries haven't tested that scenario, but it's possible one might.
I think we’d use nukes. Maybe smaller “tactical” ones first, to give the attacking country a chance to withdraw and deescalate but we’d use them. “Perdu pour perdu”, we’d take our invader down with us.
> Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.”
The numbers may be impressive, but mostly in their implausibility. Who writes that China's and Germany's waterway networks have the same total length without having an alarm bell going off in their head?
According to the German Federal Waterway and Shipping Administration, there are roughly 7,300 kilometers of navigable waterways. Even if you grant that the 2,000 miles (≈3,200 kilometers) are only intended to refer to the ≈75% of waterways that are rivers, that's still off by a lot. https://www.gdws.wsv.bund.de/DE/wasserstrassen/01_bundeswasserstrassen/bundeswasserstrassen-node.html
The Chinese governments transportation statistics list total network length for various modes of transportation: http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-05/19/content_5608523.htm
- 146,000 kilometers rail (including 38,000 kilometers high-speed rail)
- 5,198,100 kilometers road (including 161,000 kilometers highways)
- 127,700 kilometers waterways
That seems more realistic to me. It also checks out with Wikipedia's list of countries by waterways length which also gives different numbers for the US (40,230 kilometers) and France (8,501 kilometers). The Arab world is not a country, but I'd expect Iraq's 4,600 kilometers to be included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_waterways_length
Read charitably, maybe Zeihan's figures were limited to some special category of waterway (maybe those suitable for very large ships?). But considering other weird claims (like southern China having "ports, but no rivers"—the Pearl River Delta would like to have a word) I'm more inclined to believe Zeihan just didn't put much effort into verifying the geographic facts he uses in his grand narrative.
And the claim that Japan lacks water ways is pretty funny too. Yes, they don't have large rivers, but maybe that's because most of japanese territory is within 50km of the see ?
I didn't check the figures about how much waterway there is, but just on how much they're used. It looks like Japan and Europe ship far more goods domestically by water than the United States, while the United States mainly uses rail: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/
(That said, I assumed that the claim about southern China having "ports, but no rivers" was somehow saying that the Pearl River isn't particularly navigable for shipping beyond its delta - I have no idea whether or not that's actually true, but it's plausible to me.)
"“the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.”
That is a statement that makes you think. Specifically, it make you think that the Nile alone stretches more than 500 miles from the Delta to the Aswan Dam, and I'm pretty sure boats have navigated their way up and down it for the last five thousand years. Does Egypt not count as part of the Arab world? What does the writer mean by "navigable"?
I wonder if the term "temperate zone" isn't doing a lot of invisible work here; if what he means is that "the entirety of the Arab world has but 120 (miles of navigable temperate-zone rivers)".
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some special pleading was going on; my sources are greatly outdated (Mark Twain) but the Mississippi was a pain to navigate because of its constantly shifting course due to carving out the soft earth of the river banks along its course. It seems like the river system is still hugely important for US commerce, and that it is the responsibility of the US Army Corps of Engineers to maintain that state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River_System#Flooding
So the Mississippi system needs a lot of federal government intervention to keep it going, and there is no reason why states elsewhere shouldn't do the same for their own river systems, if the need is "get our products from site A to port B where they can be shipped off for export".
America does have a lot of natural advantages, much of which are because it was settled and developed much later than the rest of the world, as well as sheer size.
I haven't read all the comments so sorry if someone else addressed it but the demographic argument bugs me. Especially as its supposed interplay with savings/interest rates.
Japan is ahead of us (Europe and USA) in its aging and, granted, Europe will get older faster than the USA. Are Japan interest rates rocketing upwards as its elderly population start de-saving?
Nope. Their interest rates are still sub zero, significantly below US ones. And so is Europe for that matter.
Is this a nitpick? Maybe but it shows that its demographic/economic model is wrong.
The reviewer is clearly a supply sider and I'm a post-Keynesian/institutional economist so we're unlikely to see eye to eye on the most important motors of growth, past and present, but the failed prediction of rising Japanese interest rates should be enough to make us all cautious about Zeihan's sweeping predictions.
That said, as a non-US professional investor, I focus almost exclusively on investing in the US out of choice. And that's partly because of generational safety concerns (and rates of return available). So, you know, that ought to be some kind of Taleb-like support for Zeihan on my side... :)
There are more valuable commodities other than oil. Like rare earths.
I am very skeptical of these type of predictions. So many moving parts. Just looking purely at oil, that is already brutally difficult to predict in the long run. Almost nobody predicted the enormous shale oil production in North America, and how low they could bring costs. Full cycle break even costs of $25-45 per barrel! That stuff was unthinkable 10 years ago!
Although a lot of these oil fields are in decline. Only major field that has yet to peak is the Permian. This is a good source to play around with it, lots of data:
https://shaleprofile.com/us-tight-oil-gas-projection/
To add here, I think at $100 oil there are more oil reserves globally for the authors projections to not play out for at least another 50 years. Peak oil has a long long trail of dead bodies. The amount of shale oil around the planet is probably humongous. In China as well. The only issue is that a lot of it is in remoter areas. That is really the big advantage of especially Texas shale oil, it is surrounded by loads of infrastructure and water access. But if it really gets that scarce, they will find a way to get that out of the ground at $100-150 per barrel.
Did the author mention buying oil stocks? I can't think of a better investment if what he says will really play out. He must be loaded up on oil stocks. Especially the way they are still priced now.
Tight oil has never been profitable, since it seems to act as the marginal supplier.
And it's not clear whether the US "success" can be replicated elsewhere - there are so many positive factors there, that even another country adopting USA's mineral rights and financing seems to be unlikely to result in the same oil rush.
Permian shale producers are profitable at $25-50 oil. So at $100 oil these guys would be printing money. OXY is slightly better than break even at current prices, Pioneer will generate 20% profit margins, Diamondback 30% etc.
That is why oil is not at $100 anymore. And why oil is in backwardation currently. My guess is that at $100 oil there are enormous shale reserves in the US alone. At $55-60 WTI prices shale can slowly raise production for another decade or two at least.
I'm talking about the US tight oil industry in general, which has not had a *single* profitable quarter ever ! Even when oil was around $100/barrel circa 2005-2015 !!
Oil is not at $100 any more because the Saudis tried to snuff out the US tight oil by increasing production, unsuccessfully... so far.
I really don't see where those enormous tight oil (not shale = kerogen) reserves would come from, and since the best spots have been already played out, and since depletion rates are so high for tight oil, and since US tight oil producers have slowed down their drilling, I very much doubt that the US crude+condensates oil production is *ever* going to come back to those ~13 Mb/d levels from 2019-2020...
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
Based on this review and not having read the book, I'll cut it some slack in that it comes from 2014.
But oh dear, this reminds *so* much of Francis Fukayama's "The End of History", where nothing more was ever going to happen again because now we were all fat and happy and Western Liberal Democracy was the all-conquering model that was changing all of the nations of the earth.
There is a lot here that makes me go "He got it *nearly* right". I have to choke a bit reading such nuggets as blaming the fall of Egypt on "stagnation as the increasingly centralized government devoted more labor to monument building rather than technological progress, eventually being conquered by seafaring people seeking to rule the Mediterranean".
Uhhhhh... the entire Sea Peoples thing is something still argued over, initial presentation of them on Egyptian records were as a band of pirates rather than a united, unified population; they seem to have been comprised of several nations or origins; and as for "seeking to rule the Mediterranean", it's hard to say that they had that sort of end-goal in sight, rather than reacting to things like environmental pressure - think in the later Roman Empire, the waves of migrations by barbarian tribes that encroached on Roman territory, which were driven by those tribes being displaced themselves by others and forced out of their own territories. The Bronze Age Collapse is a complex matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
As for "America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low", well colour me surprised. America is the one that has the romantic notion of the open road, of the endless highways, of possibility because of the ease of packing up and moving elsewhere to follow dreams and find your fortune. Route 66 from East to West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUYf6cekMA - America is the car civilisation, the one that developed highways and brought the advanced concept to the rest of us.
Water transport is easy and reliable but slow, and could be tricky - see Mark Twain's accounts of learning to be a pilot on the Mississippi, which because it changed course of often, could be a different route from one trip to the other. Road and air travel took over from it - who is going to travel by boat from the East Coast to the West if they need to get there fast?
As to the idea that America will do fine because it can pull up the drawbridge and fend for itself, I think the recent pandemic and the disruption of supply chains showed how that works out.
I agree that the various competitors set up in past analyses as replacements for the USA have fallen (see the hysteria at times during the 80s about the threat of Japan, which is ironic in the face of this book's claim that "better technology makes you a winner" - Japan's lead in technology was what was going to make it the replacement superpower over the sclerotic US) and I don't think American hegemony is going to topple soon.
But on the other hand, I am sure the various empires also, at the height of their power and influence, also thought they could never fall because of all the advantages they possessed. 19th century Britain, at the height of its Empire, often looked at the USA without realising that it was looking upon not alone its competitor but its replacement; even post the Second World War Britain was still claiming a place in the world it no longer owned - see the above mentioned "The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, which concluded with the Americans intentionally and publicly humiliating the English and French".
As to the claims that America never bothered empire-building because it didn't need to, well, ask Hawaii and the Philippines about that.
I would expect that Mr. Zeihan moderated his opinions in the later books; the "look inside" on Amazon for his 2020 book shows that he still believes Geography Is King and still seems, on that glimpse, to imagine a USA withdrawn from the world behind its own borders but still the biggest, strongest, and safest. I don't know if he takes into account that the USA is also a consumer: https://www.bea.gov/index.php/news/2021/us-international-trade-goods-and-services-march-2021
The 2020 foreword mentions that we should be thinking about mass starvation in China; what about the USA food supply? California is a huge agricultural producer, but it depends on two things - water and cheap labour - either or both of which may dry up https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-california-s-thirst-groundwater-now-state-hopes-refill-its-aquifers
His most recent book is about what will the rest of the world do, scrambling around for a new order when the USA pulls away. Well, this has happened before - the US became the big dog as a successor to previous collapses - and there's no reason it shouldn't happen again, with things smoothing out eventually. Granted, it will be a very bumpy period until that happens.
But already he has modified his opinions, it would seem, from 2014 "America will continue to be the boss of everywhere" to 2020 "Insular America will leave the rest of the world to its own devices". Has he considered "America itself will one day be replaced by a successor empire, and we should think about what that will mean"?
I once amused myself, inspired by an episode of ST:TNG, with starting a story about the publication of a book by a very third-rate historian that was a summation of "the glory of our empire" and a justification of why it had panned out the way it did that this particular rule was the inevitable outcome of history. The irony of the story would be that literally the day after this book, which forecast that "our glorious empire will continue like this forever and ever", First Contact with an alien civilisation, more advanced, would be made - and the old certainties would be turned on their heads due to the completely different cultural and social assumptions of the aliens (as well as their advanced tech).
I never got anywhere with the story, getting side-tracked by the worldbuilding to back it up (I now understand why the Romans had a goddess of hinges because once you start, you can't just stop at the great numinous cosmic forces, you can descend down through the levels to the most nit-picky level of details) but I am being reminded here of my over-confident historian by this review.
"Zeihan gives us a story of the Ottoman Empire entering a prolonged decline as deepwater navigation technologies took off in the fourteenth century. These technologies enabled the European powers (first Portugal and Spain, and then England) to capture increasing shares of trade with Asia, dropping prices in Europe and depriving the Ottomans of much of the income to which they had grown accustomed."
As for the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this is something that happened over a long time scale and there is apparently now a revisionist school that refutes the idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Decline_Thesis
Even if we go with the traditional account, it wasn't the 14th century that saw this happen, it wasn't until the 19th that there was talk of "the sick man", and looking forward to European powers carving up the empire between them, and even the economic decline attributed above to Portugal becoming a maritime power in South Asia doesn't seem to be so steep; the Ottoman Empire found new goods and new markets:
"The discovery of new maritime trade routes by Western European states allowed them to avoid the Ottoman trade monopoly. The Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 initiated a series of Ottoman-Portuguese naval wars in the Indian Ocean throughout the 16th century. Despite the growing European presence in the Indian Ocean, Ottoman trade with the east continued to flourish. Cairo, in particular, benefitted from the rise of Yemeni coffee as a popular consumer commodity. As coffeehouses appeared in cities and towns across the empire, Cairo developed into a major center for its trade, contributing to its continued prosperity throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century".
There have always been prognostications of decline and fall, here's a cartoon about the death of the Chinese Dragon and the various powers squabbling over its corpse, and here today is China as a world power: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-co3aFyoxtdA/Ux0J4meCmUI/AAAAAAAAABQ/aBxzST9Gcpw/s1600/boxer-rebellion-china_cartoon.gif
Then again, on the other hand, if he's right about the primacy of deepwater navigation - ah, so that's why Jeff Bezos and the other ultra-rich are building even bigger superyachts! 😁https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-05-07/jeff-bezos-s-new-superyacht-heralds-roaring-market-for-big-boats
Zeihan claims that « the only successful across-ocean/continental-scope invasion in world history was pulled off by America, not against it. »
If you count "before it was America" there was a *devastatingly* successful trans-Atlantic invasion going the other direction, but that one was helped along quite dramatically by a quirk of epidemiology.
One of the things that surprised the author was Zeihan's description of America's role in WW2, but as far as I can tell, that belief - that once the US entered the war, the Allied victory was inevitable, absent some truly amazing screwups - was pretty common, especially among the better-educated elites. According to his history of the war, Churchill's first reaction to Pearl Harbor was to send a message of support and sympathy to FDR; his second reaction was to get a good night's sleep, since things were finally going his way, and he thought Germany's decision to declare war on the US was the worst it ever made.
Similarly, Isoroku Yamamoto, one of the Japanese navy's leading lights, repeatedly and consistently argued against the war; he was the architect of Pearl Harbor (as "the only way we might be able to win this"); his famous quote, in the form given on Wikipedia, was "I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years." America's industrial power was so overwhelming compared to its rivals that the main Axis hope was for a short war, gotten either by knocking Russia out swiftly or by destroying American sea power so decisively it was forced to make peace, but though both prospects were *possible*, neither was all that likely.
This is an interesting book, albeit a controversial one, and definitely one of my favorite reviews so far.
To make a *very* tenuous connection between this post and what is happening tonight (Eurovision grand final), one of the best comments I've seen on Tumblr:
"To quote my housemate's work chat: I am all over Malta like an Ottoman armada" 😁
The importance of navigable waterways surprises me, as I was under the impression they had become much less important. Why are the cities founded on the Mississippi River, such as St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans, in such decline if this waterway is so important to the economy? The same can be said about Mid-West cities placed along Great Lakes. And as (I think) someone below was getting at, The Jones Act demonstrates we don't value the potential of the coasts to serve as internal waterways. For instance, when the Colonial Pipeline was shut down recently, the alternative for shipping oil to the East Coast was by truck, not because shipping by water wouldn't be theoretically cheaper, but because the US doesn't legally allow it.
I don't understand the following: "(Due to extensive waterways) we get cheap transportation for 'Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars.'" The US ships Texas oil cheaply around its interior through man-made pipelines not waterways. I know less about shipping steel, peaches and cars, but it would be interesting to know the breakdown of how much is shipped by river vs rail or truck.
I don't doubt that a lot of commerce is still done by riverway, but as a percentage of internal shipping, how important is it?
According to Wikipedia "630 million tons of cargo valued at over $73 billion annually" move on the inland waterways of the United States. It also says "According to research by the Tennessee Valley Authority, this cargo moves at an average transportation savings of $10.67 per ton over the cost of shipping by alternative modes. This translates into over $7 billion annually in transportation savings to the economy of the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_waterways_of_the_United_States#Commodities
Thanks. So the savings is a small percentage of GDP. Sounds like Zeihan is wrong about the importance of navigable waterways to a modern economy.
I *think* these figures are by ton-mile, but it looks like in the US, domestic waterways account for 13% of shipping, while in Japan it's 36% and in Europe it's 41%: https://www.masterresource.org/railroads/us-most-advanced-rail-world/
That suggests that he got this bit entirely backwards.
I really hate to be the first one to bring something like this up, and I truly apologize if this is not a site where this sort of thing is allowed, but demographics? The US is not in such a fantastic position.
It is true that we have more young people per capita than some other first world and near-first nations. But they are, um, well, not traditional first world workers.
Something like half of Americans will be Hispanic or black. The working-age population will be even more than the population overall. These are not people who occupy the upper reaches of the world economy in power, prestige, or importance. Nor are nations that are gifted in these populations exceptional performers in either current production or growth. Within the US, some regions that are heavily Hispanic are doing well, but it is not the Hispanics who occupy these highly productive positions. Blacks and Hispanics are not heavily represented in the lower echelons of exceptionally profitable companies, so it is unlikely that they are the exploited workforce upon whom highly paid whites and Asians depend.
It is likely, though technically uncertain, that increasing blacks and Hispanics in STEM jobs will improve output, though there will be considerable ‘demand’ for capable ones. The American low tax, low regulation system may not be exceptionally stable when a sizable majority of the workforce cannot benefit from high-end jobs, and when the majority of eligible voters do not understand laissez faire arguments.
Politically, we have saw the instability of populace and elite disagreeing strenuously with the election of Trump and his attempt at governing. Currently, the new administration has been a boon to political-class blacks, it will likely continue to disappoint lower-wage workers. Is America not only more stable, but obviously and indisputably more stable than China? We have more experience with democracy and (small ‘r’) Republican government than China, but around half of Americans will not be from first world populations.
I’ll leave off with the fact that our meritocratic system is not under assault in our most non-Hawaiian diverse state, the meritocracy in California colleges is dead. Without the SAT, or a functionally identical test, we will not be able to funnel the brightest to positions where their intelligence has the most social utility. In a diverse society, where the majority cannot directly benefit from meritocracy, does it have much chance of returning?
> I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite - SA
Please don't: first-past-the-post is the worst system.
Or do, but ask people to then fill out a ballot using a near-ideal voting system* and let's see how the result of that compares with the FPTP result. (* my idea of near-ideal is score voting on a scale of 0 to 10 with an option to abstain on a per-candidate basis; you then compute the average of these scores, and the variance could help detect 'near ties'—candidates that are not clearly distinguishable statistically.)
Comparing to my own models, I think Zeihan focuses on the right things (i.e. demographics and geography), and gets the big picture largely right as a result. But a lot of the specific analysis seems wrong.
Probably the biggest issue is in overweighting the importance of geography in the economics of developed countries. Large capital investments in infrastructure (i.e. rail and road) can make most river transport obsolete; I'm pretty sure the Mississippi river system doesn't actually carry that large a fraction of US inland freight these days. However, the capital investment required for that infrastructure is *big*: the list of largest capital investment areas in the US these days is roughly (1) real estate (i.e. buildings), (2) power grid, (3) shale oil wells, (4) rail and roads, (5) data infrastructure, so rail and road is definitely on the short list of major capital sinks. For e.g. Africa, this poses a big problem: the transportation infrastructure needed to modernize would be extremely expensive, and they don't have the rivers to modernize without it. So inland geography is definitely important as a determinant of industrialization and connection to global trade *for poor countries*, but it matters less once a country has made the developmental jump. This is especially relevant to the predictions for China - I doubt that their inland geography will be that large a factor, since infrastructure investments will substitute for navigable rivers.
Ocean access remains a big deal even for developed countries - the post correctly points out the order-of-magnitude difference in transportation cost for ocean vs overland. But ports are another place where capital investment can largely substitute for natural geography, so long as a country borders an ocean at all. In fact these days, in the container-shipping era, large capital outlays are needed for efficient ports anyway; I doubt that dredging is enough of a relative cost increase to block most such projects.
The review also complains about Zeihan's invocations of demand-side reasoning, and I basically endorse those complaints. Demand-side problems, to the extent that they make sense to worry about at all, are short-term; the topic here is decidedly long-term. The loss of savings/investment as demographics invert is the right problem to focus on; that will turn into a relatively higher cost of capital. (And for political purposes, the increase in elderly people dependent on entitlements and the relative decrease of working people to pay for them is the right problem to focus on.)
Interestingly, I came across echoes of this book in the years following its release but never the book itself. For example, this article by the private security firm Stratfor covers much of the geopolitical arguments about why the US became as strong as it is, and even has a similar title ("The Inevitable Empire"):
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire
I feel like these geopolitical tools + basic demographics + reading Guns Germs and Steel just about covers all the knowledge in The Accidental Superpower (or at least what's mentioned here in the review), albeit very chaotically. Zeihan does seem to organize it all in a "tell it like it is" manner and presents a general toolkit for long-term analysis of global politics. Kudos for the great review.
Yeah, it seems Zeihan really leaned on Friedman and his opinions for his work...though I understand it, if you study geopolitics, then this seems like the logical conclusion...
> Some will merely decline, as they have some capacity to address challenges (Brazil, India, Canada). Some will cope (UK, France, Peru, Philippines). A few will join the US as “masters of the chaos,” as they have favorable geographies and other advantages (Australia, Argentina, Angola, Turkey, Indonesia, Uzbekistan).
This is in nitpick territory, but why would Zeihan think Canada will merely decline? Off the top of my head, it seems to have many of the traits that Zeihan's model favours - most of Canada's key population centers are on navigable rivers (either the St. Lawrence or Frasier River) with a number of ports on either rivers, plus one in Prince George (connected via railroad to the rest of the continent). It also borders 3 oceans, and has large reserves of fresh water and minerals. Demographics are aging for sure but heavily propped up by immigration with less political backlash than the US.
*Prince Rupert, not Prince George. Oops.
"Then there’s something like the CNBC effect. Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions. Some people go so far as to say that it’s the same reason that Wall Street provides market research; the demand is there, so someone will sell it."
Because markets are anti-inductive, isn't it possible that these analyses would be meaningful if no one had published them?
I enjoy the fact that I'm reading this piece in the same year that Singapore granted the first regulatory approval for the sale of lab-grown meat (cellular agriculture), to be manufactured domestically. Just because we're nowhere near Drexler territory doesn't mean countries can't find a way to reduce the need to ship stuff from place to place. 2030 is close, but there is a *lot* of work going into developing more flexible and distributed manufacturing and recycling infrastructure over the next 20 years to improve sustainability, enable adaptation to a more diverse mix of chemical feedstocks and changing regulatory demands, and allow more frequent changing to the mix of products produced. Between synbio/fermentation, chemical recycling, electrification of transportation, movement towards renewable fuels, plant- and cell-based meats, and so on, countries by 2050 could, if they want, have much less dependence on the import of physical goods. Zeihan's transportation argument mostly relates to materials and consumable goods. I doubt the difference in transportation cost matters much for long-lasting capital goods, or at all for digital goods.
I suspect we're going to see a lot more local toll manufacturing and licensing/royalty business models where the people developing the IP still make as much as they do now, but the physical production happens much closer to the end use point. Not for everything, by any means. Lots of high-value goods really do require highly specialized production tools/infrastructure/materials/etc. But much more than ever before.
The summary part of this review seemed good, but the critical analysis part was rather lacking.
"I’ve never understood why people find this idea persuasive. Most of us would consume all the things if we could."... would we? Once our basic needs are fulfilled, additional things don't really increase our happiness; incentives for wanting (and working for) additional things need to come from culture - e.g. having a new car every year will make people admire you in some cultures, and will make people think you're tacky and foolish in others.
Trying to do long term geopolitical projections without any concept of HBD is a bit like trying to do long term astrophysical projections without any concept of atoms and fusion. He predictably exaggerates geography's direct effects to pick up the slack. I'll push back on some of those.
>"the only successful across-ocean/continental-scope invasion in world history was pulled off by America, not against it."
Only if you ignore the conquistadors, the colonization of Australia, and the scramble for Africa. Advantages in technological/human capital overcome geographical defense bonuses as often in real history as in Civ4.
>"all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000."
Quoting Encyclopedia Britannica: "China's water transport potential is great, but it is still far from being fully developed. Nonetheless, China has more than 75,000 miles (some 125,000 km) of navigable inland waterways, the most extensive system of any country in the world."
It is not explained why he counted only "temperate-zone rivers". Half of china is south of the temperate zone, and the southern half has more rivers. Seems like he arbitrarily excluded the most river-y part of China.
>Blaming Africa's underdevelopment on its lack of harbors
A cursory glance at satellite photos on google maps shows an abundance of natural harbors in the 1200km stretch of west africa between Dakar and Monrovia -- a much higher density of harbors than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and many of them connect to rivers that go inland. Yet all these countries have GDP per capita below $1000 versus the subsaharan africa average of $1600. And anyway, harbors are not hard to construct artificially by piling up rocks to block the waves.
>"Almost all of the countries along China’s oil import route are also oil importers. All already have more than enough naval power necessary to interdict supertankers that go somewhere they don’t wish them to."
None of the countries along the route from the Persian gulf to China have anywhere near the economic might of China at present. China could probably build a large navy quickly if needed, just like how the US 20x'd its navy in a few years during WWII.
>predicting that economic interdependence for resources will lead to wars
I think this is exactly backwards. Economic interdependence and trade means playing a lots of positive-sum games with lots of other countries and having a lot more to lose in the event that you piss off those countries. See Robert Wright's Nonzero etc. (OTOH maybe the dependence gives politicians some levers to pull if they want to provoke a war that they wouldn't otherwise have the popular support to initiate, such as the US blockade of Japanese oil imports forcing Japan to attack pearl harbor, flipping US public opinion overnight. But I think this sort of thing is probably far outweighed by the positive-sum games.)
> Predicting China will balkanize because of mumble mumble geography.
China is fortunate to be 92% ethnically han chinese. Thus any attempted breakaway along ethnic lines would be far too weak to succeed. If not along ethnic lines, it's not clear what rallying flag would unify the rebels. Most breakaways in the last 100 years have been along ethnic lines.
> Predicting that Angola and Uzbekistan will prosper more than China and Russia due to mumble mumble geography.
If Angola and Uzbekistan end up richer than Russia and China despite the huge IQ gaps, I will donate half my net worth to malaria prevention.
Brief review-of-the-review:
All the right pieces are here-- the argument of the book presented cogently, the case made for the author having it right, and the skepticism noted that people who make these kinds of claims tend to be hacks. A solid review; unfortunately I just don't find the topic to be that interesting and I have strong priors against analysis of this kind being useful (to me at least). Still, it was easy and enjoyable reading.
If rivers are so important, can't China just terraform itself to have better rivers? They surely have the industry, the huge workforce and the command economy to do it.
That's called a canal, and China does have them.
> compare his comment on Africa, which has 16,000 miles of coast, “but in reality it has only ten locations with bays of sufficient protective capacity to justify port construction” with one on Texas, which “alone has thirteen world-class deepwater ports, only half of which see significant use, and room for at least three times more”
I'm confused by this. South Africa alone looks to have at least six ports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_and_harbours_in_South_Africa
Is he saying there are only four around the rest of Africa? Or that there are more than 10 ports around Africa, but only 10 are justified? Or are there multiple ports per "location" (and this doesn't apply to Texas)? Or...?
I can well believe the general point here is accurate - South Africa's coastline is in the region of 5x Texas' - but it feels like it's probably overselling it?
(This isn't necessarily a fault of the book, which may have included more detail, or of the review, which can't include everything.)
Lovely misinformation about river ways. China has 110k km, holding the first place, and Russia with 102k keeps the second.