Good analysis, I agree. Zeihan is good at creating confident-sounding narratives that seem reasonable on the surface, but often missing deeper, important consi

Good analysis, I agree. Zeihan is good at creating confident-sounding narratives that seem reasonable on the surface, but often missing deeper, important considerations like this. The main generator of innovation is how many clever people you have hacking and tinkering with new ideas and trying to reify them. It's primarily a weighted numbers game, with education, cultural work ethic, and poltical-economic system adding some weight to more favorable outcomes. As you observe, much of the coming population culling in China will be people less able to contribute to that dynamic. What's left will be a smaller but still immense population of people, ~3x the US and ~2x Europe, a greater proportion of which are able to contribute as innovation generators.