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This year, like so many others I'm sure, I found Peter Zeihan's books, which have been really eye opening in terms of what has happened and what's coming. It's

This year, like so many others I'm sure, I found Peter Zeihan's books, which have been really eye opening in terms of what has happened and what's coming. It's not perfect, and at times it comes out a bit gloomier than expected, but it's certainly illuminating on a lot of topics. I highly recommend his books and videos as much as possible. Edited to add link. And also, I'd say that even though climate change impacts lots of regions of the world, fossil fuel is what has enabled our massive growth this past century. And renewable energies are not even remotely close in terms of providing the energy for that kind of growth. Not just because there's not enough of them, but because we'd need more mining than this planet can provide us with in order to meet those needs. So what I'm trying to say is that if you're concerned about falling demographics, better start embracing fossil fuel more. Either that, or come up with a different economic system in which there are fewer of us and we still manage to avoid famines and reduce poverty around the world. Demographics: https://youtu.be/xD-pj6i4b8A https://youtu.be/xD-pj6i4b8A Here's one on agriculture: https://youtu.be/myjLrulhMzk https://youtu.be/myjLrulhMzk

causi 4y ago
His ideas are very emotionally attractive but I think he falls down in two big areas. 1. The degree to which compliance with intellectual property laws constrains certain societies. Sure, China can't domestically produce bleeding-edge chips without using Western intellectual property, but Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. 2. That nations will go back to high seas piracy and active trade disruption the way they did two hundred years ago. He mentions repeatedly the US no longer operates the type of navy required to patrol the ocean ("we don't need ten carriers, we need a thousand destroyers") but at the same time says the only thing stopping half the nations on earth from attacking the trade routes of the other half is the US navy. Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible.
- rapsey 4y ago
  > Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. Bleeding edge chips are a giant international effort requiring tech from Europe, US, Taiwan and Japan. China has been cut out from that market and simply stealing and starting up all of it domestically is just not realistic. It is a decades long task needing hundreds of billions. > Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible. Failed states don't have the ability to control their population and they can turn to piracy like Sudan.
  - causi 4y ago
    Bleeding edge chips are a giant international effort requiring tech from Europe, US, Taiwan and Japan. China has been cut out from that market The more isolated economies are the less of a difference it makes. How much would your ability to contribute to the economy be damaged if you had to use a phone/computer whose performance was five years out of date? I'm guessing not a lot.
    - jfim 4y ago
      For general development not that much, but for cutting edge machine learning research, it would be a pretty significant hit.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  They've been trying to steal it and produce it themselves for years. Are they somehow going to get better at it now? Nobody cares about international scorn unless you target someone who matters or that someone who matters cares about. During the pandemic planes were legally and openly highjacked and their contents stolen because the country needed it for their population and nobody batted an eye and there was no international scorn. And I'm not talking about Somalia, I'm talking about first world countries.
- dirtyid 4y ago
  >he falls down in two big area He falls down frequently when trying to integrate the politics in geoPOLITICS. Which is half the model. Apart from US, he's an generalist that's not a subject matter in other major/minor countries to make useful extrapolations from. There's a reason he's not invited to any prominent think tanks to talk - he's a former Stratfor marketting man trained to sell reports/analysis/books to wealthy Murican exceptionalist crowd. Zeihan's arguments are more based off geography and demographics, with a dusting of politics. He'll never finish writing his books if he had to actually delve deep into relevant politics instead of making course conclusions from reading a few maps and pyramid charts. Distilling some of his US vs PRC arguments to essence, On paper: US blessed with most miles of connected, sheltered riverways, has deep shores for ports, geographically protected and access to two shores. Meanwhile PRC: dangerous rivers must be linked through huge expensive infra effort/bribes between provinces or PRC collapses. PRC would trade networks would disappear without USN and can be contained via island chain. Reality: US waterways under developed after billions of army corp engineer dollars, still only good for bulk cargo, affected by climate induced draught. PRC has highest miles + utilization of interior waterways by far. US has shitty ports, PRC plurarity of largest advanced ports in the world, because country with good infra capabilities can dredge/engineer, and no one needs 100,000 deep ports. Both countries do resources transfters between interior regions for political stability. PRC leeching off USN =/= dependant, PLAN blue water surface fleet can easily take over her own leg of global anti piracy duties. Increase advancedment in conventional long range strikes = fortress America will be vunerable and the underpinnings of US primacy will be gone, likely in the short term, if not already. Sufficient technology at scale (politics) has power to invalidates advantagages/disadvantages of geography. Or the big one on demography. On paper: PRC will collapse in the next/previous 1/2/5/10 years due to crippling pop pyramid. Reality is for purpose of cultivating "super powers" - how Zeihan ostensibly frames his analysis - PRC probably has the _best_ demography in perhaps human history in terms of great powers competition. Greatest collective + abundance of high skilled talent is being generated for high tech / high value development (around OECD combined, more than US can generate and absorb via immigration). Like how Asian tigers kept growing after their demographic collapse. Meanwhile declining net population = less import dependencies which enhance strategic posture. Demographic dependencies ratios get mitigated by some of the highest house hold savings rate with little expectation for onerous safety nets supported by more industrial automation capacity than next 15 industrial powers combined. On the flip side American primacy is sustained by being able to, develop/maintain unrivalled military, attract talent in numbers that are competitive, and do so while preseving social serenity, welfare/QoL, which I arguely she's doing poorly/failing at. In many ways, politics > geography and even demography, especially for large countries with excess people.
DavidPiper 4y ago
I too found Zeihan earlier in the year on YouTube, and I just finished The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning. I agree that regardless of what you think of his work, it's well worth exposing yourself to. For my own opinions: - The demographic data and logic is really hard to argue with. - The "this is what happens when systems collapse" scenarios also seem quite logical and well thought-out. - The collapses themselves I'm more optimistic (pessimistic?) about though. In the same way that human incompetence is often blamed for progress not er... progressing fast enough, I also think the same will happen in reverse. - I also don't think he offers enough weight to (generally non-American) economic systems as a way of stabilising an economic turnaround as population falls. The bit that I'm struggling with though is how to actually use the information and ideas he expresses: - If you knew that, in aggregate, the world will never again (in our lifetimes) experience the economic growth we've seen in the last 100 years, what would you do differently? Personally I think the "in aggregate" part is extremely important. I suppose if you're able to, you have to find the industries/societies/etc that are growing (or stabilising, as we'll have to do), and become part of those. That's likely to be a very difficult thing for a very large number of people to do though. (And as you can probably tell, reading his work tends to leave you in an unusual mental place for a while. Which is one of the reasons I recommend it. But it does trigger a "think carefully here" reaction in my brain, similar to scams, weird internet forms and casinos. I just haven't figured out why yet.)
jemmyw 4y ago
I've watched quite a bit of Zeihan. He's interesting for sure, but some of his conclusions are really barmy, especially about the motivations of governments. The reason he thinks Russia does things is nonsense. Putin might hero worship Peter the Great but that doesn't mean the Russians think that way in general now about defense (and he always talks of them in that homogeneous way, "the Russians"). Obviously he is correct where the data shows a direction, although I've seen videos where he's talking about a graph and the numbers on it clearly don't align with his narrative. Where I believe he really falls down is that changes cause changes and people don't just do nothing and carry on. In particular when talking economic and social collapse, economies, people and governments will drastically alter things to prevent collapse. And there is a huge amount of momentum in our systems.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  This is feeling which I am getting from him as well. His videos have great comedic value, but most of his predictions about country X are expecting that country X will do nothing to mitigate it and ram in the wall, full speed.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  > I've seen videos where he's talking about a graph and the numbers on it clearly don't align with his narrative. Can you cite an example for this one? I don't remember having seen that.
singularity2001 4y ago
renewable energies are not even remotely close in terms of providing the energy for that kind of growth Solar energy grows at an exponential rate which will provide 90% of the global energy in 2040 and 200% a few years later. If authors fail at one basic axiom I usually discard the rest of their "conclusions".
- thrown_22 4y ago
  It's easy to grow exponentially when you're going from 3% to 6%.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  It won't. Because the resources are going to be more expensive, and between "going green" (if they can even afford it) but being miserable, or burning coal (or gas if you're lucky) but improving your living standards, people will choose the latter. There's a reason Germany is burning lignite now after spending billions on renewable energies.

causi 4y ago

His ideas are very emotionally attractive but I think he falls down in two big areas. 1. The degree to which compliance with intellectual property laws constrains certain societies. Sure, China can't domestically produce bleeding-edge chips without using Western intellectual property, but Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. 2. That nations will go back to high seas piracy and active trade disruption the way they did two hundred years ago. He mentions repeatedly the US no longer operates the type of navy required to patrol the ocean ("we don't need ten carriers, we need a thousand destroyers") but at the same time says the only thing stopping half the nations on earth from attacking the trade routes of the other half is the US navy. Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible.

rapsey 4y ago
> Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. Bleeding edge chips are a giant international effort requiring tech from Europe, US, Taiwan and Japan. China has been cut out from that market and simply stealing and starting up all of it domestically is just not realistic. It is a decades long task needing hundreds of billions. > Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible. Failed states don't have the ability to control their population and they can turn to piracy like Sudan.
- causi 4y ago
  Bleeding edge chips are a giant international effort requiring tech from Europe, US, Taiwan and Japan. China has been cut out from that market The more isolated economies are the less of a difference it makes. How much would your ability to contribute to the economy be damaged if you had to use a phone/computer whose performance was five years out of date? I'm guessing not a lot.
  - jfim 4y ago
    For general development not that much, but for cutting edge machine learning research, it would be a pretty significant hit.
mrleinad 4y ago
They've been trying to steal it and produce it themselves for years. Are they somehow going to get better at it now? Nobody cares about international scorn unless you target someone who matters or that someone who matters cares about. During the pandemic planes were legally and openly highjacked and their contents stolen because the country needed it for their population and nobody batted an eye and there was no international scorn. And I'm not talking about Somalia, I'm talking about first world countries.
dirtyid 4y ago
>he falls down in two big area He falls down frequently when trying to integrate the politics in geoPOLITICS. Which is half the model. Apart from US, he's an generalist that's not a subject matter in other major/minor countries to make useful extrapolations from. There's a reason he's not invited to any prominent think tanks to talk - he's a former Stratfor marketting man trained to sell reports/analysis/books to wealthy Murican exceptionalist crowd. Zeihan's arguments are more based off geography and demographics, with a dusting of politics. He'll never finish writing his books if he had to actually delve deep into relevant politics instead of making course conclusions from reading a few maps and pyramid charts. Distilling some of his US vs PRC arguments to essence, On paper: US blessed with most miles of connected, sheltered riverways, has deep shores for ports, geographically protected and access to two shores. Meanwhile PRC: dangerous rivers must be linked through huge expensive infra effort/bribes between provinces or PRC collapses. PRC would trade networks would disappear without USN and can be contained via island chain. Reality: US waterways under developed after billions of army corp engineer dollars, still only good for bulk cargo, affected by climate induced draught. PRC has highest miles + utilization of interior waterways by far. US has shitty ports, PRC plurarity of largest advanced ports in the world, because country with good infra capabilities can dredge/engineer, and no one needs 100,000 deep ports. Both countries do resources transfters between interior regions for political stability. PRC leeching off USN =/= dependant, PLAN blue water surface fleet can easily take over her own leg of global anti piracy duties. Increase advancedment in conventional long range strikes = fortress America will be vunerable and the underpinnings of US primacy will be gone, likely in the short term, if not already. Sufficient technology at scale (politics) has power to invalidates advantagages/disadvantages of geography. Or the big one on demography. On paper: PRC will collapse in the next/previous 1/2/5/10 years due to crippling pop pyramid. Reality is for purpose of cultivating "super powers" - how Zeihan ostensibly frames his analysis - PRC probably has the _best_ demography in perhaps human history in terms of great powers competition. Greatest collective + abundance of high skilled talent is being generated for high tech / high value development (around OECD combined, more than US can generate and absorb via immigration). Like how Asian tigers kept growing after their demographic collapse. Meanwhile declining net population = less import dependencies which enhance strategic posture. Demographic dependencies ratios get mitigated by some of the highest house hold savings rate with little expectation for onerous safety nets supported by more industrial automation capacity than next 15 industrial powers combined. On the flip side American primacy is sustained by being able to, develop/maintain unrivalled military, attract talent in numbers that are competitive, and do so while preseving social serenity, welfare/QoL, which I arguely she's doing poorly/failing at. In many ways, politics > geography and even demography, especially for large countries with excess people.

DavidPiper 4y ago

I too found Zeihan earlier in the year on YouTube, and I just finished The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning. I agree that regardless of what you think of his work, it's well worth exposing yourself to. For my own opinions: - The demographic data and logic is really hard to argue with. - The "this is what happens when systems collapse" scenarios also seem quite logical and well thought-out. - The collapses themselves I'm more optimistic (pessimistic?) about though. In the same way that human incompetence is often blamed for progress not er... progressing fast enough, I also think the same will happen in reverse. - I also don't think he offers enough weight to (generally non-American) economic systems as a way of stabilising an economic turnaround as population falls. The bit that I'm struggling with though is how to actually use the information and ideas he expresses: - If you knew that, in aggregate, the world will never again (in our lifetimes) experience the economic growth we've seen in the last 100 years, what would you do differently? Personally I think the "in aggregate" part is extremely important. I suppose if you're able to, you have to find the industries/societies/etc that are growing (or stabilising, as we'll have to do), and become part of those. That's likely to be a very difficult thing for a very large number of people to do though. (And as you can probably tell, reading his work tends to leave you in an unusual mental place for a while. Which is one of the reasons I recommend it. But it does trigger a "think carefully here" reaction in my brain, similar to scams, weird internet forms and casinos. I just haven't figured out why yet.)

jemmyw 4y ago

I've watched quite a bit of Zeihan. He's interesting for sure, but some of his conclusions are really barmy, especially about the motivations of governments. The reason he thinks Russia does things is nonsense. Putin might hero worship Peter the Great but that doesn't mean the Russians think that way in general now about defense (and he always talks of them in that homogeneous way, "the Russians"). Obviously he is correct where the data shows a direction, although I've seen videos where he's talking about a graph and the numbers on it clearly don't align with his narrative. Where I believe he really falls down is that changes cause changes and people don't just do nothing and carry on. In particular when talking economic and social collapse, economies, people and governments will drastically alter things to prevent collapse. And there is a huge amount of momentum in our systems.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
This is feeling which I am getting from him as well. His videos have great comedic value, but most of his predictions about country X are expecting that country X will do nothing to mitigate it and ram in the wall, full speed.
mrleinad 4y ago
> I've seen videos where he's talking about a graph and the numbers on it clearly don't align with his narrative. Can you cite an example for this one? I don't remember having seen that.

singularity2001 4y ago

renewable energies are not even remotely close in terms of providing the energy for that kind of growth Solar energy grows at an exponential rate which will provide 90% of the global energy in 2040 and 200% a few years later. If authors fail at one basic axiom I usually discard the rest of their "conclusions".

thrown_22 4y ago
It's easy to grow exponentially when you're going from 3% to 6%.
mrleinad 4y ago
It won't. Because the resources are going to be more expensive, and between "going green" (if they can even afford it) but being miserable, or burning coal (or gas if you're lucky) but improving your living standards, people will choose the latter. There's a reason Germany is burning lignite now after spending billions on renewable energies.