The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
by Peter Zeihan
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2023-06-19
It’s all about predicting the future, which is probably impossible, but it was still fun to read. I’m not in a good position to gauge how credible this guy is. I think the book came out just before GPT3, so who knows, maybe AI will save us all. I’m really interested to see how history plays out over my lifetime.
Thesis: 1980-2015 was probably the peak of civilization. The world industrialized and increased lifespan, but at the expense of falling birth rates. Now as few young workers have to support many old retirees, economic growth will pretty much halt, globalization will reverse, and most of the world’s quality of life will fall.
The causal chain according to the author: America had the only intact navy after WWII -> America protected trade with its allies as a way of fighting the cold war -> slow, cheap naval global trade became safe -> globalization really got going -> countries really specialized and became less self sufficient -> industrialization and urbanization happened all over the world -> fewer people had babies -> we’re heading toward a population collapse -> productivity will go down -> just-in-time global supply chains prone to shocks will be disrupted -> countries will become more protectionist -> slow, cheap naval global trade will become dangerous again -> everyone’s economies will break, mass starvation, lower standards of living, etc
That’s a lot of assumptions!
Random tidbits from the book:
- civilizations were successful on the basis of geography plus technology (for example, England as an island nation plus the technology of deep water navy meant they could control global trade routes)
- globalization, industrialization and urbanization led to lower birth rates
- lower birth rates and longer lifespan mean more productivity for a few decades, followed by population crash
- Many places can only be lived in because of globalization. Modern cities rely on uninterrupted access to the entire world