“There will never be more children alive on the Earth than there is today.”

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.

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.

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.

Can you cite an example for this one? I don't remember having seen that.

There's a reason Germany is burning lignite now after spending billions on renewable energies.

Having children is awesome but it is also a hard work and quite costly. It would be quite hard to compel modern people have 3+ children.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria

Assuming they don't keep doing what they are doing and raise the retirement age.

I doubt I'll live to whatever the retirement age is, by then.

All retirement models are like that. Doesn't matter how many millions of dollars the old people have, if you are on an island with 10 workers and 50 old people, the old people are screwed.

> Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more.

I can't believe people use that outdated 1900s era argument despite it being proved completely wrong time and time over.

It was true at some point but has been wrong since sometime after ww2

If you can privately educate every child one-to-one for the same cost of sending them to a kindergarten then something is seriously wrong with the economics of school funding. Simple economies of scale should mean you're not going to get much more than 1/10th of what it actually costs, right?

Today, we can see the re-emergence of national boundaries, with: Brexit, the Russian invasion, and protectionist competition between the US and China.

The syrian mass migration to Europe was indirectly a climate event: the precipitating conditions of the civil war was mass crop failure. This also, in many ways, caused brexit.

So we have clear "climate -> migration -> national-borders" events today. We have clear great power politics today.

What else? Well consider declining birth rates in the west require more immigrants, but at the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment rises. Why can no leader tell their people the truth? Why can't they say, "we're all too old to support our own populations"?

I don't know. But the lack of that question posed to the public is conspicious and alarming. In the UK case, the leader of the centre-left opposition is even so deranged to suggest that our national health service shortages (100,000 positions!) should be filled by more training of our own population. This is economically and politically incoherent; and I'm quite sure he knows this.

This is economically and politically unsustainable: the driver towards anti-immigrant sentiment and national boundaries *HAS* to collide severely with the need for young immigrants and the "almost-here" health crisis of the west agining population.

Either the future is one in which political leaders and western populations can reconsile themselves to their dependence on young immigrants, accept relatively mass migrations, and adapt their political cultures to cope. That is the "EU will work, eventually" view.

OR, we take the Brexit-Russia lesson, and say the west will find a national-militaristic solution to the problem.

At the moment, we're already a decade past needing to explain to western publics that immigration is not only economically beneficial, but necessary. We havent done so. At the same time, we've done the opposite.

I'd suppose then that, knowing only what we know now, the "Russian trajectory" is the more likely one. The EU nations build armies, the US plays economic empire, China plays wargames in asia all the while our need for mass immigration plays out.

Where does that lead? The best guess I can make is: empires. Along the "Russian-line" of future history, nations are still a deeply inefficient economic unit, but increasingly "politically efficient" at regulating national identities.

With that tension, arises the need to bundle nations into empires.

I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine has delayed this future a couple decades; but I only see a reversal towards the liberal alternative if new liberal institutions emerge. China-India-Russia need an "EU", and likewise, so does Europe. On that timeline, we get liberal supra-states able to negotiate migrations, transitions to aging nations, etc.

But as the EU requried WW2, probably that liberal future (if ever realised) will require a comparable war. Perhaps an "asian civil war" in the manner that WW2 was a european civil war.

Liberalism (in the sense of rights-based institutions) is just what happens when no amount of people dying will resolve conflict, so nations are forced to give up. It was a product of intra-Christian warfare; and possibly the likely state of the early 22nd century.

Assuming Asia has the "civil war", which seems somewhat probable.

The "west" here is purely metaphorical. East of what? West of what? Constantinople?

Calling people silly because you're getting downvoted is against the rules and will result in more downvotes.

And the roads.