India and China having 4x the US’s population doesn’t mean anything if the top 5-10 productive percentile of their population emigrate to the US.
Further, unlike India and China which literally share a contested border, the U.S. is surrounded by extremely friendly nations and 2 oceans.
Further, the US has a 200+ year history of a relatively stable democracy whereas India is currently turning into whatever clown show Modi is trying to turn it into, and Xi Jinping has turned China into the kind of autocracy where he is telling highly educated Chinese that they should go back to their villages and try their hand at subsistence farming.
I would have thought the last 6 months of Chinese collapse, which should have been a post Zero COVID era of epic growth would have disabused people of the notion that people automatically means growth and success. China is currently beyond their demographic dividend and is now in the payback stage, having f’ed their demographics massively with their 1 child policy.
India is in the peak of their demographic dividend but instead of utilizing it to productive ends is engaged in the promotion of religious infighting and autocratic tendencies all to satisfy the power lust of 1 man and his lackeys.
The richest, in India, China, and the US are not the "most productive" by any means. They're the most extractive. If we were immigrating hard workers, we wouldn't have labor shortages. Instead, we're immigrating investors who drive up real estate costs.
All the nations, especially those that industrialized quickly are facing this problem. As industrialization correlates strongly with smaller families (don't need children to work the farm). But China compounded it with the one child policy. And they industrialized faster than almost anyone. India went straight for a service economy, that may be even worse. Russia... Not sure about Brazil.
The US delayed its demographic collapse via immigration. It might even effect a soft landing relative to the rest of the world if it can ramp back up manufacturing in a way that doesn't destroy shared resources or enforce permanent underclasses leading to revolt. That isn't an easy task.
zeihan's analysis is performative and is designed to make him money, not provide value to anyone in the real world. wow, america's geography makes it invincible and china will collapse any day now because they suck at innovating. that's super insightful and original. i definitely haven't been hearing that repeated ad nauseum for literally 40 years.
Not this Shapiro right? This one is mostly agreeing with Zeihan. https://www.dailywire.com/news/bank-on-it-ben-shapiro-predic...
Sure, nothing lasts forever. Doesn't mean we just roll over and give up.
The authoritarian dictatorship system they have adopted is also highly unstable. Dictatorships are only stable until some sort of catastrophic "black swan" event occurs, and then everything collapses faster than anyone expected. Their history is full of violent uprisings and civil wars. I wouldn't be surprised to see another one within our lifetimes. Even just maintaining the security apparatus necessary to control the populace is a huge drag on their economy.
meanwhile they are still fighting with sticks in the Himalayas
But the rats are well-fed: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=indian+temple+feeding+the+rats&iax...
Will they necessarily? I would expect culture and system of government to be factors in whether a country can not only support 1 billion plus people, but grow their economy too. Let alone natural resources
i'm surprised in 2023 people aren't yet tired of this schtick. it's getting old.
Only friendly neighbours on the same continent, vast swaths of some of the most fertile land in the world, water access to Europe AND Asia, etc.
Regardless of the difference between Chinese and US citizens / culture / government, geography will always remain an advantage
Also, any country that is not extremely poor does mechanized farming, which has been described as "using land to turn petroleum into food", and most of the petroleum China uses comes from the Persian Gulf or even further away. (For example, I'm pretty sure that most of Russia's flow of petroleum to China comes via ports on the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea.) In contrast, (because of the fracking revolution) the US produces all the petroleum it needs domestically. If that changes in the future (for example because of a commitment to reducing carbon emissions cause regulations that discourage petroleum production in the US) then the US can probably make up any shortfall with petroleum from Canada.
And I'm pretty sure China must import most of its needs for 2 of the 3 major fertilizing commodities (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium).
And they get a lot of grain and oilseed for example from Ukraine or at least they did until Russia stopped the flow (according to a Youtube video I recently watched).
I see a lot of statements here to the effect of how screwed the US would be if it suddenly couldn't import things from China, but very little on how much more screwed China would be if it couldn't import things from other continents. At least the US can feed its population, keep the electricity on and keep the trucks moving on its highways without imports.
PRC agriculture has absolute food security in terms of domestic calorie production and was net fertilizer exporter via coal gasification in 2010s but turn importer after coal crack down due to green initiatives. Coal back on menu due to recent geopolitics that prioritize energy/good security PRC can feed herself with domestic inputs worst case scenario. With surplus if she moves to mechanical farming - current 200m farm household basically make job programs with lots of farmers pursuing cash crop instead of efficient calories.
Finally discussion on import dependency is really dog whistle for what happens if US tries to cut off PRC SLOCs in which case it's really a discussion on resource security not autarky. And reality is US is as vulnerable as PRC now - we are in era of advanced rocketry where 150 blown up refineries sets US energy and agriculture into stone age, highly automated ag especially vulnerable. In a peer war where homeland critical infra is being degraded, US can feed population as much as PRC, which is to say not at all. All that shale and blessed farm land means nothing if you can't process what you extract. Blocking shipping is just down the logistics chain than hitting production facilities themselves. The entire fortress america narrative collapsed once US adversaries like PRC gained global strike and now US is vulnerable like everyone else.
So it's not that China hasn't got the natural resources, it's that at the moment it isn't exploiting them as much as the US do.
Mostly this is just the usual sports talk: "Mine is bigger than yours!", etc.
As long as it’s in the US—yeah, you can.
And this is particularly hilarious in the context of China which has already gone beyond its demographic dividend further worsened by their one child policy.
Also, the U.S. has a birth rate or 1.2, whereas China has a birth rate of 1.1 and dropping.
For free - and it controls the knobs (immigration policy) to bring more whenever it wants too