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Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been.
Fact
Place matters. Hugely. The Egyptian cities are where they are because they had the perfect mix of water and desert buffer for the preindustrial age.
Geography Matters
America’s strengths allow her debates to be petty, while those debates barely affect her strengths.
Fact
the last seventy-five years long will be remembered as a golden age,
True
The easy movement of people and goods throughout the river network forced Americans to interact with one another regularly, contributing to the unification of American culture despite a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.
Amazing
Economic stress did not automatically translate into political stress—or vice versa.
American Flexibility
The catch-all phrase for the pact is Bretton Woods, named after the New Hampshire ski resort where the Americans first made the pitch shortly after the Normandy invasion. It is perhaps more commonly known as the free-trade era of the post–World War II period, or simply as globalization.
GLOBALIZTION BEGAN THAT SOON AND A CERTAIN.PLACE IN.AMERICA
A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman.
Where does he get this formula this is amazing
Globalized supply chains are all about tapping different skill sets and labor cost structures to generate the most economically efficient outcomes.
Globalization
The average grocery store today has about forty thousand individual items, up from about two hundred at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Amazing fact
Industrialization plus globalization has not only generated the fastest economic growth in history; collectively they have dramatically increased the standard of living of billions of people the world over.
Amazing Fact
Modern cities are so large and their economies so specialized that they require regular access not just to a huge swath of territory, but to the entire globe.
Interesting
Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our “normal” is going to end, and end soon.
points so far
first time anyone shoots at a single commercial ship.
Point
Oil powered global trade, global trade powered the American alliance, and the American alliance powered American security.
The resons why
the combined navies of the wider world have less than one-tenth the power projection capacity of the U.S. Navy.
Power of the us navy
At least half the global population faces the unwinding of decades of urbanization.
Wow
At that point, governmental and civil collapse is rarely far off, with leaders finding themselves holding tickets for admission to history’s ash heap.
Funny
Even better, the Americans were perfectly willing to provide the World War II Allies with anything they needed—oil or fuel, steel or guns, wheat or flour—so long as they were paid in gold. By war’s end the U.S. economy wasn’t only far larger and that of Europe far smaller. The U.S. dollar wasn’t just the only reasonable medium of exchange in the entire Western Hemisphere: it had sucked the very metal out of Europe that would have enabled a long-term currency competitor anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere. If anything, this is truer than it sounds. After all, the metals-backed currencies of
...more
Wow and lol if true
In the first Asian wave, agriculture gave way to textiles and heavy industry. In the post-1971 wave, heavy industry gave way to ever-more-advanced manufacturing of every imaginable sort: white goods, toys, automotive, electronics, computers, cellular products.
Asiqan economic expansion
Mao’s Cultural Revolution—killed at least 40 million
Mao effect on China
In particular the Chinese boom stressed global commodities markets between 2003 and 2007, with oil prices reaching historical, inflation-adjusted highs in 2007 of approximately $150 a barrel.
China effect.
The Chinese Communist Party’s only source of legitimacy is economic growth,
Chinese strength gauge
It’s no surprise then that the CCP’s preferred method of storing their wealth is in U.S. currency . . . outside of China.
Chinese hypocrisy
From the 1950s through the 1980s, middle-class white Americans codefined “American Dream” with “home ownership.”
The American Dream
The mortgage-backed securities quickly degraded from the safest of all investments to something even Enron would have balked at. New homeowners started defaulting on their mortgages before they had even made a single payment. It all went belly-up. We know the subsequent economic carnage as the 2007–09 financial crisis.
2008 World Recession
The world knows these collective advances as either “fracking” or the “shale revolution” and collectively they made the United States the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.
US oil
Between 1990 and 2020 this broad convergence of factors brought us the cheapest capital supplies and fastest economic growth in the history of our species.
Interesting fact about human growth
The slowly aging demography of the United States and the moderately aging demographies of Japan and the Europeans and the quickly aging demographies of the advanced developing world all converge on mass retirement in the 2020s and 2030s. And when they retire—when all of them retire at once—they will stop providing the capital that has fueled our world.
The end of free money
Credit is the lifeblood of a modern economy.
Modern economics
Singapore sits on the Strait of Malacca—the world’s busiest trade route—and serves as the world’s largest transshipment center,
Singapore strength
products can flow from areas of high supply to high demand.
Basic economics
The unfortunate fact is that greentech in its current form simply isn’t useful for most people in most places—either to reduce carbon emissions or to provide a substitute for energy inputs in a more chaotic, post-Order world.
Greentech reality
the coastal cities of this line comprise roughly one-third of the American population on a tiny footprint.
Eastern seaboard population United States
From 2014, when the solar boom began, until 2020, solar has only increased to become 1.5 percent of total energy use.
Solar energy failure
six times that of the standard combined-cycle natural gas plant,
battery faIlure
greentech requires two to five times the copper and chromium of more traditional methods of generating power,
Greentech not feasible
and houses ten of the world’s twenty largest copper smelters.
Chinese copper
South America copper
Chile also smelts most of its own ore into copper metal, making it the world’s one-stop shop in a post-China world.
Chilean Copper
double to 220,000 tons simply to keep pace with Green aspirations.
Green Reality:Cobalt
Eight of the world’s fourteen largest cobalt sources are China-owned, and nearly all cobalt refining occurs in the PRC (with Canada a very distant second).
Chinese Cobalt Power
More than half of commercially usable cobalt comes from a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Congo Cobalt
gold already is the best conductor.
Golf conductor
90 percent of global rare earth production and processing was in the PRC.
Chinese rare Earth
The Order established stability, which fostered economic growth, which enabled technological advancement, which led to the availability of these materials, which allowed their inclusion into the products, modernity, and lifestyle of the modern age.
American Order post 1950
Smuggling of ores, processed materials, and/or finished products will, out of necessity, become a booming business.
Black Market Ore Future
The German river system—in particular the Rhine-Ruhr system of western Germany—is the densest network of naturally navigable waterways in the world.
German Rivers
Ford are among the most complex of any firm in existence, tapping more than sixty countries and 1,300 direct suppliers that together have more than 4,400 manufacturing sites.
Ford Network
in the twenty years following 1996—a period that includes the Great Recession—global maritime trade doubled by volume and tripled by value.
Ladt twenty years of World Growth
