The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

Americans survived and thrived before because their geography is insulated from, while their demographic profile is starkly younger than, the bulk of the world. They will survive and thrive now and into the future for similar reasons. America’s strengths allow her debates to be petty, while those debates barely affect her strengths.

Between the Great Lakes and the Greater Mississippi, everyone in those first two big settlement waves landed within 150 miles of the world’s greatest navigable waterway system on some of the world’s best farmland. The math was pretty easy.

Simply to achieve the degree of population density that Germany had in 1900, the United States would have to nearly triple its 2022 population (and that doesn’t even count the half of American territories—such as the Rocky Mountains—that are not well suited to settling).

The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence* because for much of their history they didn’t really need a government.

Move from the small town to the city, and children quickly (d)evolved (in economic terms) into being little more than really pricy conversation pieces.

nearly all the population gains in the developed world since 1965—overall a greater than 50 percent increase—are from longer life spans.

Getting man to the moon was cool and all, but humanity’s greatest trick to date is building machines to get grain from more than fifty miles inland to the water. And to do so while still making a profit!

should containerized shipping break down, much of the world will be economically decimated from the collapse in manufacturing. But should bulk shipping—which transports food and fuel—break down, many of the world’s people will starve. Alone. In the dark.

The in-progress demographic bust threatens to reduce the human population writ large over the next few decades by as much in relative terms as the Black Death effect. The impact upon working-age populations will be even bigger.