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

by Peter Zeihan

But break the link to the household and agriculture. Enable mass female education. Allow women to earn their own income. Even women desiring large families quickly discovered that careers tend to crowd out other items on their to-do lists, in part because—regardless of intent—spending a few dozen hours a week at factory job reduces the opportunities for pregnancy.

The third incidental factor depressing birth rates can be laid at the feet of the Americans’ grand plan for their post–World War II international Order. The urbanization trend was already going full steam before the world wars blasted the old system apart, but with the onset of the free trade Order, the world’s most advanced economies—most notably Western Europe and Japan—were no longer burdened with a world of constant, high-velocity war. Countries could focus on what they did best (or at least, what they wanted to do best), and the security placidity of the Order enabled them to import food from half a world away. The very nature of the Bretton Woods globalization process depressed birth rates by squeezing the agricultural sector across the industrialized world. In the pre–free trade world, importing food en masse was rarely a viable, large-scale option. That drove government calculations both economic and strategic.

No longer did a country need to conquer some distant bit of farmland in order to guarantee food security. Parts of the old imperial networks could now maximize output with an eye toward servicing global demand rather than the narrow needs of their imperial masters.

Not only did opportunities increase in a globalized world; so too did scale. More capital flowing to more places triggered transformations in agriculture.

Larger farms could be more mechanized, achieving greater efficiencies and output with less and less labor. Such optimization granted them the economic heft to demand better pricing for inputs. Instead of getting a few dozen bags of fertilizer and the odd hoe and such from the local store, large farms would contract directly with petroche...

Globalization didn’t simply empty the countryside; it also gutted the world’s smaller communities, forcing ...

For the most part countries gave up attempting to grow foods they couldn’t grow well, drastically increasing their output for the crops they could grow well. The Americans’ prohibition of military conflict among their allies eliminated the heartburn of worrying where one might get their next meal. Global agricultural trade exploded, and the need for national and imperial autarky went out the window.

Americans’ transformation of the global security and economic architecture—or more accurately, the Americans’ creation of the world’s first truly global security and economic architecture—enabled the industrialization and urbanization experiences that had defined Europe for the previous quarter millennia to go global.

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

post–Cold War moment wasn’t simply that war and famine had largely vanished from the world, but instead that all these countries’ populations, aging and expanding at different rates, created the perfect foundation for breakneck, historically unprecedented economic growth.

Most of the spending a person does occurs between the ages of fifteen and forty-five—that’s the life window when people are buying cars and homes and raising children and seeking higher education. Such consumption-led activity is what drives an economy forward, and this bucket of countries had consumption to spare.

Fewer children meant fewer resources needed to be expended upon child rearing and education, while more could be splashed out on cars and condos. Older populations had accrued more capital, enabling more money to be saved and invested. These aging societies did not become less dynamic, but instead more so because they were able to develop and implement technologies at a more rapid pace. Productivity surged while the products produced became more sophisticated. What these countries lacked was enough young people to consume what they produced.

Globalization was always dependent upon the Americans’ commitment to the global Order and that Order hasn’t served Americans’ strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

In 1700 the average British woman bore 4.6 children. That’s almost identical to that of the average German woman in 1800 or the average Italian woman in 1900 or the average Korean woman in 1960 or the average Chinese woman in the early 1970s. Now, in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 and in many cases well below.* This is a position the average Bangladeshi woman will likely find herself in by 2030.

A central factor in every growth story that accompanies industrialization is that much of the economic growth comes from a swelling population. What most people miss is that there’s another step in the industrializationcum-urbanization process: lower mortality increases the population to such a degree that it overwhelms any impact from a decline in birth rates . . . but only for a few decades. Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country a greater population, but with few children. Yesterday’s few children leads to today’s few young workers leads to tomorrow’s few mature workers. And now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.

In the 2020s, birth rates are no longer simply dropping; they have been so low for so long that even the countries with the younger age structures are now running low of young adults—the demographic that produces the children. As the already smaller twenty-something and thirty-something cadres age into their thirties and forties, birth rates will not simply continue their long decline, they will collapse. And once a country has more older folks than children, the next, horrible step is utterly unavoidable: a population crash. And because any country that begins this process is one that has already run out of young adults, these countries will never recover.

What many in the world see as a threat—the rapid rise of China in economic, military, and demographic terms—is nothing more than two hundred years of economic and demographic transformation squeezed into a searing four decades, utterly transforming Chinese society and global patterns of trade . .

China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of early-2022, China’s only partly released 2011–2020 census indicates China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout human history. The country’s demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion, with complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation.

The industrial technologies that reduce mortality and raise standards of living cannot be uninvented, but if trade collapses, these technologies can be denied. Should anything impact these countries’ commodity outflows or the income or product inflows, the entire place will break down while experiencing deep-rooted famine on a biblical scale. Economic development, quality of life, longevity, health, and demographic expansion are all subject to the whims of globalization. Or rather, in this case, deglobalization.

Everything we know about human civilization is based on the simple idea of organization. Once a government lays down some basic ground rules like “don’t kill your neighbor,” people start doing what people do: raising families, growing food, hammering out widgets. People start trading, so that the farmer doesn’t also have to make flour and the blacksmith doesn’t have to grow his own food. This specialization makes us more productive in our chosen fields—be it farming or milling or blacksmithing. This society gets richer and expands. More land, more people, more specialization, more interaction, more internal trade, greater economies of scale.

Under the Order and this magical demographic moment, we have become so specialized and our technology has advanced so much that we have become totally incompetent at tasks that used to be essential. Try producing your own electricity or enough food to live on while keeping up your full-time job. What makes it all possible is the idea of continuity: the idea that the safety and security we enjoy today will still be here tomorrow and we can put our lives in the hands of these systems.

Labor hyperspecialization is now the norm, and trade has become so complex that entire economic subsectors (loan officers, aluminum extruders, warehouse planning consultancies, sand polishers) now exist to facilitate it. Nor is this specialization limited to individuals. With global peace, countries are able to specialize. Taiwan in semiconductors. Brazil in soy. Kuwait in oil. Germany in machinery. The civilizational process has been reaching for its ultimate, optimal peak.

“optimal” is not the same thing as “natural.” Everything about this moment—from the American rewiring of the security architecture to the historically unprecedented demographic structure—is artificial. And it is failing.

There are a number of ways down for countries looking down the maw of demographic oblivion and globalization’s collapse, but they all share something in common: reduced interaction means reduced access means reduced income means fewer economies of scale means less labor specialization means reduced interaction. Shortage forces people—forces countries—to look after their own needs. The value-added advantages of continuity and labor specialization wither. Everyone becomes less efficient. Less productive. And that means less of everythi...

Electricity shortages gut manufacturing. Food shortages gut the population. Fewer people means less chance of keeping anything that requires specialized labor working. Say, things like road con...

“decivilization” means: a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world function. Not every location had the right geography to make a go of civilization before the Order. Not ever...

A precious few countries have managed a high degree of development while simultaneously avoiding a collapse in birth rates. It is . . . a painfully short list: the United States, France, Argentina, Sweden, and New Zealand. And . . . that’s it. Even if politics aligned, even if everyone’s hearts were in the right place, even if all the Americans and French and Argentines and Swedes and Kiwis wanted to put the rest of the world’s needs in front of their own, the sheer scale of humanity’s demographic turning means all of them combined would not comprise nearly enough of a foundation to support a new global system.

By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last. What you and your parents (and in some cases, grandparents) assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living—that is, the past seven decades or so—is a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms.

before deepwater navigation, the height of the human experience wasn’t very high at all. Most governing systems were a mix of imperial and feudal. The issue was one of reach. The few places with rich geographies would establish themselves as Imperial Centers and use their wealth to reach out militarily and economically to control other territorial swaths. Sometimes these Centers would innovate or adapt a technology that would alter the regional balance of power, enabling more successful land grabs. The Romans used roads to dispatch troops here and there more quickly. The Mongols developed the iron stirrup, which enabled their mounted warriors to wipe the floor with, well, pretty much

Feudalism was simply a trade of securities: the lords provide protection to the serfs, while the serfs pledge their lives to their lords. Finis. Imperial systems weren’t much different: any large-scale “trade” had to exist within the borders of the empire. The only way to secure access to new goods was to venture out and conquer. And since any advantage would be temporary, it all came down to the security-for-loyalty trade of the Imperial Center to its provinces, as guaranteed by imperial armies.

human economics have been defined by this concept of more. The world’s evolution within the idea of more, this reasonable expectation of more, is ultimately what destroyed the old economies of the pre-deepwater imperial and feudal systems. New products and markets and players and wealth and interactions and interdependencies and expansions required new methods of managing the new relationships. Humanity developed new economic models, with the most successful and durable ones proving to be fascist corporatism, command-driven communism, socialism, and capitalism. Competition among such systems—among these -isms—has defined the past few centuries of human history.

all economic models are systems of distribution: deciding who gets what, when, and how.

Capitalism is what most Americans are most familiar with. The idea is that government should have a light touch and leave most decisions—especially as regards consumption and production, supply and demand, tec...

Socialism is either the norm (if you’re in Europe) or the enemy (if you’re on the American political Right). In modern socialist systems, firms and government and the population exist in a shifting kaleidoscope of cooperation and struggle. The core idea to all truly socialist structures, however, is that government belongs as an inseparable part of the economic system. The debate is over how central the governmental role should be and how the government should use its power and reach to shape or maintain society. Canada and Germany are probably the best contemporary examples of well-run socialist systems.

Command-driven communism is socialism carried to its absurd extreme. The idea is that the government is the sole decider of all the things capitalism would outsource to the private sector and population. Eliminating private choice—and the private sector altogether—enables the government to direct the full power of society to achieve whatever goal needs tackling.

Fascist corporatism is one we don’t often think about; it fuses business leadership with state leadership. The government ultimately calls the shots and it obviously coordinates firms to work toward government goals, but the key word is “coordinate.” Firms are government-linked and government-directed, but not as a rule government-operated. In a well-run fascist economy, the government can co-opt the private sector to achieve broad government-derived goals, like, say, building an autobahn or wiping out the Jews.

Contemporary “Communist” China far more closely resembles fascism than socialism, much less communism.

Each model has its own pros and cons. Capitalism trades away equality to maximize growth, both economic and technological. Socialism sacrifices growth at the altar of inclusivity and social placidity. Command-driven communism writes off dynamism, instead aiming for stability and focused achievements. Fascist corporatism attempts to achieve state goals without sacrificing growth or dynamism, but at the cost of popular will, a massively violent state, epically awe-inspiring levels of corruption, and the gnawing terror of knowing that state-sponsored genocide is but a few pen strokes away. Capitalism and socialism are broadly compatible with democracy and all the political noise and chaos that comes with it. Command-driven communism and fascist corporatism are far more politically . . . quiet.

In 2019 the Earth for the first time in history had more people aged sixty-five and over than five and under. By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms.

Combine geopolitics and demographics and we know there will be no new mass consumption systems. Even worse, the pie that is the global economy isn’t going to simply shrink; it is being fractured into some very nonintegrated pieces, courtesy of American inaction.

Capitalism without growth generates massive inequality, as those who already have political connections and wealth manipulate the system to control ever-bigger pieces of an ever-shrinking pie. The result tends in the direction of social explosions. Three, of many, examples of how it can go to pot are the anarchist movements within the United States during the Great Depression, the rise of Donald Trump in the Rust Belt as a reaction to the region’s deindustrialization, and the general societal collapse of the Lebanese Civil War.

The future of socialism is, if anything, darker. Socialism cannot generate capitalist levels of growth even when the pie is expanding, much less when it is shrinking. Socialism might be able to preserve economic equality, but that’s unlikely to save the model. Unlike capitalism, where at least the elites might be able to struggle through, in socialism everyone will become noticeably worse off every year. Mass uprisings and state fracture are pretty much baked into that particular dessert product.

Fascist corporatism might provide an option by outsourcing much of the clinical management of the economy to large corporations. But ultimately it will face the same problems as capitalism and socialism—inequality from concentrating power with firms, degrading stagnation from a shrinking pie—and since the government is clearly in ...

That just leaves command-driven communism. Sadly, it just might be the most viable of the four. But only if it crushes the population’s souls to the degree that having an opinion is suppressed by an overarching, 1984-style propagandaesque dictatorship. And of course, it will retain all the normal shortcomings of the model as we know it: it really only works if those running the command economy guess correctly on which techs will...

At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school:

The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault.

The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else.

The only countries in a post-2022 world that might be able to maintain an overseas empire are those that can have three things going for them: a serious cultural superiority complex, a military capable of reliably projecting power onto locations that cannot effectively resist, and lots and lots and lots and LOTS of disposable young people.

First, everything is going to change. Whatever new economic system or systems the world develops will be something we’re unlikely to recognize as being viable today. We will probably need far higher volumes of capital (retirees absorb it like sponges), but we’ll have far less of it (fewer workers means fewer taxpayers). That suggests economic growth and technological progress (both of which require capital as an input) will stall out.

Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been “more” on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings.