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

by Peter Zeihan

Now comes the other side of the hill. 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.*