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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.
The faster the transformation and growth on the front end, the faster the population collapse on the back end. By far the most unfortunate tsunami of consequence of this compression phenomenon at work is China.
The faster the transformation and growth on the front end, the faster the population collapse on the back end. By far the most unfortunate tsunami of consequence of this compression phenomenon at work is China.
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.
China is amazing, just not for the reasons most opine. The country will soon have traveled from preindustrial levels of wealth and health to postindustrial demographic collapse in a single human lifetime. With a few years to spare.
begs the question of what Shanghai would look like without oil? Or Berlin without steel? Riyadh without . . . food? Deglobalization doesn’t simply mean a darker, poorer world, it means something far worse. An unraveling.
The American-led Order (big O) did more than change the rules of the game; it institutionalized order (little o), which in turn allowed industrialization and urbanization to spread everywhere.
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.
world of more. Ever since Columbus sailed the ocean blue, human economics have been defined by this concept of more.
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 re...
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Fascist corporatism is one we don’t often think about; it fuses business leadership with state leadership.
Contemporary “Communist” China far more closely resembles fascism than socialism, much less communism.
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.
By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms.
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.
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.
present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into.
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. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term.
One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less).
But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.
is to underline two outcomes: First, everything is going to change.
Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic.
We are entering a period of extreme transformation, with our strategic, political, economic, technological, demographic, and cultural norms all in flux at the same time. Of course we will shift to a different management system.
The last time humanity struggled with changing factors that necessitated new economic models, the causes were the Industrial Revolution paired with the first globalization wave. We argued—vigorously—over which system might be best. We had fights.
The trauma of the Soviet collapse was economic, cultural, political, strategic—and demographic. Between 1986 and 1994, the birth rate halved while the death rate nearly doubled.
Russia today is deindustrializing at the same time its population is collapsing.
Dark? Yes, but Russia is probably one of the best-case scenarios for much of t...
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Japan has been on the path to demographic oblivion for more than five decades.
.Japan
Japan passed the point of no return in its demographic structure back in the 1990s, but rather than crawl into a hole and die, the Japanese government and corporate world have long since branched out in ways that reflect the country’s underlying demographic weaknesses—and strengths.
.Japan
the Japanese have opted for something new: desourcing.
.Japan
have relocated much of their industrial productive capacity to other countries, where they use more abundant local workers to produce the goods that are then sold into those same local markets.
.Japan
this concept of “build where you sell” has become Toyota’s new corporate mantra.
.Japan
Japan’s population is the world’s most homogeneous, with more than 98 percent of the population being purely ethnically Japanese. That unity enabled social and economic transformations that would have triggered mass upheaval in more diverse populations.
.Japan
attempt desourcing like the Japanese model. Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan come to mind.
.Japan .desourcing
coronavirus pandemic didn’t simply rob us of lives. It robbed us of what we needed more than anything else to prepare for the coming demographic devastation. It robbed us of the one thing no one on Earth can make more of. It robbed us of time.
The globalization game is not simply ending. It is already over.
The United States has more high-quality, temperate-zone, arable farmland than any other country and its entire agricultural supply chain is contained within North America.
suitable for habitation—reasonable climate, relatively flat, good water access, lack of pests, etc.—than any country in the world.
Moving things around on water costs roughly one-twelfth that of moving them around on land.
omnipresent internal waterways—more than the combined total of the rest of the world—the United States has lower internal transport costs than anyone
Courtesy of the shale revolution, not only is the United States the world’s largest oil producer, enabling it to be net oil-independent,
The United States is the first-world country closest to the equator, granting it more solar power
potential than any other country,
Cheaper inputs—whether in the form of land or energy—helped trigger a massive reindustrialization process in America as early as 2010.
United States has not faced a security threat from within the North American continent since the 1840s.
Instead of hostility, the Americans have worked with the Canadians and Mexicans to form an integrated manufacturing space and trade zone. The expanded economies of scale allow for a regional manufacturing footprint that is world-class in terms of both quality and cost. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans make the United States all but immune to extra-hemispheric invasion.
Should anyone want to take a crack at America, they’d have to first get past the U.S. Navy, which is ten times as powerful as the combined navies of the rest of the world.*
a world without more, the United States not only still has plenty, it has the capacity to keep it.
