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Millennial demographic group falls into two categories. The first match the stereotype of entitlement and laziness and taking an extended adolescence between college and entering the workforce. The second . . . got screwed: they attempted to be adults, but got sideswiped by the combination of Boomers squeezing them out of the workforce, and the mass unemployment triggered by the 2007–09 financial crisis. Regardless of bucket, the Millennials lost years of meaningful work experience, and today are the least skilled of any equivalent age cohort in modern American history.
The truly terminal demographies of Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, and China are looking at at least 4 percent, while the youngish populations of America and France will only suffer about a 1 percent reduction.
On the front end in the 1700s and 1800s, these would-be Americans arrived young. Fogies and biddies couldn’t (and wouldn’t) put up with the sort of cramped conditions required for a multi-week sail across an ocean. That meant that upon arrival they were (a) less likely to die of old age, (b) more likely to immediately start having a lot of kids, (c) able to expand into all kinds of open land, and (d) reinforced by more young settlers in the next ship in the queue at Ellis Island.
loose associations that their national governments are really barely even governments in name: they are confederal. In others—like the United States, India, or Australia—the balances among the various levels is roughly equal: they are federal.* The takeaway from all this political blah-blah-blah is that in the United States the federal government—that’s the one headquartered in Washington, D.C.—was expressly not designed to serve the interest of any specific ethnicity.
far easier for the United States in specific, the settler states in general, and in the broadest definition any federal or confederal system, to absorb rafts of new immigrants.
unitary systems, new migrants need to be invited to join the dominant culture. Failing that, they become an underclass.
Expect a lot of the world’s remaining labor—especially its high-skilled labor—to soon be knocking on America’s door.
Part of the Mexico factor is obvious: in 2021 the average Mexican was nearly ten years younger than the average American.
Part of the Mexico factor is a less-than-obvious reason: manufacturing integration.
Globalized supply chains are all about tapping different skill sets and labor cost structures to generate the most economically efficient outcomes.
United States and Mexico in having the perfect technical complement right next door.
Within their own social strata, Mexican-Americans have redefined “white” from an exclusive term that refers to “them” and especially “those gringos” to an inclusive term meaning not simply “us” but “all of us.”
China’s population path turned terminal two decades ago.
In the best-case scenario, the Chinese population in the year 2070 will be less than half of what it was in 2020. More recent data that’s leaked out of the Chinese census authority suggests that date may need to be pulled forward to 2050. China’s collapse has already begun.
it’s reliable availability and reliably low cost. Take this concept of utter availability, apply it to absolutely everything, and you now have a glimmer of the absolute connectivity that underpins the modern, globalized economy.
combined more than a dozen preexisting devices into one, increasing efficiency and access. Important? Ridiculously. But such improvement-based techs do not fundamentally change who we are.
Transport technologies, on the other hand, profoundly alter our relationship with our geography.
those better-than-world-class Roman roads? In 300 CE it cost more to move grain 70 miles on those roads than it did to sail it some 1,400 miles from Egypt to Rome.
carved out room for a new tier of country: the middlemen who brokered or ferried goods among opposing empires. It was risky business. The deals an empire categorized as “brokering” on Monday were often reclassified as “double dealing” by Thursday. The Dutch—every European’s favorite middleman—became notorious for their massive booms when they carried European trade, and massive busts when the British or French or Germans decided they had had enough
Moving stuff on water remained cheaper, but a rail line could be built to anywhere that was flat and transporting stuff via rail was “only” twice the cost to operate of a ship.
Much of the early Industrial Age logistical needs of the British Empire revolved around the establishment and protection of far-flung coaling stations like Aden and Perim on the Bab el-Mandeb, Hong Kong and Singapore in Southeast Asia, Fanning Island and Fiji in the central Pacific, Australia and New Zealand in the southwest Pacific, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Halifax in Canada, Bermuda in the central Atlantic, and Gibraltar and Malta in the Mediterranean.
Between 1825 and 1910, inflation-adjusted prices for freighting cotton and wheat fell by 94 percent. Between 1880 and 1910, the cost component of transport for wheat being shipped from the United States to Europe fell from 18 percent to 8 percent.
The United States agreed to rebuild the European states on the condition that trade would no longer be isolated within their imperial systems. Conversely, intercepting rivals’ ships became the ultimate no-no. Oh, and one more thing: there would no longer be empires at all.
While the Industrial Revolution made it much cheaper to ship products from A to B, it took the Americans’ global Order to make transport much safer.
security was no longer the overriding concern. Competition was no longer about guns and sea-lane control, but instead about cost.
transport come from four factors: size, crew, fuel, and packaging. The first three are pretty straightforward. While the capital costs to build a vessel all increase with size, it is not a linear increase. Double the size of a vessel and it probably “only” costs about 80 percent more to build.*
Fuel usage rates follow the same general trend as ship size: double the ship’s size to reduce its fuel use by about 25 percent.
security isn’t an issue, ships sail more slowly.
The containerization process transformed transport in general, and the world’s ships and ports processes in specific.
early as 1966, the impact was obvious. Total port turnaround times on both ends shrank from three to five weeks to less than twenty-four hours. Port costs dipped from half the total cost of shipping to less than one-fifth.
Between 2000 and 2020, moving a container across the Atlantic or Pacific averaged out to about $700 per container. Or put another way, 11 cents per pair of shoes.
The Americans didn’t simply outlaw conflict among their allies; the Americans guarded all global shipping as if it were their own internal commerce, ushering transport into an age of utterly inexpensive sanctity.
Shipping, once restricted to “only” raw inputs and finished outputs, now serviced a seemingly endless array of intermediate products. The modern multistep manufacturing supply chain system was born.
two contrasting thoughts wove together to define our modern system: First, industrial techs became ever easier to apply.
Unlike preindustrial technologies, which required master craftspeople, much of the Industrial Age—and especially the Digital Age—has proven to be plug-and-play.
Unlike preindustrial technologies, which required master craftspeople, much of the Industrial Age—and especially the Digital Age—has proven to be plug-and-play.
Second, industrial techs have become ever more difficult to maintain. The ability to diversify supply systems over any distance means it is economically advantageous to break up manufacturing into dozens, even thousands of individual steps.
two contrasting thoughts wove together to define our modern system: First, industrial techs became ever easier to apply.
no longer do the goods consumed in a place by a people reflect the goods produced in a place by a people.
The geographies of consumption and production are unmoored.
Let’s focus the mind with a little cheat-sheet set of bullets. Modern vessels are fat beasts. Container ships running full tilt max out at just under twenty-nine miles per hour. Bulkers at half that. The fastest civilian ships we have are . . . passenger cruise liners, mostly because they are mostly empty space. No joy in refitting them to ship corn. Modern transoceanic container ships hold thousands of containers, more than half of which are packed to the gills with intermediate goods essential to the fabrication of pretty much all manufactured products. Those intermediate products are built
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The central defining trait in all this work is safe, cheap transport. Inhibit that and the rest of . . . everything simply falls apart.
regions can deindustrialize far more quickly than they industrialized, and the critical factor is what happens to transport.
takes 30,000 pieces to make a car. If you only have 29,999 pieces you’ve got an ambitiously sized paperweight.
Back-of-the-envelope math using data from throughout the past quarter millennia suggests that reducing transport costs by 1 percent results in an increase of trade volumes by about 5 percent. One doesn’t need to run that in reverse for long before the trade-empowered modern world fades into a treasured memory.
The most miraculous and, to a degree, unexpected outcome of the American-led Order is the extent to which it transformed areas that had rarely—if ever—been participants in any large-scale, multistate trading system.
The Order made geography matter less.
Chinese fascism has worked to this point, but between a collapse of domestic consumption due to demographic aging, a loss of export markets due to deglobalization, and an inability to protect the imports of energy and raw materials required to make it all work, China’s embracing of narcissistic nationalism risks spawning internal unrest that will consume the Communist Party.
Regardless of what goes wrong, long-haul transport is an instant casualty, because long-haul transport doesn’t simply require absolute peace in this or that region; it requires absolute peace in all regions.
The United States will update the Monroe Doctrine and turn the Western Hemisphere into an invitation-only American playground.
The defining characteristic of the new era is that we will no longer all be on the same side.
It’s a good thing that Japan likes to manufacture products where it sells them, and fields a potent long-reach navy. It’s a bad thing that most of China’s navy can’t make it past Vietnam, even in an era of peace.
.Japan
