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

by Peter Zeihan

The workforce will be very different. Between an alternating emphasis on customization and carrying out multiple manufacturing steps in one location, there isn’t much room for people who don’t know what they are doing. One of the great gains of the Industrial Age was that low-skilled labor could make a reasonable living working on an assembly line. But now? Demand for the lowest-skilled jobs within the manufacturing space will evaporate, while rewards for the highest-skilled jobs will soar. For poor countries, this will be a disaster. Moving up the value-add scale means starting at the bottom. Between geopolitical devolutions, demographic inversions, and technological changes, most of those jobs will no longer exist. In addition, shorter, simpler supply chains will reduce overall employment in manufacturing in general as measured in terms of jobs per unit of product produced. The end result? Widening inequality both within and among countries.