smells like statists up in here...
I suspect Zeihan may play up the extremes a touch for marketing purposes, but maybe not by much.
We’ve been seeing the effects of what he talks about for years now. Japan is the best example. It looked like they were going to take over the world until their demographics began to bite.
The US is even seeing mild effects. One of the big factors of the current tight labor market is that many Boomers just decided to call it quits and retire early during Covid. They are probably not coming back in huge numbers. The work force has permanently shifted slightly. But the effects here a mild compared to other places.
Japan has basically stalled out economically and became a nation of old people. There are not nearly enough young Japanese to maintain their previous economic power. And there will probably never be again. A fundamental problem with Japan, is they are extremely xenophobic. Their culture is hyper adverse to anything other than an ethnically pure society. They’ll let you come in on a work visa, but it is extremely hard to go immigrate there permanently and become a Japanese citizen. To them, being Japanese isn’t about accepting a form of government and rule of law, it’s about genetics. That is very inflexible and brittle. So they have no method of injecting new breeding stock into their demographics. Guest workers will only get you so far. They tend to take their learned skills and wealth away when they eventually leave. They can hold that off a while by continued technological advancement to increase their populations productivity, but that is a curve of diminishing return. They will continue to fade.
I’m not sure I see Germany in quite the same position. Yes, they are facing demographic collapse, but I don’t think they have the cultural racism that Japan has. They can re-inflate themselves with immigration. They may not like it, but it’s not a deal breaker for them. They can pull in reasonably educated stock from all over EU and elsewhere and indoctrinate them and run with it. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t mind living in Germany.
Russia does have problems, even worse than Japan. They are also very closed, which doesn’t matter, because who would want to immigrate to that shhthole anyway. Well, maybe North Koreans.
China was someone of a shock to me. I knew they had real demographic problems from the One-Child laws. I didn’t realize how bad it was. Even worse that the raw numbers is the sex imbalance. They are going to have a large population of angry young men who are never going to be able to marry and have a family. To me, that sounds reasonable.
To a Chinese male that is cataclysmic. In their culture that is the ultimate failure. It dishonors not only them, but their parents, and their ancestors. And they are ethnically closed like the Chinese, so marrying a Korean, or Vietnamese girl isn’t really considered and acceptable substitute. Having a large population of angry young males with no future is generally not conducive to a stable society. Throw in an economic collapse and real hunger and you have a powder keg.
I also never realized how resource poor they were and how crappy their land was for agriculture.
Russia and China are especially dangerous because they are dying cultures who may not feel they have anything else to lose.
We should feel lucky in America even with all our First World problems. We were blessed with….errrr pried from the cold dead hands of indigenous peoples...a uniquely perfect geography. We really have an embarrassment of riches. And immigration (yes it should be legal) is built into our national DNA. We can absorb anyone and eventually digest them into our culture, even though they end up adding their own diversity to our own. Believe me, I’ve eaten English food. I am so glad we traded so much culture with Mexico and appropriated their cuisine.
We’ll have rough patches, but America will recover and continue to get stronger if we don’t screw it up from the inside.
