Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

 I checked out The End of the World is Just the Beginning because someone referenced it as being a good book on the end of globalization. Halfway through the book I realized that the author assumed the end of globalization as his premise and then went on to roll out the implications of what had happened, and realized that if I treated the book as science fiction it would work a lot better.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, since the book actually has interesting details about where cobalt, lithium and other rare earth elements come from, and those statements might not be completely science fiction. The thesis behind Zeihan's work is that all developed (and many developing) countries that urbanize drastically reduce their population growth. As a result of this, demand will collapse and the US will also withdraw as the major peace-keeping power in the world, and therefore globalization will go in reverse.

None of these conclusions follow from each other, but Zeihan throws a lot of pithy quotes and facts hoping you'll ignore this lack of logic:

The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence* because for much of their history they didn’t really need a government. Managing foreign territories twice the size of the United States would have been, like, really hard. And the Americans are, like, really bad at government. (kindle loc 602)

 China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A 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...For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. (kindle loc 882-889)

It's as though immigration can't happen! Germany recently reported that 23% of its population has immigrated to the country since 1950 or are the children of immigrants. And that's not even including Guest Worker programs or expats. Similarly, I expect countries like Spain, Portugal, and the USA to get immigration whether or not those countries even desire the entry of such immigrants.

This book was published right after the Russian war in Ukraine started, and there, we see no signs of US disengagement in world affairs. We even see stronger determination in the US to contain China, something I did not expect.

If you accept the book's premise is true, the rest of the book kinda makes sense. Zeihan analyzes all the natural resources within the control of each major power and points out that North and South America together have all the resources they need, while places like China, which are heavily dependent on imports and exports are kinda screwed. He makes statements asserting that China grew only by pouring lots of debt into its economy, but debt denominated in yuan can be eliminated at any time by government fiat (which the Chinese government wouldn't hesitate to do, given for instance, their recent behavior towards their own tech industry). More interesting is the demographic challenge:

China should have become a noncompetitive country in manufacturing in the late 2000s because it had exhausted its coastal labor pool. Instead the coast imported at least 300 million—likely as many as 400 million—workers from the interior.* That bought the Chinese economy another fifteen years, but at the cost of hardwiring, both within the coast and between the coast and the interior, massive inequality in income and levels of industrial development. It also makes the Chinese goal of a domestically oriented, consumption-driven, internationally insulated economy flatly impossible to reach. Little of the income from all those Chinese exports went to the workers (especially the workers from the interior), so little can be spent on consumption. China now has a rapidly aging coastal population that has limited consumption needs and—most important—hasn’t repopulated. That coastal population is stacked against a seething migrant class from the interior that lives in semi-illegal circumstances in hypercramped, near-slumlike conditions, working grueling hours, and that cannot repopulate. It is all located next to an emptied-out interior whose primary source of economic activity is state investments into an industrial plant that is of questionable economic usefulness, populated by a demographic that is too old to repopulate. This is all in a country where decades of the One Child Policy have encouraged selective-sex abortions en masse, so there simply are not enough women under forty to repopulate the country in the first place. (kindle loc 4674)

Again, the author didn't realize that he made contradictory statements. If the reason the population isn't growing is because of cramped, slum-like conditions, then reducing population would enable the remaining population to live a better life and grow! It's as though feedback loops can't happen in human environments and to human behavior. It's not a given that we live in a world where immiseration of humans living in the 3rd world is required to produce modern luxuries. A world where Chinese labor is as expensive as US labor would not be a bad thing for either the Chinese or the Americans!

There are other statements made by Zeihan that I'll let you judge for yourself whether or not to take seriously:

part of why American manufacturers feel cheated by globalization is because that was the plan. The core precept of the Order is that the United States would sacrifice economic dynamism in order to achieve security control. The American market was supposed to be sacrificed. The American worker was supposed to be sacrificed. American companies were supposed to be sacrificed. Thus anything that the United States still manufactures is a product set for which the American market, worker, and corporate structure are hypercompetitive. Furthermore, the deliberate sacrifice means that most American manufactured products are not for export, but instead for consumption within North America...by 2021, most manufacturing processes were already cheaper to operate in North America than in either Asia or Europe. That might shock, but it doesn’t take a deep dive to understand the conclusions. The North American system sports high labor variation, low energy costs, low transport costs to end consumers, nearly unlimited greenfield siting options, stable industrial input supplies, and high and stable capital supplies. Even better, the North American continent faces few security threats between its own shores and those of potential suppliers. On average, North American products face less than one-third the supply chain disruptions the Germans are likely to feel, and one-tenth that of the Asians. (kindle loc 5023-5054)

All in all, this is a great book to read if you want to feel good about living in or putting down roots in the USA. But I hesitate to consider it anything other than science fiction --- as I mentioned above, none of the conclusions he comes to necessarily follow from his premises.