But this card has an expiry date, after which geographic constraint will return to haunt us – some of us more than others.Īging societies: Zeihan places a lot of emphasis on demography, and particularly the aging character of most rich and middle-income countries as the postwar boom and following fertility crash works its inexorable logic through time. He argues that the advent of fossil fuels as the motive force of the modern global economy eclipsed these geographies because the easy availability of prodigious power means that more or less anything can now be built more or less anywhere. Geographies of success: Zeihan offers potted histories of global economic development and political power based on various physical and topographical features that favoured certain areas of the world and rendered others ‘strategically irrelevant’. I’ll begin by summarizing some of Zeihan’s main analytical optics, then I’ll draw out the links with my own arguments. It would be easy for me to devote a lot of words to all the points of disagreement I have with him (I do highlight a few below), but I think more interesting to examine the overlaps. Second, Zeihan has different political convictions and analytical concerns from me, but he ends up painting a pretty similar picture of where the world is headed.
It strikes me that you don’t have to peer too hard through the diversionary froth of the day to day news cycle to see this writing on the wall, but it still surprises me how few people are doing so. First, for those of us who’ve long been saying in the face of much derision that the days of the present global order are clearly numbered, it’s gratifying that a major publisher should bring out a hefty book articulating this very point. I’ve recently read Peter Zeihan’s book The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (Harper Business, 2022) and I’d commend it to readers of this blog as an informative complement to the issues laid out in my own book. In the meantime, feel free to listen to me talking small farm futures with Manda Scott on her Accidental Gods podcast. However, I hope to see readers of thsi blog soon on the other side of my book project. I wrote it a while back and had planned to edit it a bit, but I don’t have the luxury of time for that just now. So coming right up is my review of Peter Zeihan’s recent book, as per the title of this post.
I’m in the final manic editing phase of my little book, and if I don’t get a post out now it won’t happen for a while.
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