Things I (Do) Worry About: Higher Education in the US

If mommy and daddy told you to go college and then you’d be set for life…you’re not alone. With traditional models pushing everyone towards white-collar jobs and university degrees, we’ve created a massive oversupply of finance bros and marketers, but left those blue-collar industries begging for some fresh meat.

As the US faces a demographic shift and shrinking population, the educational system is struggling to adapt to the changing demands. With a need for more blue-collar workers, higher education in the US is dropping the ball.

Employers are already seeing these worker shortages play out and are struggling to find a solution. As more and more graduates enter the workforce and struggle to land that ‘dream job’, those lucrative and accessible blue-collar fields might start poking holes in the higher education system in America.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a beach. A love, a good beach. Today we’re going to dip into one of the ask Peter questions and I’m going to drop that into our open ended series on things that I worry or don’t worry about. This is definitely something I do worry about. The question is, in this demographic shift that we’re experiencing as populations age and shrink, what do I think is the future of higher education in the United States? 

And the short version is it doesn’t look very good and things are going to have to change. So let me give you a little bit of backdrop and then we’ll talk about the concerns. When the baby boomers started entering the workforce in the late sixties. They discovered that their numbers were so many that they pushed down the cost of labor. 

This is one of the reasons why the baby boomers have a reputation for being very mobile, because they would move wherever there’s a job, they could get better pay. This is also one of the reasons why women tend to enter the workforce in this period, because they had to do so to make ends meet. But that only put more pressure on the labor market, which is why the baby boomers have the record for the highest divorce rate in our country’s history. 

Anyway, point is that from a financial point of view, life was kind of rough. So the belief back in the sixties, seventies, and especially early eighties was that if you wanted to get ahead, you didn’t want a blue collar job because that’s where all the baby boomers were. You wanted a white collar job where you didn’t have to be in a factory, you didn’t have to be in construction or farming where you could work in an office, being a doctor, be a lawyer or whatnot. 

And so the baby boomers ruthlessly pushed their children, the millennials, to go to university, get a four year degree, get a white collar job. And so now we have the opposite problem. We have an oversupply of white collar workers and not enough blue collar workers. So that’s the baseline. Now, we’ve got three things going on in the labor market, in the educational system right now, with China approaching its end, we need to massively expand the size of the industrial plant in this country, even if you ignore all the national security concerns. 

That means we need to expand industrial construction spending and do a lot more manufacturing. And almost all of those jobs are blue collar and we haven’t been training up enough people to fill them. So we’re already in a situation where you can get a six week welding or excuse me, electrical degree and earn more money in your first month than a white collar worker can after four years of college and five years in the workforce. 

That’s just where we are. Until such time as the educational system transforms to adjust to this new reality, and it’s only going to get more intense as we go. And so if you’re looking at a four year university that’s doing traditional things, especially in the liberal arts, we already have an oversupply of labor in that space. We are just desperate for blue collar workers. 

So that’s number one. Your traditional liberal arts colleges, especially the smaller ones, are not going to have nearly the level of demand that they used to. Two year universities that focus on white collar jobs, same thing to your universities that work on more technical skills. They’re going to be in very high demand. And in between you’ve got the legacy universities. 

You know, your Harvard’s, your University of Texas is who either have a very large endowment or a lot of notoriety or both and will always be able to attract folks. So that’s number one. Number two is numbers. The incoming generation is no longer the millennials. The older millennials turned 45 this year. They’re way out of college age now. 

The new kids on the BLOCK are Generation Z or the ZOOMERS, and they are the smallest generation we’ve ever had. So the number of potential students that university systems can attract is simply lower than it’s been at any time in recent American history. And that means we probably have about 15% fewer students that can potentially enroll than we had before. 

So the competition among universities is going to be fierce for them. And a lot of universities are simply not geared for the jobs of the next 15 years. That’s number two. Number three is candidate quality. The Zoomers are loners. They don’t like to be around other people. The idea of the social experience of university is not something like, Ooh, I can’t wait to do that. 

They want to code in a closet. And that’s a different sort of job experience and a different sort of educational experience. Now, it usually takes about five years for universities to meaningfully change their curriculum because, you know, students are going through a four year process right there. And if you’re talking about a state school, it can be as much as ten years because you first have to get it through a review. 

And oftentimes the state legislature likes to weigh in. And certainly tenured faculty does. So by the time we have retooled our educational system to deal with the influx of blue collar job demand that we’re now already seeing, we’re are going to be most of the way through this transition. And it’ll be time to switch again. So if you are an employer, you’re basically going to have to raise your own, bring in kids who are younger than you normally would train that up within the system in order to convince them that there is a job with a good paycheck doing interesting things that they want to do. 

And the more successful companies that I have seen have been engaging in that process aren’t starting in college or even high school, but middle school, to make sure that their community is part of their success story. 

A Conversation with The Times

Here’s my Frontline interview with Times Radio from last week. We discussed the war in Ukraine and global security, specifically looking at what could unfold in Russia due to this conflict.

“Putin is running out of time and allies as the west doubles down on shutting Russia out of the global economy and corruption erodes his military gains in Ukraine.”

You can find the full interview below…

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

More Than Hon Hon Hon: What Are the French Up to in Ukraine?

There’s been recent discussions by French President Macron regarding deploying French troops to Ukraine. Is this really going to happen and why would they do this?

Given France’s nationalist stance, stable demographics, and the evolving European landscape, this appears to be a feasible endeavor. The French stand to gain some insight to tech and new tactics, some resource regulation, and the obvious strategic positioning to support Ukrainian forces and the security interests of wider Europe.

Given the relative speed with which France can make decisions and implement them (when compared to the Germans), this is likely the emergence of the French as an assertive power in European strategic conversations. This move could shake up all of Europe, so I’ll be monitoring this situation as it continues to unfold.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado today. We’re going to kick around with the French are doing in Europe, specifically in Ukraine. You have French President Macron, who has been recently talking about sending French troops into Ukraine. And not only is this week broken the eyes on a broader strategic discussion. It bears the question of what the hell the French are thinking, how they fit into the alliance network, how this might play out.

And I got to say, in traditional French fashion, it’s it’s interesting. So the French have a reputation well earned, I might point out, for being rather narcissistic. They’re convinced that the world revolves around them. They they believe that oftentimes the Americans are just as much of a problem as the more legitimate strategic threats, because the Americans tend to take the lead in everything because they’re providing the men and the money and the intelligence and the satellite system and the transport, you know, other pesky things.

But the French have always, always, always been at the center of decision making in Europe, largely because they’ve had a relatively strategic position out on the western edge where they’re not being constantly hit from multiple directions so they can focus their forces when they want to, not the the degree of a naval power like Britain, of course, but for a land power, they punch pretty hard and it’s kind of hard to hit them back.

Now, what this means is that the French being on the far side of Western Europe are directly impacted by the day to day goings on of the Ukraine war. And even in the worst case scenario where Ukraine falls, they’re not in the next line of attack. That would be Poland and Germany and then the low countries before you would get to France.

So from a certain point of view, the French can take an almost American approach to this and take the very long view. And that’s been shaped by their political culture, their geography, their military system. You know, this is nothing new here. But why? Why, why, why, why would they be talking about sending troops? Well, we’ve got a few things going on that are making this more and more feasible.

Number one, the very nature of Europe needs to change. So the EU, as it was originally envisioned, was an economic and trading club, but everything that allowed it to work has basically broken down in the last few years. Number one, globalization is going away. So the Europeans are losing their ability to sell on the international market bit by bit.

France, being nationalist, never really got into that. So they don’t have anything to lose. Second demographics. Most of Europe is aging so rapidly that all of the major countries basically ceased functioning as modern economies. And 5 to 15 years. But not France. France actually has needless policies and so has a pretty high birth rate or complications that come from that.

But this is not a country whose economic models in danger. Third, if Europe as an entity is going to matter at all. It has to be able to stand up for its own security concerns. And we now know very clearly that the Russians are not going to stop unless they are stopped. That means France, despite being on the far western edge, can’t take a completely hands off approach.

You can take the long view, but it can’t do nothing. You put all this together and the French see, putting boots on the ground as you create is something to very seriously consider. Number one, there’s a lot of resources, especially in agriculture in Ukraine, getting that under the European EGIS so it can be regulated by European norms is something the French like, just as it is.

Number two, technology. Ukraine has become a background in a new type of warfare using mass drones in the hands of not just strategic decision makers, but everyday troops. And if you are France, you would rather understand that before it comes to your borders. So having folks there not just to train the Ukrainians, but to be trained by the Ukrainians makes a lot of sense.

Three, whatever the future of the European Union is going to be, it’s not going to be a major trading bloc. They no longer have the population to sustain that. It’s going to be based more on politics, security, culture and identity. Well, these are things that the French are much more comfortable with. And if you can bring Ukraine into that family, it makes the overall unity of the system much stronger and more coherent.

This isn’t like the old days when the French would oppose European Union expansion because they don’t want to have to subsidize anyone. Those days are over anyway. The European Union is losing the ability to do that as the Germans age out. There’s no one left to write the check except for the French, and they don’t want to. So they’d rather change the nature of the union itself.

And then finally, there’s a leadership issue here. A very short term leadership issue under German Chancellor Schulz. Germany is basically getting dragged into a lot of strategic positions. They’ve got a fractured government made of libertarian businessmen, Greens and social Democrats. And there’s very little that they agree on. And it’s really hard for them to change their mind on any policy or take a leadership position, because before Germany can act, the coalition has to come to an agreement.

So whether it’s been on subsidies or health care or labor negotiations or the Ukraine war or EU policy, everything has just been so damn slow. And then you have France, where there’s a majority government run by a major party under a relatively airmatic leader who can make decisions and implement them very quickly. And if you put that in the context of what’s going on Ukraine right now in this conversation of troops, people are looking to Germany to set the strategic conversation at all.

They’re looking to the French and may they may not like what the French have to say. But there’s a lot of different opinions, because if you are in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania or Finland or Sweden or Poland, well, of course we’re going to have to get involved in Ukraine. Of course, the Russians are not going to stop.

Of course, we need to consider putting boots on the ground in order to protect the Ukrainians and look out for European values to have someone on the other side of Europe and far west saying that. That’s a rallying cry, not something to argue against. So for the first time in quite some time, the French are getting some very real strategic kudos from other European countries for being aggressive as opposed to just arguing with the United States.

And then there’s the final issue of what would they do when we get there. We’re not talking about French troops going to the frontline and fighting the Russians. No, no, this is not a Napoleonic invasion. The idea is threefold. Number one, you put them there in order to repair equipment that the Ukrainians need. So it doesn’t have to get shipped all the way to Western Europe.

So speed the process up. Number two, training it both ways. The French training the Ukrainians, especially things like Special forces, the Ukrainians training the French, and especially in things like drone tech. And then third, provide a strategic backstop in places that you don’t expect to get hot but could. So you put French troops on, say, the border of Belarus or the border of Moldova, where the Russians have forces in a place called Transnistria, where they’re basically sponsored a secessionist operation 30 years ago, and they’re still there.

And that way the Ukrainian forces that are there now can redirect to the front line. So there’s a lot of reasons that we should treat this seriously. I mean, yes, it’s the French, so there’s a lot of bombast and pomposity. But this is a very, very real strategic discussion that Macron has started. And if I was a betting man, I’d say it’s going to manifest as something that is actually real before the end of this year.

The New Face of Military Technology

The new face of military technology is here…and no its not some Master Chief type suit running around the battlefield. We’re talking about the democratization of tech applications and the empowerment of individual soldiers to make strategic decisions.

The best example of this is the use of drone technology in Ukraine. With accurate and timely striking capabilities at the fingertips of everyday soldiers, attacks can be carried out at the flip of a switch. We’re seeing this play out with strikes on Russian naval vessels, small drones used in anti-personnel attacks, mid-range infrastructure strikes, and modular drones like the Phoenix Ghost for precision attacks deep in Russian territory.

These drone technologies and other developments are playing a key role in disrupting Russian operations, and we’re beginning to see practical applications for use in future conflicts. The decentralization of precision targeting is shaping up to be a transformative force in contemporary conflicts.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey Everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. We’re in the calm between the snow storms. Got 40 inches last week. What we’re going to do this weekend is 4 to 6 inches on what seems like a rounding error in comparison. Anyway, 60 degrees because Colorado today, we’re talking about the revolution in military affairs. It is now going through a second phase.

So the first revolution of military affairs happened in the 1990s and 2000 when the United States started to marry information technologies to its military, its combination of sensors and targeting information, whether it’s on the method of delivering the ordnance or in satellite or attached to the weapon itself. So, for example, joint direct attack missions fall into that category, as do cruise missiles like the Tomahawk.

Important stuff. And it basically took whatever explosive ordnance that you had and allowed you to deliver to a target with a very high degree of accuracy. So instead of having the carpet bomb, things like we used to in Vietnam, in Egypt before. Now you just send one or two weapons out and hit the specific target that you’re at the Ross Hawk for a good long time.

But that if you marry precision weapons with hypersonics, that all of a sudden all of the rules of warfare go away and you can just have a handful of hypersonics to defend everything. And then we discovered things like jamming and the fact that people don’t have one tank, they have 100,000 people in infantry and the math never just worked out.

Hypersonics are just way too expensive sort of in order to play. It’s just that it’s not the determining role. So that was kind of phase one. We’re going through phase two now, which is the democratization of the application of these technologies. And so instead of it being controlled from the White House, we’re from a generals chair. Individual soldiers are now giving command of this sort of information, can use it to make targets on an autonomous basis.

And we’re seeing this, of course, most aggressively in Ukraine, mostly with drones. The Ukrainians are following a four part strategy at the moment. So this is going to evolve quite a bit. Phase one is applying these drone technologies to things like jet skis and loading them up with a couple hundred pounds of explosives and sending them out to target Russian naval vessels.

That process has been so effective, has I’ve noted it in earlier videos that basically the western half of the Black Sea is now completely no go for the Russian fleet. And most of the ships, especially the larger ones, simply can’t shoot back because anything that’s installed on the deck of the ship is designed to hit the horizon or higher and it can’t are angled down to target these small boats in the water.

So that’s number one. Number two is actually something that’s much more recent that has come up as a result of the problems with the American Congress getting conventional aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainians have had to find a way to hold the line against the Russians when they’re running out of artillery shells. And so that what they’ve started doing, this mass producing these very small drones that only have a payload of about a pound, which is about the size of a small grenade.

And when the Russians do their human wave tactics, you just send a swarm of them out to go after anything that moves. And it’s basically dropping grenades that range into massed infantry. They’ve done this to the point that in the Battle of Africa, which the Ukrainians technically lost, they were inflicting regularly eight and 10 to 1 casualty ratios on the Russians despite not having much artillery.

So anti-personnel. Number three is mid-range infrastructure strikes. The Ukrainians developed a pair of drones called the side and the beaver of the to the beaver is far more technologically competent and has a much longer range and better avionics, whereas the South has basically a grudge project that’s practically made out of plywood. It’s a fugly. Little thing carries a decent warhead, but less range.

And they’ve been sending these out against any pieces of infrastructure in kind of the mirror abroad, if you will, within a few hundred kilometers of the front line. And they’ve used it to target any number of things like refineries in the Russian space, but also fuel depots. And then finally, something where the Americans are getting in on the job with something called the Phenix Ghost.

Now, the Phenix ghost only carries a fairly small warhead, typically 5 to £15. The advantage of the Phenix Ghost is it’s modular and you can put it together on the fly and it’s light enough that one soldier can carry it. Now, originally, when the Phenix Ghost started coming in, they were going after armored vehicles and supply trucks. But the Ukrainians very, very quickly realized that because they were available in such small volume and because they were so accurate, because unlike a lot of drones, these have a live visual feedback to the controller.

They could basically put them in a backpack, send someone hiking or driving into Russia and a thousand miles from the front line, take it out, put it together and send it against an unprotected target. And most of the refinery attacks we have seen in Ukraine in recent weeks, in two weeks maybe are probably Ukrainian special forces operating with American made.

Phenix goes deep within the Russian interior. And this is getting pretty robust because at present, you know, we’re talking about regularly a half 1000000 to 1000000 barrels per day of Russian refining capacity is taken offline. The issue is that these things are accurate enough that they can strike within just a couple of feet of what came about because you can see where you’re going.

And that allows the operators to target the sensitive spots in a refinery like the distillation tower, where the parts that are really exploding get separated. And so if you target that, but the parts that are really exploding, it really exploding and repairing this is really difficult for the Russians because they stopped training engineers in large number over 30 years ago.

Anyway, bottom line is that you’re talking about interrupting an income flow for the Russians that is typically about 8% of government revenues, which is more than what, say, the U.S. federal government, as a percentage of the budget collects in terms of corporate taxes. So big line item. And if you destroy the ability of the Russians to process crude, that means there’s no place for the crude to go because the pipeline system has already filled the maximum.

And then you talk about pressure built in back of the pipes and then having problems, everything through their midstream right up to the point of production, and they might even have to shut some in. And since they don’t have the engineers to turn it back on, that would be that. Anyway. So we’re getting a combination of strategic warfare, naval warfare, infantry warfare, economic warfare that didn’t seem possible as little as three months ago.

And now they’re all very much in play with most of these drones, 100% Ukrainian born specials. Now, this, in my mind, evokes something very similar to what happened in the American Civil War and in the Crimean campaign of the 1850s, when you had Europeans engaging in early industrial warfare and then sending observers to watch the Americans duke it out where they were watching the Americans engage in early to mid industrial warfare.

There’s a lot of reasons for a lot of countries to now send observers into Ukraine, even if they’re not providing a lot of aid because this is a fundamentally new technological breakthrough. We understand today that the first phase of the revolution in military affairs took what was a relatively lumbering Cold War defense industry that the United States had and turn it into something with extreme range and extreme precision.

We’re now keeping that precision and marrying it to individual decision making with not tens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of individuals with weapons platforms that can be launched in a relatively short period of time. And they’re decentralized. Now, there are pros and cons to that, but being able to have individual target enemy formations at scale over a thousand mile front and then hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the front, that is something we have never seen ever in any warfare in any age.

And we are only at the very beginning of understanding just how transformative that is going to be.

Japan: Zero No More

The Japanese have just announced an interest rate increase to a whopping 0.1% after seventeen years of zero to negative interest rates. So, is this a sign of a return to normality for Japan or is something else going on?

After years of demographic and economic challenges, Japan has struggled to stimulate consumption and combat deflation. Unfortunately, this recent interest rate adjustment isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel, instead it’s just supply chain inflation trickling down.

Japan has faced challenge after challenge and while there might not be a glimmer of hope for them, countries like Korea, Taiwan, and Germany might have a crystal ball moment by looking at the Japanese tribulations.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from snowy Colorado. The news last week in the financial world is that for the first time in 17 years, Japan raised its interest rates above zero. They’re now point 1%. Very exciting stuff. Let me give you the backdrop. So I talk a lot about demographics. Japan is the original demographic basket case.

They started industrializing around the turn of the last century and were the first significant country after Germany to be majority urbanized. And like Germany, where you have suburbs, you basically just have inner city, followed by more inner city with everyone living in condos. So they’ve had the world’s lowest birthrate for quite some time until recently. And they’re definitely the world’s until recently, the world’s fastest aging society and or still the world’s oldest society.

They found a way to mitigate some of that, but it’s really just slowed the decline. Definitely not reversed it. Any who once people age are past roughly 50. It’s different for every culture, but roughly they’re they start consuming less and saving more. And in the case of Japan back in the 1980s, which was one of the most productive economies in the world, you’ve got this super saturation of the local market with high tech goods, and then everything had to be sold abroad.

It was a combination social management, political and economic plan, all in one. That meant that Japan became the boogieman of the day for the Americans because they could sell high tech stuff for cheaper than the Americans could make it at home. But it also meant that back in Japan, the super saturation pushed prices down. And if you think prices are going to go down, you tend to defer your purchases for a little bit because they’ll go down more.

And that happened across every economic sector in Japan for decades. And they eventually got to the point that between trade tensions, which triggered problems with the United States, that forced Japan to offload some of their manufacturing to other countries, most notably the United States, in order to keep relations. Okay. You also had people aging and aging and aging and aging, eventually hitting mass retirement.

So the bulge in the population pyramid in Japan is past the age of retirement already, and people who are retired don’t consume much at all. So after 30 years of consumption being flat to negative, you’re now not simply dealing with a different population structure that can’t consume. You also have a smaller industrial base in Japan because so much of it has been offloaded, moved to other places for a mix of strategic, political and economic reasons.

Well, that means deflation has never really gone away, and that means that the Japanese have been really having problems stimulating consumption. Normally, normally interest rates are, to be perfectly blunt, a method of regulating demand. The idea is you make them lower so it’s easier to borrow when you want people to buy more. You raise them when you may a slowdown and fight inflation so that they’ll buy less.

That’s how it works. But once you get into deflation and you eventually drop your interest rates to zero, you can’t go any further. Well, I me guess the Japanese did. You went negative. So you actually get paid when you borrow money. But it wasn’t enough to change the fundamental mechanics of it. Now, in recent years, especially with the recovery from COVID, we’ve been seeing inflation throughout the manufacturing supply chain system.

Japan is no exception to that. And so prices have risen in Japan, triggering monetary policy changes like raising interest rates to a record high in recent years of Point one. But this is not a sign of a return to something that’s more normal. This has only occurred because of increase in prices for the inputs of raw materials and the outputs of intermediate and finished products.

This is a supply chain reason for inflation going up, not a demand reason. So while it’s a little bit more normal today in Japan, and banks can work a little bit more normally, which is, you know, a good, good thing. There hasn’t actually been a fundamental change in the core problem that plagues the country, and that’s that demand has been steadily dropping now for an entire generation and is unlikely to recover.

Why does this matter? Well, Japan used to be the world’s second largest country, and it has basically stalled for 35 years now. Second, in the meantime, a lot of other countries have caught up or even passed Japan in terms of the speed of aging. If you remember earlier, I said that Japan’s birth rate had risen a little bit.

And it’s aging. It’s slowed a little bit. Not not recovered, not reversed, but slowed. A lot other countries have screamed right by it. Countries that are now aging faster include Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland. And now it’s kind of a race to see who gets to the bottom first, which means this sort of problem.

It’s not so much that it’s Japan’s old normal and still new normal. It’s about to become the new normal for a whole swath of countries that we have long associated with robust economic growth and high levels of industrial production. So Japan’s past is the future for a lot of these countries. And Japan’s present doesn’t look all that hot either.

The Rising Incompetence of the Russian System

More details have emerged about the March 22 terror attack outside Moscow. The information does not look good, with the biggest takeaway being the Russian government’s showcasing of a shocking incompetence in security matters. That will haunt this regime until the day it falls.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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Terror Attack at Concert Hall in Moscow Suburb

Late evening on Friday, March 22 local time, three gunman attacked a concert venue in a Moscow suburb, setting it ablaze and killing an as-yet-unknown number of civilians. Regardless of who the perpetrators are ultimately revealed to be, the attack cuts to the core of how the Russian Federation holds itself together.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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Things I (Do) Worry About: Deflation

In Person Speaking Event

Thanks to The Economic Roundtable, First Settlement Orthopaedics, and Marietta College, I’ll be speaking at the McDonough Auditorium on the campus of Marietta College.

Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2024 at 7:00pm.

LEARN MORE & REGISTER HERE

We’re all quite familiar with the concept of inflation, but inflation’s dark and twisted sister -deflation- doesn’t come out of her shell all that often. So, for our next episode of ‘Things I Worry About’ we’re talking about deflation.

Deflation is when prices drop due to low demand, which causes a downward economic spiral. Some examples of this are the Great Depression in the US and Japan during the 90s. We’re now seeing mounting deflationary pressures in the Chinese economy that could have devastating consequences.

With some sectors exhibiting inflationary activity and others facing deflationary activity, there will be some complex challenges to overcome. When I find myself staring at the ceiling late at night, pondering the ‘flations, I often find that deflation is what really worries me…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here, I am coming to you from Monterey Bay in California, where I just spoke to the Naval Postgraduate School on threats and evolutions in the international system. Today, we’re going to take one of the questions I was asked there and turn it into a video for our ongoing open ended series on things that I do or do not worry about.

This is one that I do worry about. Specifically, it’s about deflation. Now, before we get into deflation, for those of you who are not economists, we need to define what that is. And I think the best way to do that is to put in the context that everyone would recognize readily. So we’ve all heard about in inflation and inflation has been a well foe for most countries in most of modern history.

And it pretty much happens whenever there’s a disconnect between supply and demand. Either supply of a product is insufficient or demand for that product is too high. Now, I don’t mean to belittle the inflation pain that people have been feeling on and off for the last few years. It’s very real. It’s no fun at all. But one of the beautiful things about inflation and combating it is it’s relatively self-regulating.

So if inflation is too high, one of two things can very easily happen. Number one, the producers of a product are now incentivized to produce more of it because they can charge more, in which case you generally bring the supply demand back into balance. Or second, people can get tired of paying so much and so they can buy less.

And so either supply can go up or demand can come down. And those will happen naturally without any action from government. I don’t mean to suggest government doesn’t put their finger on the scale here. Of course they do. But the self-regulating nature of inflation means it’s a more manageable problem in comparison. Deflation is like the the hideously ugly, bitchy little sister of inflation because it’s not self-regulating when you have a break between supply and demand.

In an era where demand falls below supply. Prices start to drop, but eventually it builds expectations among consumers that they’re going to continue to drop. And so people put off their orders. Well, if that happens, then all of a sudden companies that are making these products tend to produce less of them because they can’t make any money. And then people start to be unemployed.

And when people are unemployed, their demand goes down because they don’t have the money. And so while as inflation tends to self limit, deflation tends to self reinforce and build below, this policy set that can get you out of deflation is an order of magnitude more difficult. So we’ve all heard inflation, this inflation that on and off for the last few years and honestly for the last 75.

But deflation, when it gets its claws into the economy, can be really, really terrifying. It can take decades to fix. And oftentimes on its way out, it does a lot of damage. So, for example, the last time we had meaningful deflation in the United States was during the Great Depression, and we got in a wage spiral that went up, but a product spiral that went up more in the Roaring Twenties.

And what that eventually did was supply exceeded demand and then led to a plunge in everything that ultimately culminated to the Great Depression. And if it hadn’t been for the stimulus that we saw moving into World War Two from the government for the military buildup, we may have never recovered. A more recent example is in Japan. We’re in the 1990s, they were boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

But eventually their product production got so high that they overwhelmed the domestic market. Starting off a three decade period of deflation that they’ve only very recently recovered from. And as a result of the American experience in the Great Depression, GDP dropped by a third. And in the Japanese situation, we had basically 0% economic growth for 30 years. And the Japanese economy of 2024 is almost the same size as the Japanese economy of 1995.

Now, where is this an issue? Well, any country that has a significant export portfolio for finished goods but has run out of young people to consume them is in some degree in danger. The two economic systems in the world where that is most true are the gemalto centric systems of Central Europe and then, of course, the Chinese system.

Of the two, I am much, much, much more worried about the Chinese system in the case of Germany. There has been a recognition that a lot of the model needs to change. Most of the energy use to come from the Russian system and a lot of the end product used to go to China. And since there is a recognition that neither of those are long term solutions for the Germans, there’s already a significant amount of industrial restructuring.

And as a rule, when you have restructuring, you’re going to have an inflationary impulse because things are moving around. That doesn’t mean that the risk is zero, but it does mean at least some of the normal economic processes are taking effect and inflation tends to self-correct. China is a much bigger problem. Every couple of months we get even worse demographic information about the Chinese system.

We now know that they’re not just running out of teenagers and twentysomethings, but 30 somethings and 40 somethings. So the age group that would normally do the the consumption is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. At the same time, China’s dependance on exports gets higher and higher and higher and higher. All it would take is a significant policy change and not even a very large one from a major economy.

The United States and Western Europe are the two biggest chunks that would restrict Chinese exports and all of a sudden all of that product gets locked up in the Chinese system itself. We also know that 70% of private citizens in China is locked up in real estate in an industry where there are more spare apartment units than anywhere else in the world.

And in fact, if you lose so many spare units now that are representative of people’s wealth, then you could house more people in China in those spare units than the rest of the world has spare housing units by us of five. None of this works, and it’s a recipe for a deep deflationary system. And if you want to make it just a little bit more complex and a little bit more problematic, it is perfectly capable.

A system is perfectly capable of having deep deflation and inflation at the same time. So again, the Chinese system, this is a country that imports 80% of its energy. This is a country that imports more food than any other country in the world. And this is a country that imports most of the inputs that allows them to grow their own.

You can have inflation in energy and food at the same time you have deflation and overall consumer demand and manufactured goods and that mix we have never seen before. And I can guarantee you it would be ugly. So, yes, the inflation is an issue that I do have concerns about in specific parts of the world. Next topic.

How Shrinking Populations Determine Economic Growth

We tend to overlook the dynamics of demography and its economic impact, so let’s take a step back and break down demographics by generation and how that will dictate the future of our economies.

There are standard behaviors for each age group. You’re born as a ward, but are cheap to take care of. Then you start to become more productive and consume a lot. Then you age into a situation where you’re providing taxes. And then you revert back to your old ways and become a leech on the economy again. Fairly cyclical and predictable.

So in rapidly aging populations like Europe, Korea, Japan and parts of Africa, once you tip that scale towards people consuming more capital than they are producing…you can imagine how well that plays out. There are certain situations where population shifts could benefit an economy, but there’s no silver lining to deep population decline.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody Peter Zeihan here coming to you from snowy Colorado today. We’re taking an entry from the Ask Peter column on overpopulation and under population a specifically. The question is, Peter, you talk a lot about population and the negative economic consequences of it. But if we are entering a world where there’s a lot of environmental concern and damage, doesn’t slimming down the population actually argue that we could be headed towards a better world?

In addition, in general, is this going to mean that there’s more resources available for everybody else? Wouldn’t that mean we’re going to have a degree of economic growth that is qualitatively different than what came before? And, you know, there’s some there’s something to that argument. But the problem is that assumes that we lose five, ten, 15, 20%. Pick your number across the world.

Equally of every age group of every country and every ethnicity. That’s not what’s going to happen. So before I go into the nuts and bolts of it, let me kind of give you the overview. As a rule, people under age 18 only can assume things like education, a little bit of health care. They don’t contribute to the working economy.

People aged 18 to 45, these are the folks that are having kids and buying homes and going to school. It’s very heavy consumption. Most of the stuff that you will consume in your lifetime, the greatest proportion of your consumption will happen while you’re raising your kids, which as a rule, ends between 45 and 50 from 45 to 5065.

These are your mature workers. These are the people who are playing, paying lots and lots of taxes. They’re saving for retirement. They’re generating the investment that drives the private sector. And then when you turn 65, you’re still consuming, but your consumption changes dramatically to things like health care and a little bit of leisure. But you’re still occupying your home.

But your tax bill goes way down and now you start drawing pensions and health care benefits that drive government commitment to you through the roof. So you start out being a ward but not being very expensive. You move into being very productive in a lot of consumption. You age into a situation where you’re providing taxes and then eventually age to the point where you’re just this giant sucking sound.

Instead, in the advanced world. We’re not just dealing with the population. We’re dealing with very, very rapid aging. So the population structure for, say, Europe or Korea, Japan in just 15 years is going to be a big bulge of people who have retired but not died. And then a very, very small number of working age adults and even fewer children.

It’s a very different pattern because old people. Let me rephrase that. People of advanced age consume goods, but also consume a huge amount of tax take and health care. And so they are a net drain on the system instead of tax payers like they were in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and early sixties. So the pressure on the system is massive.

A good thing. A good example. I can give you a how this imbalance really doesn’t work out is if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, especially southern Africa, during the AIDS epidemic, you had an absolute gutting of the population structure of people roughly aged 18 to 45, leaving you with mature workers and societies where the mature workers weren’t all that skilled and then no one to raise the kids.

And so the block of people 18 to 45. Those are the people who do most of the work, pay a lot of the taxes and absolutely raise the children for the next generation. And we lost their consumption at the same time. So a lot of these countries south of Congo basically faced a 25 year period of economic just despair as their population balance changed.

The part of the world where we’re probably going to be seen that this happened most dramatically. Well, let me give you two. The first one is East Asia. These are places that have seen absolutely massive increases in health care and longevity over the last 50 years. So, for example, I believe the Koreans are now the longest live people in the world, which means that you’re going to have these massive, massive aged populations sucking the government dry while there’s no one down below to do the work, much less raise children.

The other chunk is the Orthodox world, where a combination of the post-Cold War shocks and alcoholism and a poor diet are hollowing out the working age population. Before we get to the point where we have a population collapse, and these are two very different economic models that really don’t go anywhere particularly positive. But there is a lot of nuance and difference between the two.

In the case of East Asia, assuming for the moment that we don’t have an energy or trade breakdown big, if you’re looking at a general degradation of the states ability to function. In the case of Central Europe, you’re instead looking at scene wedges of populations that are actually going to benefit quite a bit from this because if you lose everyone in the thirties, but you still have people in your fifties, you still the tax base, you still have the work and the economic inequality that will erupt in that sort of environment suggests a significant political challenge.

So everyone has their own story, but it’s really hard to make the case that deep population has a silver lining and the environmental case. Keep in mind that if people age, they’re still consuming. You’ve just lost the younger generation that can pay the taxes and generate the investment that’s necessary to maybe transition to something that isn’t based on oil and coal.

So there’s really no upside here. There are just flavors of downside.

Russian Tech Transfers and Propaganda in the US

It should come as no surprise that the Russians love meddling around, so let’s see what they’ve been up to lately. We’ll be looking at tech transfers with Iran, North Korea, and China and Russian propaganda in the US.

Russia has promised satellite launches to the Iranians and North Koreans in exchange for Iranian Shahed drones and North Korean artillery rounds. In fact, the Iranian satellite was launched about a week ago. The Chinese are getting in on the action too, with naval technology and weapons systems changing hands.

Now with all that going on, you would think America could agree that the Russians are NOT our friends…sadly that’s not the case. The MAGA movement has fallen victim to Russian propaganda, which reaffirms Russia’s ability to disrupt American politics and sow discord (especially during election season).

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado, where we are recovering from Snowmageddon 2024. We’ve gotten about 40 inches of snow in the last 36 hours. pretty though. Anyway, the news today is that the Russians are making some adjustments to things. Number one, they’re starting to pay back countries that have helped them in the war with Ukraine.

So, for example, they’ve promised a satellite launch to both North Koreans and the Iranians. And the Iranian one launched in the last few days. So if you think of all of the operations where Iran has activities in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, in Jordan, in Gaza, they now have the ability, at least in a limited way, to have a bird’s eye view of what’s going on, which is going to cause significantly more problems for anyone who happens to be on the other side of the ledger.

The Russians are doing this in exchange for the Shaheed drones that the Iranians have been providing. Those are the ones that are basically flying mopeds. They have a £10 warhead. The Russians have been using those targets in power centers. The North Koreans will be getting one soon as well. Of course, North Korea has been providing the Russians with about a million artillery rounds.

And for those of you who have forgotten, North Korea has intercontinental ballistic missiles. So getting satellite recon for any reason is something that vastly increases that threat. And then, of course, there are weapons systems being traded to the Chinese, things like naval technology, where the Chinese could use them to hurt the United States and any number of ways.

That’s kind of half of what’s going on. The other half is the Russians are in a celebratory mood because they’re discovering that they can widen, that the sort of propaganda that they spread in the United States and certain factions of the American political system, specifically the MAGA. Right. Because, I mean, here we’ve got the Russians providing aid and comfort to three countries, North Korea, Iran and China that even Mogga agrees are all bad.

But that doesn’t seem to be registering. They’re still thinking of Russia as a friend. Let’s see. The background of this, of course, happened during COVID, when the Russians were the most active peddler of anti-vaccine disinformation in the world, which resulted in the death of over a million American. You know, the kind of death toll that the Russians could have never achieved during the Cold War without some sort of horrible response.

But now they have enablers across this branch of the Republican Party. And so the Russians have started to diversify what they’ve been saying just to see how far they can push it. And last week, they were able to actually get Donald Trump to stop campaigning against the ban of Tik Tok, which is something that is broadly popular even among the American right.

So it’s going to be interesting to see how Donald Trump’s shift on this is going to now translate into Moscow’s opposition to Chinese issues. I don’t know how far this is going to go. The general breakdown in civics education in the United States is definitely having a very deep impact on our political system at home, but it’s providing a lot of opportunities for the Russians to drive wedges between the various aspects of American society.

So far, with minimal blowback. So this is something that is definitely on my worry list and not something that I have a very clear idea of how it’s going to go. There’s just too many pieces in play. I can tell you that because it’s an election season and because Donald Trump is defending himself from 90, I think, indictments, that there’s going to be ample fodder for the Russians to work with over the next several months.

This is definitely one of those things that’s going to get far worse before it even begins. Do you get a hint of better?