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William Markle's avatar

Reminds me of the quote involving Macaulay - "I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything." Zeihan is everywhere online. I get cautious when forecasters need publicists.

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rahul razdan's avatar

I had the same impression... directionally right, but overstating the consequences. Human beings and societies are dynamic feedback systems. There is always a response and this is somewhat difficult to predict. Three observations about this predications:

1) Demographics: yes..in the traditional model, the reduction of "working" age population can be a disaster. However, useful life is increasing, aggregate wealth is higher, and technology leverage is pretty good. Thus, a "disaster" in an agrarian economy is ok in a modern society.

2) Globalization: a lot of this analysis is on hard goods (energy, food, etc). All very important. No doubt. A lot of the value in global trade is moving to "soft" goods (SW, entertainment) and "medium" goods (sophisticated machinery). These tend to have centers-of-competence which don't move easily.

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