The end of the world is just beginning for shipping

I am not specifically familiar with Zehain, but I am very well acquainted with figures who generate many predictions, have a small number become true, and then get treated as oracles for years before the truth is exposed: predicting the future in massive, chaotic systems is nearly impossible.

The US Navy is a major player here, having recently seized Venezuelan and Iranian tankers on the basis of violating sanctions. Only in retaliation did Iran begin seizing boats. This undermines the thesis that the US Navy is somehow protecting the stability of global trade. They're actively destabilizing to advance Washington's hegemonic interests.

> The thing about Zeihan’s arguments is that you can’t really argue against demographics.

You can absolutely argue against this. It's called automation. Needing millions of young healthy bodies to push machines around is increasingly outdated. A highly technical population with "bad demographics" will easily outperform a 20th century population with "good demographics" in the 21st century. Not to mention high population growth (required for "good demographics") is increasingly unsustainable due to natural resource limitations.

Zeihan is frankly a crock. He makes pretty maps and bold claims, but his evidence-based analysis is incredibly shallow. His MO is selling books: geopolitics as entertainment, not providing useful analysis.

You are much better served by listening to experienced realists like John Mearsheimer or Michael Hudson, rather than Zeihan's pop-geopol junk.

I might be a bit biased in this regard (see username), but I've always thought the issue of immigration is massively overblown by journalists and politicians in order to get clicks/listeners/votes.

Both at home and when traveling, it's surprising how well understood "global culture" is by pretty much everyone who lives in a city or large town. Outside of language barriers, things like catching a train or buying a bottle of Coke are all done much the same way no matter where you came from.

I distinctly remember one instance where this old Ethiopian guy, who didn't know a single word of English, successfully managed to communicate that he'd forgotten to grab something and I should save his space in the supermarket queue.

Outside of specific conflicts (Serbia/Croatia, India/Pakistan), or particular instances where one particular group has turned out to cause a whole lot of trouble, the policy as a whole seems surprisingly effective.

I don't think he is particularly 'smart' (wait for me a second here). I think he instead makes obvious conclusions from undeniable evidence like demographics and geography. The 'smarter' more institutional types from Brookings and Hoover tend to argue from policy and politics backwards and then the facts become inconvenient.

Zeihan's thesis is generic geopolitical analysis, which is a fine model, but there's no reason to credit that to him. Really it's about the quality of his predictions which is hard to gauge other than he throws a lot of shit out to see what sticks and occasionally some do. Broken clock etc. Otherwise, he sells US exceptionalism powerpoints to wealthy boomers over expensive dinners. He tends to pile on "natural 20" dice rolls to America's favour and extrapolates from there why Fortress America will be fine no matter how much she FUBARs which undermines the quality of his prediction. It matters if supply chain break down was due to pandemic driven factors rather than active reshoring. Greece-Iran drama was Greece fulfilling US request and eventual release back to Iran - this isn't anarchy caused by US withdraw but US continued engagement/meddling while countries try to minimize fallout - essentially opposite cause of Zeihan prediction. Hard to credit right predictions for wrong reasons. Lastly if demography was destiny, India would be a super power - divident can turn into curse depending on policy and other structural factors.

Sanctions haven't stopped Russia but Russia is a food and fuel exporter. Most countries are more reliant in imports for essentials. E.g. the Saudis need food imports, so maybe going to war with Iran isn't such a good idea for them, and that helps prevent the drastic Asian oil shortages Zeihan describes.

[1] https://zeihan.com/end-of-the-world-maps/ [2] https://zeihan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/global-fertili...

It's crap.

Demography is powerful, yes, but the interpretation matters, and the premises here are of steady-state or linear extrapolation. There is no mention of technological disruption: all the criticism assumes linear progress, allowing analysis to proceed along the lines of resource shortage. This core assumption means the book is already wrong since the progress in key disruptive techs has actually followed exponential curves(see any Tony Seba lecture). If we have the AI and robotics to fill in 18-year old roles, we don't need actual 18 year olds.

It's a work of the moment in that it explains near-term problems reasonably well, while also being extremely wrong about anything more than a few years out because it can't imagine a world that gets weirder, when every big epochal shift has made the world weirder in the process of fending off Malthusian logic.

Not that this invalidates his future predictions, but...

I predict there will be a recession in the next 8 years! And another war!

I also predict there will be food insecurity in the developing world!

And bad things will happen to countries and ships, somewhere on the globe! Probably including Iran!

What do I expect from an expert prognosticator? Opinions with the potential to be wrong. Numbers or quantitative statements help a lot.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, explores this possible future. Great book.

How do you envision the deprecation of the nuclear-armed nation state unfolding? The USSR had a unipolar world outside to stabilize and manage its disintegration. How is this accomplished in a multipolar context, with tensions inflamed by intensifying scarcity, competition, environmental instability, etc?

Serious questions, not a derogatory comment

Arguably it already has begun; tech monopolies are starting to provide "government-like" rules and enforcement.

Governments have the monopoly on sanctioned use of violence. They could choose to outsource that to a 3rd party, such as privateers.

Yeah you know why? Because both parents sitting in offices 8 hours a day have no means of looking after their kids. And a mother giving birth needs to return to work in a few months time, else she there's no pay. Oh and neither parent can give up work to raise these future adults because living expenses are too high. I don't know why everyone is so surprised by the raging population decline. Most of the western world is not child friendly, simple as that.

Like in India, our latest survey revealed that our fertility rate is now already below replacement level - a landmark we were supposed to hit in 2050. We hit that three decades ahead of schedule.

Where is the data to back this statement up? Sub-Sahara African countries have been growing by 2.5% over the last decades. Just one example.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=Z...

You're completely right that given fertility rates are under replacement rate—from memory: 2.1 children per woman—populations will decrease with mathematical certainty. But there is no universal law that developed countries must remain below replacement fertility levels; that's just what has always happened so far—given the cultures and policies which exist today.

It's not completely absurd to imagine scenarios like:

- a rich society getting serious about the fertility problem and putting it's money where it's mouth is: free childcare, free fertility clinics, generous subsidies for having a third kid, etc

- a culture shift amongst the patriotic, or the religious, or whatever subgroup, to believe it's their responsibility to have more children.

Ummm, what? Biden moved the date for withdrawal back, to make it coincide with a 9/11 anniversary. Then, seeing that the US would just arbitrarily change treaties, the Taliban launched an assault and reconquered the country. I get that historical revisionism is popular with political partisans, but usually you wait until goldfish have forgotten the details before attempted to do so in such a blatant manner.

looks like it’s a net exporter of oil, remember you can import, refine and export.

As the US is largely self-sufficient in energy and will likely start becoming self-sufficient in a great many things, it needs the rest of the world less and less.

Those shipping lines, which mainly benefit the rest of the world, start to look like an expensive relic with each passing year.

All it takes for an end of shipping is for the US to stop protecting shipping lines which mainly benefit foreign governments.

If you're talking about high end manufacturing like cars, planes, specialized steel or similar we still do tons of that in the US. In inflation adjusted dollar amounts we produce more than ever, it just doesn't take very many people to do those things anymore. Robots do most of the jobs people used to do in that kind of manufacturing.

Ship building has been killed largely by the low cost of over land transit since the highway system was built and government protectionism vis-a-vis the Jones act which allowed ship builders in the US to become uncompetitive. But realistically we never had a special advantage in ship building, beyond build a bunch of naval vessels really quickly.

> I mean, can a country as large as the US be really competitive without manufacturing?

We do manufacture a lot of things, just very few people work in manufacturing. We're also a world leader in agriculture. Services are fine, and very lucrative. One of our chief exports is education, which is a service.

The perception of US manufacturing decline is widespread. My guess is that this perception is due to a number of factors. Other sectors of the US economy have grown more, so manufacturing now represents a smaller share. And also as productivity increases, fewer people are required to produce the same amount of output - so manufacturing workers make up a smaller share of the workforce than they did in the past. Both of these facts mean that manufacturing has less visibility in the US than it had. Finally, as poorer parts of the rest of the world have grown - the US's share of global manufacturing is smaller.

And by the way, there is absolutely no problem finding someone who will sell you a pair of US made shoes for $300 (or more) if that's what you want. There's a long list of US manufacturers who make high end boots and shoes.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?end=2019&indicators=...

The U.S. has invested trillions of dollars building an infrastructure that has led its citizens to being some of the best-educated and most-productive in the world. Those citizens are capable of doing higher-value work. Should they do that low-value work when it can be easily and eagerly performed by other countries where the populace hasn't benefitted from such an infrastructure investment? Thereby raising the standard of living for all the parties involved? That's the economists' argument. Moreover the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries taught us that focusing on the nation-state leads to widespread warfare. Better to have those nation-states in economic cooperation that leads to peace than economic competition that leads to war.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying you need to really think through why and how we got here when considering our next steps. You're going to need to address how doing what we did before won't lead to the same problems we experienced before. I suspect you're not going to be able to do that, but I'm willing to be shown to be wrong.

But US-made stuff, on the whole, is also better quality and longer-lasting than Chinese.

Like what? You can buy all the raw materials for 10 - 15 dollars (way less in bulk) and a single person can make a pair in under an hour with minimal training.

Manufacturing things in the US doesn't have to be vastly more expensive.

The greatest revolution right now is the ability to do small scale manufacturing. Now the issue is that most of the equipment IS still being made in China. That's because manufacturing in China is small scale. Even on a large scale it is still just a lot of people together doing small scale manufacturing.

They don't have the crazy advanced automated processes like you see in the stereotypical american factory with lots of parts whizzing down automated assembly lines. They just have thousands of people putting things together by hand or with modest equipment.

If you have a feeling the US is in decline, it's because it is. The situation is much worse than most Americans realize. There is no hope for either Democrats or Republicans to fix anything here. I recommend to all my friends that they emigrate if they can.

I suspect that this would just help keep the same returns for the shareholders and executives.

Shoes may be more expensive, but not $200 more expensive (if we take that on average they cost $100 now) if made in the US. Even for a single worker spending four hours in a pair of shoes, this accounts for $50 extra per hour, or around $100,000 per year.

Seems anti-capitalist to me.

This is key though, it presupposes everyone can buy fewer pairs. There are probably a lot of people who get by on one pair of sneakers - particularly children, who are going to grow out of them anyway. These are the people that will suffer if $300 shoes become commonplace.

Some has come back but it's robots and automation. No one is getting jobs back.

Employment is a dying legacy.

Charlie Munger has a pretty good take on it and how many economists and our own government officials are in complete denial about it:

>Now let’s follow and second and third order consequences: You are more prosperous than you would have been if you hadn’t traded with China in terms of average well-being in the United States, right? Ricardo proved it. But which nation is going to be growing faster in economic terms? It’s obviously China. They’re absorbing all the modern technology of the world through this great facilitator in free trade, and, like the Asian Tigers have proved, they will get ahead fast. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan. Look at early Japan. So, you start in a place where you’ve got a weak nation of backward peasants, a billion and a quarter of them, and in the end they’re going to be a much bigger, stronger nation than you are, maybe even having more and better atomic bombs. Well, Ricardo did not prove that that’s a wonderful outcome for the former leading nation. He didn’t try to determine second order and higher order effects.

>If you try and talk like this to an economics professor, and I’ve done this three times, they shrink in horror and offense because they don’t like this kind of talk. It really gums up this nice discipline of theirs, which is so much simpler when you ignore second and third order consequences.

>The best answer I ever got on that subject – in three tries – was from George Schultz. [Schultz was an MIT economics professor before becoming Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State.] He said, “Charlie, the way I figure it is if we stop trading with China, the other advanced nations will do it anyway, and we wouldn’t stop the ascent of China compared to us, and we’d lose the Ricardo- diagnosed advantages of trade.” Which is obviously correct. And I said, “Well George, you’ve just invented a new form of the tragedy of the commons. You’re locked in this system and you can’t fix it. You’re going to go to a tragic hell in a handbasket, if going to hell involves being once the great leader of the world and finally going to the shallows in terms of leadership.” And he said, “Charlie, I do not want to think about this.” I think he’s wise. He’s even older than I am, and maybe I should learn from him.

Basically our leaders know we are in a horrible position and are counting on dying before the full consequences of their actions take effect.

it's funny how HN says outsourcing manufacturing is fine and has no negative consequences while going into a fury at the suggestion that software engineering can/should be outsourced. Both result in short term gains but long term negatives

"When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." This is faulty reasoning that probably makes sense to an engineer because, well, engineers usually make stuff.

Zeihan's view diverges somewhat from Mahan's points, in part because he has different views, and partly just because we're in a different era than the one Mahan was writing for. Mahan earned a lot of credibility because the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century was one in which there could be decisive naval battles, and a powerful battlefleet could virtually guarantee sea dominance.

Mahanism isn't really a prophecy so much as it was a political program pursued by Mahan himself and his allies in the legislature, the presidency under Roosevelt, the business community of his time, and with the general cooperation of the British. German naval leaders during WWI and WWII tried to implement Mahanism as if it were an ideology, but failed in part due to German naval geography and in part because they just were never able to get the level of political support that would have been necessary to rival the Atlantic powers on water. So, at least in the US, it wasn't "self-fulfilling" -- he made it his life's work to fulfill it. At a time in which most of our foreign policy intellectuals fail at accomplishing their goals, it's worth noting that he succeeded, regardless of whether or not one thinks those goals are good.

The era that we are in now is one in which coastal defenses are more powerful and unpredictable than they have been in the past. The role of aviation and aircraft carriers is also highly debatable until we have a real peer to peer war with nukes.

Personally, I found Zeihan a bit exasperating in that his analysis is often good, but he's also often glib and breezy, particularly on analysis of Russia, China, and some other countries. But he's very good at talking about some of these crucial big picture topics that get taken for granted to a popular audience.

Zeihan argues that this is impossible on demographic grounds. The after-effects of the One Child Policy and the mass migration from farms to cities ensures a lack of soldiers, a greying population, and economic/military decline. Throw in Xi's unprecedented cult of personality that prevents anyone reporting bad news as the icing on the cake.

The US has nothing to fear from China, so Zeihan says.

That already covered by option 2 in the op ("2 The Rise Of China"). It's not a very interesting option to discuss when it comes to shipping (e.g. everything stays the same, except Chinese warships substituted for American).

Measured in amount of ships/boats, yes. So is North Korea's navy, though.

It is not a very helpful way to compare naval power between countries.

The USN is by far and away the strongest blue water navy with the capability to operate multiple independent strike missions in any region of the world simultaneously, including contested waters like the South China Sea. The PLAN is barely able to support missions outside of its EEZ, and has outfitted their newest carrier with EMALS despite having a oil-powered turbine engine, which basically means they're not able to launch more than 2-3 aircraft an hour without shutting down their entire onboard systems to recharge the supercapacitors. In contrast, a US supercarrier can launch it's entire flight wing of ~90 aircraft in 30-40 minutes.

The PLAN has 3 carriers. The US has 11 supercarriers and 9 assault carriers.

At least, that's what I think it's trying to say.

But the boats that carry them are huge and slow and absolutely sitting ducks to even a small navy (the Coast Guard could sink them, and improvised equipment could trash them relatively easily).

If there was any risk of losing one of those ships to deliberate activity, all hell would break loose (the theory behind the article). Weather isn't even a major an issue anymore with modern predictions and satellites. So insurers are happy to insure at low risk odds, pennies or dollars per container.

https://gcaptain.com/the-worst-containership-disasters-in-re... (same website lol) has some of the big ones that have happened, all accidental.

Losses of ships are only a financial matter because losses are very rare, so insurance is cheap. If losses become common, insurance costs skyrocket and the cost of doing business goes way up, reducing the amount of trade. That's what the article is saying will happen.

I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying in the second sentence of #1. But primarily, none of the examples you cite were on the military to stop, they were the responsibility of civilian agencies.

That's entirely a function of the loss rate. If 50% of voyages are seized by pirates, that's not just a financial matter.

People sometimes talk about this deep-seated immutable tribalism people supposedly have, but I find a lot of it comes from leadership that espouses that thinking.

I'll pick on the "less invasive nations" part which is wishful thinking. If you have America or any multilateral global order among democracies, you're more likely to have nations trying to get away with what they can with their neighbors. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the most recent glaring example of this, except the responsive was unexpected by many. We only have all of human history of empires and warring countries as examples. This doesn't result in a balanced less polarized global equilibrium. Less cooperation among countries would be worse for the environment even if you ignore the war aspect.

The grain shortage is not about an insufficient amount of grain worldwide, but because of less grain available on the markets prices went up and many poor countries cannot compete and/or afford to buy it at current prices. Also because those who can afford it are hoarding since well, you may never know.

They are barbarians, rapists, murderers, and liars.