BBC On Demographics

Seeking other sources on Zeihan's favorite topic.

Recent reports on fertility, led by South Korea reporting just 0.72, which is just a third of the 2.1 needed for a steady state population, have led to demographics being in the news. I’ve been looking for other sources that address the various topics Peter Zeihan covers, judging only on credibility, rather than seeking confirmation.

This report from the BBC is confirmatory in nature. The demographic declines in industrialized societies have happened, they’re accelerating, there are no simple policy fixes, immigration matters a lot, and maybe this is OK, because climate change and stuff.

The BBC report is an easy, digestible piece. Those of you who are curious about why I’m so taken with Zeihan might like this 95 minute appearance he made in Nashville just a few days ago. I used Document Cloud to make a full transcript.

Conclusion:

Zeihan goes at things the same way I used to do on my Wordpress blog regarding food and water security. Doing this sort of thing takes a LOT of reading, I have too many other things going on, and I am obviously lacking any standing in the area.

That being said, Zeihan has, at least for me, confirmed the horrors that await our species. He’s also given me a much better sense of the order of execution and time frames. The hands down worst thing is his assertion that societies will not willing let their electrical grids go, which means there’s more lignite coal in our future.

The thing I see missing in his work is the potential for the U.S. to be tipped into a civil war by China, Russia & Co. hitting existing fault lines in our society. The demographics of the U.S. and Mexico, which he sees as a blessing, may be the proximal cause to our melting down into some shitty substandard theocracy.

So I’m going to use Zeihan’s prognostication to decide what areas need attention next. No agonizing about China, they are a creature of globalism, entirely dependent on our goodwill keeping of the sea lanes. If we lose interest, or if we and/or Japan take an interest in choking them out over misconduct in the region, they do not have the capability to evade that. Not even if their navy is not otherwise engaged with Taiwan.

I do feel the need to read the tea leaves on the Constellation class frigates, which may fill a gap left by our carrier-centric naval strategy. When twenty of them join six dozen Arleigh Burke class destroyers, that’s close to the hull count needed to keep things orderly on a global basis. The littoral combat ships are in retrospect a mistake in both strategy and execution; they’ll not be missed. The planned retirement of the Ticonderoga class cruisers and the first 28 Arleigh Burke destroyers is dependent on the DDG(X) not suffering the same fate as the Zumwalt class.

It’s a mad, mad, mad world, in which everyone is mad, and some days I want to join the trend and go a bit mad myself.