The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

China sits at the end of the world’s longest supply routes for nearly everything it imports, including roughly 80 percent of its oil needs. China’s navy lacks the range necessary to secure, via trade or conquest, agricultural products—or even the inputs to grow and raise its own. China’s demographic collapse suggests imminent labor force and capita

meaningful cultivation of nearly half of the lands we do farm first required the pumping technologies of the Industrial Age. Deindustrialization doesn’t simply mean an end to industry; it means an end to large-scale food production and the return of large-scale famine.

casually—by sea (although not before picking up one final shipment of slaves from a city where suddenly any pretense of morality

There will be American exceptions. The world’s best geography will keep development costs low. The rich world’s best demography will make America’s capital cost increases less onerous. The rise of the American Millennials suggests that by the 2040s—when the Millennials finally age into that capital-rich age bracket—capital supply will once again ri

As a voting bloc, retirees don’t so much fear change as endlessly bitch about it, resulting in cultures both reactionary and brittle. One outcome is governments that increasingly cater to populist demands, walling themselves off from others economically and taking more aggressive stances on military matters.

Replace a tax-heavy, mature-worker-heavy demographic of the 2000s and 2010s with the tax-poor, retiree-heavy demographic of the 2020s and 2030s and the governing models of the post–World War II era do not simply go broke, they become societal suicide pacts.

The majority of the men and women in the world’s mature worker bulge—those all-important Baby Boomers—will hit retirement in the first half of the 2020s. Retirees

the Chinese boom stressed global commodities markets between 2003 and 2007, with oil prices reaching historical, inflation-adjusted highs in 2007 of approximately $150 a barrel. Another result is massive overproduction. China is worried about idle hands, not bottom lines. China is by far the world’s largest exporter of steel and aluminum and cement

Every time there’s a tweak to a demand profile—either for intermediate or finished goods—it typically takes a year of retooling efforts to work its way forward and back through the system. We have learned that little lesson the hard way with COVID. Every ship diverted, every shot fired disrupts some part of the supply and forces that same year-long