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

Business. Politics. Nonfiction. Economics. HTML: 2019 was the last great year for the world economy. For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wanted it. America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going. Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe. All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending. In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging. The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world - from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all - is about to change. A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook..… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Shrike58

It's always a tough call as to how to rate these books which are unabashed jeremiads, and which claim to be unflinchingly looking into the abyss. One thing that you have to give Zeihan is his emphasis on how globalization became treated as a machine that would go of itself, when there is really no

such thing, that it takes time to replace that which has been broken, and Zeihan doesn't believe that the time to adapt is really there. It's hard to disagree with that, particularly considering some of the breath-takingly stupid decisions that have been made in the last few years. Just look at the hash most of the governments of the world have made of COVID.

The guts of this book is the wave of famine that Zeihan sees sweeping over much of Eurasia and Africa, the return of chronic malnutrition, or simply lack of choice compared to the just-in-time system we've enjoyed. China is the big loser to Zeihan, with how big being the question. He's seeing full-tilt system failure and possible collapse of the CCP state. This would seem far-fetched until you consider the demographic disaster that Beijing has created for itself. Zeihan is not a great believer in muddling through, as he doesn't believe you can make something out of nothing if you don't have the inputs of production, and you can't procure those inputs for love nor money.

On the other hand, if you happen to live in the Western Hemisphere, pat yourself on the back, in that you're in the region most likely to get through the incipient bad times playing a strong hand. It's been noted that Zeihan really doesn't deal in ideology, but Globalization failed as an ideology in the United States because the benefits were delivered to too few people; that rebalancing act is now on. It's just that, again, it takes time, and time will be against everyone for the next decade or so. Not a happy read, but even if Zeihan is only about 50% right, the prospects are daunting, even if governments respond with intelligence and responsibility, as opposed to wallowing in resentment, which has been the predominant trend; see Nadav Eyal's "Revolt" for that trend.

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LibraryThing member Daniel.Estes

About 10 years ago I read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. It's a scientific examination of global trends which concluded by saying things were likely to turn out okay for the nations of Planet Earth. I like to think of Peter Zeihan's book as "The Rational Pessimist" only the obvious

difference is I would give Ridley's book an Optimistic rating of, let's say, 10 whereas I would give Zeihan's book a Pessimistic rating of... uh... off the charts. The title might as well be, "Get Ready For Some Pain."

The End of the World Is Just the Beginning is the most important book I've read in years. It's well-written, well-argued and is an utterly helpless and depressing look at the post-global world order. To put it another way, I'm consistently losing sleep at night thinking about it.

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LibraryThing member amimariscal

It’s very incendiary and black and white when the truth is not. It is very eye opening which I appreciate. It’s a fun read for someone who likes apocalypse stories, but definitely needs a balanced perspectivez

LibraryThing member rivkat

Interesting if not entirely convincing book about why we’re doomed: “Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been. The best it will ever be.” But people in North America will be better insulated than most from the coming collapse of international trade networks because autarky is

more possible for us. Basically, economies of scale are going away because the networks that produce them are too fragile to survive, many resources will be out of reach even if we rejigger production of electronics etc. to be domestic, and also most of the world will undergo “mass retirements followed by population crashes.” As to the networks, he's pretty persuasive on long-haul transportation as the foundation of current production and consumption. “[R]educing transport costs by 1 percent results in an increase of trade volumes by about 5 percent. One doesn’t need to run that in reverse for long” to get disaster. The stuff about demographic collapse leading to economic collapse is the least convincing because it relies on the idea that people who retire will need to stop investing in stocks, bonds, and foreign assets in order to ensure their own retirement security, something that assumes widespread stock ownership and individual allocation. (He argues that one reason that America will be relatively insulated is that rich people own so much of the wealth in the US and therefore tolerate higher risks.) But the risk of widespread labor shortages, especially of care for aging people, does seem real. And on the political side, “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.”

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LibraryThing member aadyer

An eye-opening and very thoughtful and evidence based account of the current state of the world and what can be done to change the trajectory of where we are on. I think this is a good alert to those people who want to know what will happen in the next 5 to 10 years, and what will happen to

specific countries within that time as well. The contraction of China, the continual hegemony of the United States in economic terms, And the real difficulty in converting from a petroleum-based economic project to that of a climate preserving carbon neutral project are highlighted with stark clarity.

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