The Fat Years and the Lean

A perennial staple of the best seller list is end-of-the-world non-fiction. Back in the 1950s much of it fell into the red scare, communist menace genre and others into dread about the rise of a capitalist drone society — “The Organization Man,” “The Lonely Crowd,” “White Collar.”

Since then there have been waves of terror about the loss of an imaginary American Eden due to anti-war radicals, counter-culture hippies, Godless liberals, militant feminists, narcissists. We’ve been warned about the coming crash, the coming plague, the coming decline of the West as we are superseded by a rising Japan, a rampant China, or militant Islam. Yet we’re still here.

Lately the alarmists have been worrying about a shift in the world’s economy from centralized power to decentralized digital disruption. According to many of these dystopian scenarios, the few will prosper while the many die on the vine, the young will win, the old will be toast, the tech savvy triumph, the less educated worhtless. And in the extreme versions artificial intelligence will render all humans superfluous.

Among the more amusing of recent speculations is “The Accidental Superpower” by Peter Zeihan. The author suggests that in this aborning Brave New World some parts of the globe are destined to prosper and prevail over the next 25 years while others are heading for sorrow.

He bases his analysis on factors like population trends, climate, natural resources, access to arable land and water, means of transportation and defensible borders. In a way we are back in elementary school reporting on the principle exports of Ecuador.

In Zeihan’s view, demography and geography are destiny. And of all places on earth, the United States is blessed, exceptional as some hve long claimed, though not for the ame reason. In fact, we became a superpower by accident, less because of the cleverness of our founders or divine intervention but because of the luck of the draw. Our situation is ideal, and we will come out of the slow-motion apocalypse we are in the middle of more dominant than ever.

This is a cheerful prognosis for a change. Most such forecasts of doom tend to have us in the crosshairs of history. Zeihan’s case rests on a couple pillars. First, demographics.

The retirement of he huge Baby Boom generation is underway and by 2020 to 2024 a critical mass of pensioners will be putting unprecedented pressure on the economy and the government. Either the smaller Gen X crowd will have to bear the backbreaking tax burden of the boomers golden years or the retirees will have to endure a smaller payout. It will be ugly.

But many other societies are in far worse shape. Their median age is also rising rapidly because of a baby bust with no relief in sight. Russia, Japan and Western Europe will all shrink in population and economic puissance as they become gerontocracies.

America’s millennials, by contrast, are another large cohort who will begin to mitigate the pain as their peak earning years begin to coincide with the passing of the boomers after 2030. A sane immigration policy, compelled by the need for more highly skilled workers, will also help to correct the imbalance and abate the austerity threatened by an overlarge retiree generation.

Insofar as fracking makes us energy self-sufficient, our world-beating agriculture makes us able to feed ourselves and our geographical situation protects us from large-scale invasion, we should be able to hunker down and ride out what promises to be a horror show for the rest of the world, replete with war, famine, pestilence and death.

Other areas favored by geography and demography are likely to be our allies including Scandinavia, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and a few other lonely enclaves. But when the dust settles, Zeihan believes we will emerge first by a long stretch, bestriding the ruins like a colossus. As Jake Barnes said, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

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