Summary of The End of the World is Just the Beginning By Peter Zeihan: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The End of the World is Just the Beginning By Peter Zeihan: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

 

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In The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world. Countries will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Jun 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201642297

Willie M. Joseph

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Introduction

In many ways this book is the most quintessentially me project I've done. My work lands me squarely at the intersection of geopolitics and demography. Instead of cheap and better and faster, we're transitioning into a world that's pricier and worse and slower. The author's real job is a sort of hybrid public speaker/consultant. He uses the tools of geopolitics and demography to forecast the future of global economic structures.

Globalization brought development and industrialization to a wide swath of the planet for the first time. Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been. The best it will ever be is doomed. The 2020s will see a collapse of consumption and production and investment and trade almost everywhere. No economic system yet imagined can function in the sort of future we face.

The coming global Disorder and demographic collapse will do more than condemn a multitude of countries to the past; it will herald the rise of others. Germany has more than anyone in Europe, making the German rise inevitable. The U.S. will largely escape the carnage to come. The book is not simply about how the world ends, but what comes next. The focus is to map out what everything looks like on the other side of this change in condition. In a world deglobalized, what are the new Geographies of Success?

Section I:

The End of an Era

How the Beginning Began

We wandered with the seasons to places with more abundant roots, nuts, and berries. Starvation, disease, and injury were common and had the unfortunately high likelihood of proving lethal The only power source an unaided human has are muscles, first our own and later that of the handful of animals we could tame.

THE SEDENTARY FARMING REVOLUTION

The only power source an unaided human has are muscles, first our own and later that of animals we could tame. Starvation, disease, and injury were common.

THE WATER REVOLUTION

Being in a low-latitude and low-altitude desert means you can grow more crops at more times, and less hunger. Having a slow-moving river running through the heart of our first homelands enabled early humans to move things from where it was in surplus to where they were in demand. Waterwheels enabled us to transfer a bit of the river's kinetic energy into the hands of early agriculturalists. Waterwheels were the original labor saver. At first nearly all that savings was simply folded back into the backbreaking work of irrigated agriculture.

But with the farm-to-table process becoming less labor intensive, we started generating food surpluses. That too freed up a bit of labor. Sedentary agriculture provided calories and security, but it took rivers to put us on the road to civilization. Mesopotamia and Egypt both lasted multiple millennia as did Lower Tigris and Euphrates.

THE WIND REVOLUTION

In the seventh century CE, milling technologies married the milling wheel to a new power source. Shift from water power to wind power favored different sorts of lands. Cities popped up anywhere the rain fell and the wind blew, cultures found themselves in each other's faces. The goldilocks geographies were those with solid, crunchy outsides and gooey centers: England, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden. In this era most armies tended to loot their way through their invasions, so borderlands didn't have anything to loot.

In the span of eight centuries humanity's experience on the sea transformed utterly. The quantity of cargo that a single vessel could ship increased from a few pounds to a few hundred tons. Transcontinental trade via routes like the Silk Roads generated 10,000 percent markups as a matter of course. They were able to bypass middlemen and cut the cost of luxury goods by 90 percent. Profits surged as they nabbed ports along the sailing route so their cargo and military vessels had places to resupply.

The rise of deepwater technology opened up a yawning gap between cultures that could pull it off and those who could not. Demand for urbanization and labor specialization had never been higher. The collapse in per-unit shipping costs created opportunities to ship far less exotic goods such as lumber, textiles, sugar, tea, or wheat..

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

As recently as 1700, all energy used by humans fell into one of three buckets: muscle, water, or wind. The harnessing