peter Zeihan 2020
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
History Learner
Well-known member
It has now become clear this is an actual trend in both Eastern Europe at large and possibly other places as well.
To oversimplify it, say you have 1,000 women who have 1,000 babies; the average is 1 per woman, ergo a TFR of 1. However, say you have actually just 500 because the other 500 left for Western Europe for work since the last census? Your TFR is now 2 because 500 women are having 1,000 babies. With this in mind, we find this is exactly what occurred in several Eastern European nations.
Recent adjustments found that TFRs here surged in the 2010s, reaching a high of 1.86 in 2019 before COVID caused it to fall back down to 1.78 in 2020 and then 1.64 in 2021.
Same deal; lots of movement to other countries with the end result meaning that adjusted TFR was 1.79 in 2021.
Same issue with Moldova, and it's even more impressive here; they were above replacement rate in 2015 and 2016 and spent most of the 2010s above 2 in TFRs as well. COVID caused it to come down, but even in 2020 it was a respectable 1.98 and then declined to 1.92 last year.
Czechia is last on our list and might be the most confounding one because it's not clear if emigration adjustments are the reason why their TFR has been trending up or if it's because they're just naturally more fertile than their neighbors like the French are; this could be heritability theory playing out, in fact. Whatever the reason, their TFR has been trending up even despite COVID and is now a respectable 1.82 in 2021.
Outside of these four, Serbia and Croatia are much the same story but I don't have the data handy. Croatia was bumped up to 1.6 and Serbia is 1.7, possibly 1.8 depending on when they finally figure out how much emigration there has been; I have a sneaking suspicion Russia might also be due for a bump up as well. Even if they aren't, their fertility recovery from the mid 2000s to late 2010s was as equally impressive as Czechia's and comparable to France and the Nordics:
Indeed, while American Boomers peaked in the 1990s with a TFR of around 1.93, their Russian counterparts made the most of the 1980s by being at or above replacement rate before the Soviet collapse shattered their fertility for about 15 years. You then saw this reverse in the 21st Century; American TFRs boomed to above replacement rate in the late 2000s before steadily collapsing while Russian rates steadily rose up to 1.8 for many years.
However, the most interesting case in all of this would be the situation of China and those who follow Zeihan's talking points might have already guessed where this is going:
If the Chinese population is actually much smaller as this guy says, whom I think is the source of Zeihan's claims, then it follows their TFR is higher than currently thought too.
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History Learner
Well-known member
Of note, the Atlantic Council recently released a survey report of foreign policy experts which revealed something rather stunning:
However, backing increasingly dire warnings by US officials that China will launch a military offensive to retake Taiwan, 70 per cent of respondents predicted Beijing would do so in the next 10 years.
American military commanders have pointed to 2027, the 100th anniversary of the founding of China’s People’s Liberation Army, as a possible invasion date. However, some officials have intensified their warnings about Beijing’s intentions over the past year and said that an invasion was possible before 2024.
US President Joe Biden has repeatedly said Washington will defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, even as the US has historically tried to avoid spelling out what it would do to deter both sides from acting.
f1onagher
Well-known member
Peter was on Joe Rogan's podcast the other day if anyone wants to check it out. It was mostly information we've heard before, but Joe is a good enough interviewer that we got some new thoughts from Peter. I really want them to do a follow up so that Joe can press Zeihan a little more.
I fucking love joe Rogan he's like some Mongolian warrior reborn who decided to run. A podcast
Yinko
Well-known member
Holy shit, I did an interview for a job in Marshalltown just the other day. It's a town of only 23k people.
What do we want?
China's collapse!
When do we want it?
1949!
What do we nom nom?
War Wolfs!
I don't buy that the chief diplomat got demoted for doing what he was told. More likely he was friends/relatives with the wrong person. That's way more normal for China. All the leadership in China is trying to toe the Xi line as closely as they can at the moment. Xi wants a hardline stance. The only case where Wolf Warrior Diplo would be punished would be where they went further than the central authority wanted, which is rather implausible given how closely related the diplo service is to the central authority.
Dude, 10 years is a long ass fucking time. Like, imagine getting fucked in the ass for ten years. Yeah. Hard to predict who gets bored first.
History Learner
Well-known member
Honestly China is playing the most skillful game of economic Jenga ever.
Their entire economic model is basically enron on steroids, and they have so many core problems its not even funny. From resources, to diplomacy, from being the most indebted nation in human history, to real estate to polution, to the centeralization of all power into one singular person. On top of this they are the single fastes aging society on earth and oh yeah they just oblierated their economy with their covid policies.
The fact that their doing as well as their currently doing is a fucking miracle because holy shit everything should be on fire right now.
Yinko
Well-known member
I've predicted, wrongly, the downfall of the Chinese economy a number of times for the reasons that Cherico points out. China's economy is a farce wrapped in a rice-wrap, hidden by a used Kleenex. It's all total BS propped up by the CCP's favoritism and lies. Always has been.
What Xi and covid have done is to make the economic situation so utterly sheer that no quantity of lies can hide the reality of their situation. Even stock bros who had a hard on for Chinese investing have backed out over the realization of their real-estate crash and that the perception of overall economic scale was inflated by approximately 2x.
History Learner
Well-known member
These make good sound bytes of course but, as the old saying goes, where's the beef? I was formally a pretty major China skeptic, but the verdict of history has since convinced me there's not much validity to that position. For an economy that is supposedly this weak, it's rather remarkable that China has, to date, survived:
- The Great Financial Crisis
- American economic warfare, from 2018 onward
- COVID
How about debt? China is 66th on the list of countries by public debt. Household debt? Still behind the United States and Japan. I think this is reflected best in diplomacy too; South Korea didn't even bother making a statement during the scuffle back in August. ASEAN countries did, including the Philippines and Vietnam, but not a single one of them attacked China, instead urging calm from both sides. Certainly, close American allies like the Japanese aren't afraid anymore to express skepticism about the prevailing narratives:
Taking this back to Zeihan, you see this same trend there. Before 2010, he was speculating in 2005 they would collapse by 2011. Same with Gordan Chang and others, who have literally been saying they expect imminent Chinese collapse since 1998; many of the users on this forum weren't even alive then, and yet China has remained around and growing by several objective metrics. At this point, such predictions need to be contextualized as to why they keep getting made by public figures:
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I'm going to have to respectfully disagree.
But I will expand things and say I am legit surprised things are going as well as they are not just in china but across the entire globe.
Structurally speaking the boomers started their mass retirement last year and have begun removing their investments in mass to pay for their retirements. Pretty much the entire developed world and much of the developing world is aging. Two of the biggest wheat producers in the world just fucked off the market because of the Ukraine war.
China and Russia two of the major fertalizer producers in the world have also both fucked off the market. Russian oil has been more or less cut off. The entire fucking planet basically hard fucked their economy for two entire years, and on top of that pretty much every one has been getting into structurally unsustainable debt for decades now.
I have no fucking clue why things are going as well as they are by all accounts all of this should be converging into a dumpster fire equivelent to the crisis of the 3rd century and yet everything keeps trucking along dispite so many of the fundamentals being garbage.
But I will expand things and say I am legit surprised things are going as well as they are not just in china but across the entire globe.
Structurally speaking the boomers started their mass retirement last year and have begun removing their investments in mass to pay for their retirements. Pretty much the entire developed world and much of the developing world is aging. Two of the biggest wheat producers in the world just fucked off the market because of the Ukraine war.
China and Russia two of the major fertalizer producers in the world have also both fucked off the market. Russian oil has been more or less cut off. The entire fucking planet basically hard fucked their economy for two entire years, and on top of that pretty much every one has been getting into structurally unsustainable debt for decades now.
I have no fucking clue why things are going as well as they are by all accounts all of this should be converging into a dumpster fire equivelent to the crisis of the 3rd century and yet everything keeps trucking along dispite so many of the fundamentals being garbage.
History Learner
Well-known member
Fair enough, I guess we will just have to wait and see how it plays out the next few years. One thing I will note, just because I love dunking on Peter Zeihan so much is his prediction for China to collapse in 2022 didn't pan out.
We did have mass riots all throughout the chinese system this year, but honestly people under estimate how much it takes to topple a regime, a country, or collapse a civilization. Where I disagree with Pete is I don't think the comming crisis will destroy china. I think it will destroy the CCP, and then the next regime will rise and most likely be a whole lot less retarded then the CCP is and was.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
China produces more steel than the rest of the world put together, more cars than America, Japan, Germany and india put together, has half the worlds shipbuilding capacity. They will be fine.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
My guess is a combination of sheer inertia, and widespread ignorance. As long as people think everything is fine, and something resembling a status quo is maintained, that's usually enough to keep an economy trucking along like nothing's wrong well past the point where it should have collapsed.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I think it has more to do with people underestimating the factors that drive an economy to keep working. People need to eat, people who've invested large amounts of their life's work in building a business will often work damn hard to keep it from failing, etc, etc.
Inertia isn't the only reason that a system like China's economy hasn't collapsed, even if the weight dragging it down continues to mount.
Yeah, but it's shit steel. That's why they're going after old shipwrecks to chop them up and recycle them.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Pretty much everything they make is shit; because everyone at every level cuts corners so that they can keep the money for themselves.
UberIguana
Well-known member
That's random scrap merchants looking for easy cash, not some official Chinese thing. I don't doubt they're happy to ignore the source of the metal, but it's out of indifference, not because they desperately need it. Pre-nuclear test scrap can also be invaluable for certain instruments as it doesn't contain various radioisotopes that can mess up measurements, which is another reason people are interested in it.