Summary of Peter Zeihan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 We were wanderers because we were hungry. We wandered with the seasons to places with more abundant roots, nuts, and berries. We followed the animal migrations because that’s where the steaks were.
#2 The first rule of geopolitics is location matters, and which locations matter more changes with the technology of the day. The first Geography of Success was all about range and variety. Good nutrition meant being able to tap multiple types of plants and animals.
#3 Rivers that flow through low-latitude and low-altitude deserts are the only places on Earth that have all three of the following: long, sun-filled days, multi-cropping, and fast-flowing, straight rivers.
#4 The first stages of agriculture were difficult, and required a lot of labor. Rivers helped us flush this problem, as they enabled us to transfer a bit of a river’s kinetic energy to a milling apparatus. With the farm-to-table process becoming less labor intensive, we began generating food surpluses.

Sujets

• Géographie
• Géographie
• Géographie
• Géographie
• Business
• Economics
• Globalization

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9798822546783
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Peter Zeihan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

We were wanderers because we were hungry. We wandered with the seasons to places with more abundant roots, nuts, and berries. We followed the animal migrations because that’s where the steaks were.

#2

The first rule of geopolitics is location matters, and which locations matter more changes with the technology of the day. The first Geography of Success was all about range and variety. Good nutrition meant being able to tap multiple types of plants and animals.

#3

Rivers that flow through low-latitude and low-altitude deserts are the only places on Earth that have all three of the following: long, sun-filled days, multi-cropping, and fast-flowing, straight rivers.

#4

The first stages of agriculture were difficult, and required a lot of labor. Rivers helped us flush this problem, as they enabled us to transfer a bit of a river’s kinetic energy to a milling apparatus. With the farm-to-table process becoming less labor intensive, we began generating food surpluses.

#5

The first good choices for sedentary agriculture-based civilizations were the Lower Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, the mid-Indus, and to a lesser degree, the Upper Yellow. None of these were insulated from their neighbors, and they all fell prey to unrelenting competition.

#6

The shift from water power to wind power favored different sorts of lands. The trick was to have as big an internal frontier as possible with easy distribution. River valleys were still great, but any sort of large, open flatlands would work.

#7

The first phase of sedentary agriculture took place around 11,000 BCE, and the first phase of windmill technology was in the last couple of centuries BCE. The jump to watermilling finally happened in the last couple of centuries CE.

#8

The first deepwater cultures were Portugal and Spain, which were based on peninsulas. When armies can only approach you from one direction, it is easier to focus your efforts on building a navy. But countries based on islands are even more defensible.

#9

The collapse in per-unit shipping costs opened up opportunities to ship far less exotic goods such as lumber, textiles, sugar, tea, or wheat. This created urban centers where no one was involved in agriculture.

#10

The harnessing of fossil fuels upended the world’s economy. It allowed humans to generate energy when and where they wanted, and in the quantities they desired. Everything about this new era was new, and it replaced the infrastructure of the previous millennia with something lighter, stronger, faster, and better.

#11

The logic of Geographies of Success, which states that it is better to be by a river, did not change with the shift from hunter/gatherer economics to the age of the waterwheel. But it no longer was enough to fund local development, so trade became more important.

#12

The American story is the story of the perfect Geography of Success. That geography determines not only American power, but also America’s role in the world.

#13

The American colonies were agricultural in nature, and their economies were based around farming. The soil was poor in many colonies, and the natural result was roving production, with farmers clearing land, growing crops on it for a few seasons, and then moving on to a new patch.

#14

The Greater Midwest by itself boasts 200,000 square miles of the world’s most fertile farmland. Midwestern soils are thick, deep prairie soils, laden with nutrients. The Midwest is squarely in the temperate zone. Winter brings insect kills, which keeps pests under control.

#15

America’s territory is extremely safe, and has never been attacked by a foreign power. The American-Canadian border is the least-patrolled and longest undefended border in the world.

#16

America’s coastal indentations provide it with access to trade and expansion opportunities in the bulk of the world, but the country is also at the top of a very short list of countries that face no near- or mid-range threats from other oceanic powers.

#17

Industrializing is not cheap or easy. It requires a wholesale tearing up of what occurred before and replacing wood and stone with more productive steel and concrete. It requires capital in large volume, which raises its cost. Anything that makes even a small change to the availability of land, labor, or capital will throw off the balance and raise costs dramatically.

#18

The Americans were only beginning to hit their stride when the industrial wave crashed upon American shores at the end of the 1800s. America’s vast size kept land costs low. Its river network kept capital costs low. An open immigration system kept labor costs low.

#19

The Americans were only just getting started when World War II began. They emerged as the most powerful expeditionary power in history, and they controlled key economic, population, and logistic nodes on three continents and two ocean basins. They had inadvertently become the determining factor in issues European and Asian, financial and agricultural, industrial and trade based.

#20

The Americans could not defeat the Soviets by themselves, so they allied with other nations that were sufficiently numerous to make a difference, proximate to the Soviet border to mitigate America’s distance, and skilled in land-based warfare.

#21

The Americans did not create an empire, but they did abandon the traditions of international relations. They changed the rules of the game by creating the globalized Order, and they fundamentally changed the human condition by offering peace and protection.

#22

The 1990s were a nice decade for most. Strong American-provided security. No serious international conflicts. Global trade penetrated deep into the former Soviet space as well as into countries that had done their best to sit out the Cold War.

#23

The Industrial Revolution caused a shift in population structures, and the modern economy is a direct result. Modern population structures are a result of the differences between kids, postcollege adults, middle-aged parents, empty-nesters, and retirees.

#24

The first step in the Industrial Revolution was the British textile industry, which used ultracheap Indian labor to do all the tedious, annoying work. The East India Company, founded in 1600 to bring in spices to make English food less soul-crushing, began distributing Indian cloth throughout the empire.

#25

The Industrial Revolution brought about mass urbanization, which in turn necessitated demand for and innovations in the fields of medicine, sanitation, transport, and logistics. Each of these hundreds of technological improvements altered the relationship of humans to economics and resources and place.

#26

The Industrial Revolution brought about new technologies that increased production per worker hour. The shift from the farm to the town took time, as did the transformation of cultural and economic norms of large families with many children.

#27

The second major country to experience the mass transformation of industrialization was Germany. In the century leading up to World War I in 1914, Germany rapidly evolved from a shattered, preindustrial, guild-based economic system to a united industrial, economic, technological, and military powerhouse that had in shockingly short order defeated Denmark, Austria, and France.

#28

The Americans’ post–World War II international order, which was based on free trade, depressed birth rates by squeezing the agricultural sector across the industrialized world.

#29

The Americans’ transformation of the global security and economic architecture, which was made possible by the Order, enabled the industrialization and urbanization experiences that had defined Europe for the previous quarter millennia to go global.

#30

The first wave of globalization impacted the Order alliance: Western Europe, the defeated Axis, the ward states of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and the other Anglo settler states. The path became easier to follow. Water, not electricity, powered the first factories.

#31

Between 1980 and 2015, the world’s internationally wired systems fell into two broad categories. The first consisted of countries that were still growing and had not yet reached their demographic transition points. These countries were ravenous, and not just for food.

#32

The pipe bomb in the ointment is that what proved true for accelerated industrialization is also true for accelerated demographics. As birth rates have continued to drop in developed countries, the average age of those countries’ populations has increased, and the birth rate has now maxed out.

#33

The world’s population is aging rapidly, and the 2020s are the decade when this becomes clear. China is the fastest-aging society in human history, and the country’s demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion.

#34

The next group of countries are those who started their birth rate collapses later, and so may have a better chance of avoiding demographic disillusion if they can get today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings to have a bunch of kids.

#35

The city of Denver, which sits in what used to be the Great American Desert, addresses this problem by putting dams everywhere and drilling tunnels through the Rockies to connect its western watersheds to its eastern populations.

#36

The world currently has two examples of what deglobalization might look like: Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In both cases, mismanagement destroyed the ability of these countries to produce their for-export goods, and funds shortages ensued.

#37

The gl