Industrialization plus globalization has not only generated the fastest economic growth in history; collectively they have dramatically increased the standard of living of billions of people the world over. Unlike the shockingly unequal preindustrial world, the industrialization/globalization combo has achieved the seemingly impossible duology of enabling the utterly unskilled to live at something above an abused subsistence level while pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and education further and faster and more broadly than ever before. . . .
Botton line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that's when it is working to design. Today's economic landscape isn't so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove the mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our "normal" is going to end, and end soon.
-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
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