Peter Zeihan

And so their birth rate has actually risen quite a bit, nowhere near replacement levels.

I don't want to oversell it.

But it's now higher than not just China and Japan.

and Taiwan and Germany Italy but also the Netherlands and India and Thailand yeah India India's aging so the math is going in a different direction everyone is still sliding but we're all sliding at a little bit different rates and you play that out over decades and it really matters so China probably with the data we have right now is in the worst shape and after that it's a kind of a three-way tie between or among Germany Italy and Korea most likely

At the moment, most people, when they think about demographics at all, they think about it in terms of federal budgets and the baby boomer retirement and how much it costs to pay for pensions.

And that's part of it, but that's just the leading edge.

The baby boomers are aging out.

The last of them are going to be retired in five years.

And in most of the world, there wasn't an echo generation like the millennials in the United States.

So we really are at the beginning of the end here.

The bottom line is if you still have people in your 30s, you still have a chance to have kids.

So when I look at countries like, say, you know, not just the United States, but Germany, excuse me, not just the United States, like India or Mexico or Poland or Brazil, you know, these are all places that have not passed that Rubicon just yet.

And so with the way we understand economic theory and the way that we understand biology and parenting, they don't require reinvention.

They just need to encourage their young people to have kids in some way for whatever reason they want to modify the language.

But once you pass that, once your average age slips past 40 and especially past 45, there's no longer a traditional biological path.

It's about smoothing the decline, stretching it out, and a number of European states have proven to be very good at that.

Japan has proven to be surprisingly good at that, but it's still a bit of a starvation diet in the long run unless you change the economic model.

So whether it's fascism or socialism or capitalism, everything is based upon the balance between labor and capital and supply and demand.

That's how we understand economics, how we have understood them for half a millennia.

Yeah.