Peter Zeihan

That was the only other time in history where the population declined.

Well, you're talking about not just a pre-industrial society, you're talking a pre-deepwater navigation society.

So it really was a very, very, very different economic structure by every way that you can imagine it.

But it's the only example where not just the population was declining, but the bulk of the population decline happened in relatively young people.

And so it roughly, very roughly, mirrors where we are now, where we're running out of people under age 50.

Well, again, I'm not sure this is a plus or a minus, but after the Black Plague swept through Europe and killed a third to half of the population, what we saw was a change in labor mechanics because all of a sudden there were not enough people to maintain the fuel systems that had been the European norm throughout the Dark Ages going back to Rome.

What that meant is for the first time in human history, skilled labor had an economic incentive to expand.

It used to be you had lots of masters of unskilled labor who lived on the farm and paid their rents, who were controlled by the feudal lords.

And then you had a thin sliver of skilled labor in the cities.

all of a sudden that group off in the countryside collapsed and there was a need to increase productivity in every possible way.

So for the first time, we saw institutions form with the specific intent of expanding the skilled labor pool.

And even in places where that didn't happen, like say Northern Germany, you had a situation where, it wasn't Germany at the time, Holy Roman Empire, you had a situation where just naturally the demand for goods and services required people being more productive than they had been before.

So you had this alignment of institutions and economic and demographic factors that all encouraged everybody to be better at what they were doing.

And the direct outcome of that was the Renaissance.

I wouldn't say skilled, but certainly the largest by output.

In terms of value added, you're going to have a constellation, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, the United States, Germany, United Kingdom.

It's a skill issue.

We, in the modern system and the globalized systems, we all specialize because we can.

And if we go back to a world where we're all generalists, you're going to have a significant drop in the technological capabilities of the planet and of the individual economies.

So we all do different things.