Between covid, inflation and the war in the Ukraine the world has changed a great deal in the past few years, but these changes are nothing compared to what is coming. If you want to understand what is coming, and why, Peter Zeihan’s latest book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, explains it in exhausting detail. Doom and gloom books are popular in America (peak oil, Y2K, Japan buying up everything, etc), but most have proved to be wrong, based on a misreading of short-term trends. Zeihan works with much more basic stuff – geography, demographics, trade flows, supply chains, etc. There isn’t any disagreement that birth rates worldwide have fallen precipitously, There isn’t any argument about the geography of Europe, or which nations hate which other nations. There isn’t any confusion about what raw materials are needed to make steel, or fertilizer, or microchips, or where these materials can be found around the world.. And these are the basic things on which Zeihan bases his assessments.
At just under 500 pages, this is not a book one reads in an afternoon. Zeihan wanders through history, geography, material science, demographics, and dozens of other fields, tying them together to show how we got to where we are, and where we are going, all in his jocular style, which makes this book quite readable despite the enormous amount of material to be absorbed.
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