The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Mexican Demographics: Where Are All the Kids? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Most of the developing world has relatively similar demographics...the defining characteristic being a boatload of kids. And until recently, Mexico was no exception to that. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/mexican-demographics-where-are-all-the-kids

Hey everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from the Oxford Belford Saddle, two of the Colorado's 14ers in the collegiate wilderness. Today we're going to talk about demographics in Mexico. This first chart is one that I've shown many, many, many times, and it's a traditional developing world demographic with lots of children. Now, there are two things I want to call out here. First of all, you'll notice that when you get to about the 25, 30-year-olds, there's a sharp drop in the birth rate. That happened when Mexico was operationalizing. NAFTA and the birth rate hasn't recovered. It's steadily trending down.

Now, that's piece one, knowing that if Mexico continues to age at its current rate, it'll be facing a German-style demographic collapse sometime of the 2070s, maybe 2060s. So a lot of time for things to go right. The problem is, is when I was doing some research to update accidental superpower, by the way, a 10-year anniversary edition coming out this fall. huge. Mexico has updated their data and here's the new data and you'll notice that giant bite out of children and teenagers. This is three things. First of all, the global financial crisis, which hurt everybody's economic fortunes and made a lot of people, a lot of countries less willing

to have kids. Second, COVID at the tail end, same general issue as the financial crisis. But third is America's shift into a more closed border situation. Now, net migration from Mexico to the United States has been flat to negative since roughly 2007. But you had a relatively fluid border situation where people would cross for work for the season and then go home. By making the border more ossified, a lot of Mexicans have come in state. And that has shown up in their younger demographics because it's more likely now that young families are. are going to be coming rather than transient males who are just coming for seasonal agricultural work. Plus, it's a minus. It all depends on how you stand on the issues of immigration and economic growth.

But the bottom line is that there's no longer a bottomless supply of Mexicans. And we need to start treating them like we would treat any other precious resource. Oh, yeah. One more thing. Drugs. Americans pension for cocaine has helped the drug war in Mexico reach new heights. and we're looking at tens of thousands of people getting murdered every year. Needless to say, that is problematic for things like family formation. So as long as the drug war is going to be going on,

Mexico is probably going to have a significantly lower birth rate than it would otherwise. That's not a problem today. It's not a problem tomorrow. But if you fast forward to the 2050s, you're talking about a pretty serious crimp. By that point, the demographic situation would be unfixable, and you'd be looking at significant national drops. in capacity by the 2060s. All right, now I'm really done.

Bye.