The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Peter Zeihan || Will Automation Save the World?

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

A world caught in deep demographic decline, faced with the loss of consumption and the complications that come with all that...can automation help pull us out of this nose dive? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/will-automation-save-the-world

Hey everyone, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Phoenix, a city so artificial it makes Vegas look like a nature preserve. I just want to spend a couple minutes real quick talking about, well, actually answering a question that a lot of you have sent in. And that is in a world where we're in deep demographic decline and we're facing a loss of consumption across the board and the dislocations that come to that for economics and trade. Can automation help solve some of these problems? So first, the backdrop. The birthrights started dropping precipitously in the industrial era and then really, really, doubling down at the end of World War II when the Americans created globalization and then tripling down in the 1990s when a lot of what had not been part of the global system,

your China's, your Russia's, your Brazil's, joined in. Everyone started industrializing and urbanizing and birth rates went just plummeted through the floor until we got to the point where we are today in places in China and Korea where birth rates per woman are now below 0.7 and 2.1 is the replacement level. You play that forward for decades. and we're running out of people to have countries in the not too distant future, you know, historically speaking. Now, the picture is differing country by country, but it does raise the question, and this is a good one, whether automation can help us with the workforce. And the answer is probably not in the short version. The longer version is you need two things in order to maintain a trading network and economics as we understand them.

The first one is consumption. Theoretically, automation can help with the production side of the equation, but machines don't consume. So there's no reason to expect a broad automation push is actually going to solve that unless you're part of a system where there already is consumption. So in places like the United States and Mexico where birth rates are still reasonably high and we're not facing the kind of crash we're seeing in Italy or Germany or Belgium or the Netherlands or Greece or Spain or Brazil or. China or Korea or Japan or you get the idea. You know, it might work. So in those systems that are already the most sustainable, automation can absolutely be part of the solution.

But the second broader problem is capital. As you retire, you liquidate your investments and you go into T-bills and cash because if there's a currency crash or a market crash, you're just out of luck. Well, that speculative capital back when you were investing in stocks and bonds, that's what drives the tech sector, a successful tech. sector requires not just loads of 20 and 30 somethings to do the work, people we don't have anymore, but a lot of capital to pay them for years before their investments actually bear fruit. And only then do you also need capital in order to pay for the prototyping and the

operationalization and the buildout and ultimately the maintenance of all these systems. And we don't have that capital environment anymore either. So there are just very few places in the world where tech in general, an automation in specific, can actually be part of the solution. We're going to have to figure out different ways of doing things, and for most of the world, that means doing less. All right, that's it for me. Next stop, perhaps Vegas.