Peter Zeihan watch

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I have an essay reviewing Peter Zeihan’s Disunited Nations.

Suppose that Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Ross Douthat (The Decadent Society) are correct that we have gained affluence but lost our innovative edge in recent decades. Zeihan would say that these developments both reflect the Order. And he predicts that this will soon change. But he would focus on the loss of well-being from the collapse of the Order rather than on any possible benefits that might come from a more fragmented state power system, with societies perhaps placing a higher priority on innovation and having more tolerance for risk than is the case today.

I also recommend this podcast with Zeihan and Anthony Pompliano. In the podcast, Zeihan says that the coronavirus, by lower the demand for oil, makes it easier for Saudi Arabia to drive the price down, forcing some countries to shut down oil wells that cannot easily be re-started. Zeihan argues that this will be particularly hard on Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, but not so hard on the United States.

And in this essay, he lists many ideas (not his) for government spending, at least some of which are likely to be enacted.

7 thoughts on “Peter Zeihan watch”

  1. I really enjoy Zeihan’s books, admittedly the first two a bit more than the new one. I do think the prediction that Japan, Argentina, Turkey are the countries of the future is quite bold!

    His work lines up somewhat with the Fourth Turning, which is quite interesting for its predictions about 2020 made in 1996… have you read?

    Also, on twitter, Michael Kreiger is an interesting follow for his belief in localism and the end of the order.
    https://twitter.com/LibertyBlitz/status/1258405989084049408?s=20

    While his style can be hyperbolic, he has made some good predictions. This set of blogs is interesting.
    https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/04/17/the-road-to-2025-part-1-prepare-for-a-multi-polar-world/

    • I’d love to be able to think of Japan as a country of the future. However, unless they go in for some very drastic changes (and not of the sort envisioned by Japanese US-lovers), I’m afraid it’s a country of the past. From what I saw there with my own eyes, it is degrading slowly but steadily. Zeihan mentions demographic and family-formation problems, and proceeds to ignore them. His idea that it can ‘desource’ its way out of its problems I consider completely delusional. Besides the fact that it doesn’t help with demographics, the current crisis has shown clearly that ‘desourced’ production isn’t yours.

  2. “forcing some countries to shut down oil wells that cannot easily be re-started”

    Why can’t they easily be re-started? Did he spell this out? A lot of smaller wells use a series of large but simple electric pumps that get turned off for maintenance and then turned back on again.

    I don’t have time to go through the whole video, even at high speed. YouTube will automatically generate captions, but can you have it output a whole transcript such that one can search for keywords?

      • That seems to be a sketchy claim (“long-running bluff” in the article) the Russians make to push back against pressure from OPEC to cut production. “Oh, we would, of course, if we could, but it’s not like it is in the desert, you know, here in Siberia, you can’t just turn pumps on and off, you shut down a well, it freezes shut forever!”

        “It’s mostly nonsense,” Thomas Reed, a Houston-based energy investor and former executive of an oil company with experience in Siberia, said of the cold-weather claim. “Generally, an oil well will shut in just fine.”

        That view has been substantiated by the hurried Russian shutdown now. Siberian and far northern wells, it turns out, turn off about as easily as any others.

        I think Zeihan got hoodwinked on this one, along with the rest of ’em.

  3. Disunited Nations seems to be a lesser version of Sketches of the History of Man by Henry Homes, lord James, which although centuries older, I finished recently seems much more relevant today. But that seems to be the odd thing about shutdown reading. It seems things come in pairs. Serotonin was a lesser version of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, and Skin in the Game overlapped a lot with the contemporaneous Cents and Sensibility by Gary Saul Morson, the latter of which might make useful additional readings for the epistemology seminar.

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