Originally Posted by
Noah Ebner
To be fair Jay, I haven't read the book cover to cover--only the sections the publisher made available to teachers looking to adopt the book. But, to address those points specifically, China no longer has that demographic inversion since they've relaxed the one child policy. The demographic squeeze that led China to implement the one child policy in the first place, incidentally, was exactly the opposite of too many old people. Also, China is almost as technologically advanced as the US is at this point, meaning that in our lifetimes, there will be exponentially more jobs than people. To me, this is the biggest issue with the book. Zeihan either doesn't understand or intentionally ignores the role that technology plays in promoting unemployment. I had one world-famous professor in college tell us that if he had to sum up all four volumes of Capital he would say its "a book about unemployment." In my 10 or so years of university education, this is the single most profound thing anyone said.
I won't argue the points about Russia being behind the curve but I don't think anybody in geopolitics seriously considers them a global power at this point. Most folks inside the US intelligence community that I follow seem to agree that the meddling in the last election says more about how sloppy we've gotten and less about the threat that Russia poses. The only thing Russia has going for it at this point is its veto at the UN and neither China nor the US has ever let the UN get in their way.
To answer your question directly, no, I don't think his numbers are wrong. Empirically, he's not a bad scholar; his sources and representation of data, from what I've seen anyway, appear solid. Where I do take issue, however, is how he interprets that data.