Book: “The End of the World is just the Beginning” – Peter Zeihan
Posted By RichC on October 29, 2022
My friend Jeff and I enjoy discussing and debating nearly every topic under the sun, but few subjects have held our attention over the decades like the impact of technology on society, 
geopolitics and how changing governments handle or don’t handle the demographics shifts.
I tend to look at it from the perspective of an investor and “pretend” economist; Jeff often looks at it from the bigger “doom and gloom” economic collapse of society picture (and often how it relates to Biblical revelation).
The latest book we are reading together is the 2022 book by Peter Zeihan, “The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.” Neither of us bought the book, but instead borrowed it digitally from the library. I prefer using the Libby app (for libraries using Overdrive) since I can often read it on my Kindle, but this time the only copy that was available was on Hoopla which only let’s me read it on the iPad, but also had an audio copy available – sometimes nice too (here’s the PDF from Harper Collins and a “Future of Agriculture” map).
Kirkus Reviews disclosed an informative review of the book.[7] Their assessment of the book is nuanced and somewhat reserved. They acknowledge that Zeihan has covered much territory across disciplines. But, they view his outlook as excessively pessimistic, as stated below.
Zeihan is enthusiastic in his writing, and he covers a great deal of territory, some of it in superficial or questionable fashion. Are countries really going to develop their own pirate fleets to seize supply ships? Will the U.S. establish a quasi-empire of the Americas, using food as a weapon of intimidation? Is China facing collapse within a decade? Predictions of world-ending resource depletion and geopolitical disaster have been made before… The Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich were saying it in the 1970s, and their fears turned out to be misplaced… The book has entertainment value, but some of the material should be taken with many grains of salt.
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