Leah Archibald: Your previous book, The Accidental Superpower, talked about the United States as a land with particular geographical factors that make it very advantageous for manufacturing.
Peter Zeihan: Absolutely, so for manufacturing, you kind of want three things, you want a security environment that allows you to specialize without losing your sunk cost investment, you want a demographic structure that’s great for production and for consumption and generates enough capital to do it relatively easily. And so you don’t have to import capital, and then number three, you want a good transport network so you can move things around your system so that different populations and workforces around your system can all contribute, and the United States clearly has the best set up for all three of those, we’ve got desert borders and mountain borders to our south, we’ve got forest and lakes to our north would give us a degree of insulation from our neighbors, not that they’re hostile, but it wasn’t always that way, and then we have ocean moats that keep us separate from everybody else, we’ve got the world’s greatest inland waterway network, more miles of waterway and the rest of the world combined.
Leah Archibald: And less expensive to move freight over the water than it is…
Peter Zeihan: And a great rail system and a great road system, and while all of these things could be improved and that falls squarely into Washington’s lap, a fact is they exist, and they all have room to expand what they can take. But again, labor labor, labor, labor, labor, we didn’t go down this massive aging process starting in the 50s, because we saw globalization as a way to bring everyone else in, not as a way for us to profit from the war, so we didn’t industrialize or urbanize nearly as quickly as everyone else. So we have the millennial generation, which for all their many faults they exist and their codres around the world don’t… And that is the biggest difference here, we actually have the labor force, we have the capital structure, and then we have a geography where we can do these rapid transformations without absolutely overthrowing the cultural apple cart.
