Neo Ottomans

Turkey is one of the few countries with the demographics that will allow it to flourish in this century.

Europe's Demographics are already collapsing, Russia's are collapsing, China's are collapsing, Canada's are collapsing and Japan's are collapsing.

The U.S, China, Argentina, Turkey and Japan have demographics that are decent, or have properly protected themselves from the effect of poor demographics.

Peter Zeihan has some very good books on this. He forsees Turkey retaking much of their Ottoman lands, Argentina controlling much of Southern South America, Japan becoming Asia's regional power as China collapses, and the U.S remaining a superpower both militarily and economically (barring a domestic civil war/unrest) while the Saudi's, Iran and Israel duke it out in the Middle East.

 

What is meant in this context by "demographics"? This seems overly ambiguous to me. And why is Japan listed as both having collapsing demographics and demographics that are "decent"?

 

By Demographics I mean population as seen in a Population Pyramid. Population lets you have soldiers, workers, social nets, etc. Japan was one of the first countries whose demographic bomb began to go off. To mitigate it Japan moved production facilities out of Japan. For example, Toyota vehicles are now made manufactured outside of Japan in places like Mexico and the U.S. This means the lack of workers in Japan is mitigated by the work being done in Mexico, while profits flow back to Japan to keep their retirees alive. Mexico has good demographics.

There's no way around Demographics, it takes 18 years to produce an 18 year old, and even if these countries were to start having kids now, they wouldn't see benefits economically until 18 years from now.

Here's China's Demographics in a population pyramid. The next cohort under the 30-34 bulge has 10 million less people (10 million less workers). The next cohort has 9 million less people (Another 9 million less workers). When the current 30 and 34 year olds retire in China, there won't be enough workers to replace them. Their economy is going to massively contract...hard. Keep in mind that China massively pads their numbers for demographics, so it's even worse than this chart shows.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/

Here's Turkey. Notice the base is not shrinking like it is in China:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/turkey/2019/

Here's Mexico. Notice the same thing as Turkey, good demographics:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/mexico/2019

Here's Germany. Look how horrendous that graph is. That's because their births have been far below replacement level (2 per parents) for decades. Germany is in danger of imploding:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2019/

The United States is shrinking, but vastly slower than all the rest of the West (all us Evangelicals with 5+ kids are doing that). Plus we have immigration for a net gain:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2019/

In other words, all the Western Countries, plus China and Russia are going to be hemorrhaging population except for the U.S. While Mexico, Turkey, Argentina and Africa are growing or stable in population. Putin is making a move on Ukraine because his demographics are so bad that if he waits a decade he won't have an army left, they'll all be old.

And when Turkey needs more farmland to feed their population, a stable Turkish army against hollowed-out European demographics made up of mostly old retirees with very few young people (I.E soldiers) won't go well for Europe. Europe will be very interesting in the next 50 years.

 

Thank you. Very interesting. Some germane facts:

1. China apparently has a huge population of young, unmarried men, due to the fact that they only allowed one child per couple for so many years, and most couples chose sons (aborting the girls). So there is a large population of draftable young men in China.
2. Besides your observation that Japan (where we were missionaries for 33 years) has outsourced its factories for years, for many years they have imported foreigners for the factories still in the country. At one point they had a big problem with surplus Iranians in a district in Tokyo, men who had not gotten a job yet and were sleeping in the parks.
3. In Japan, the Self Defense Force is looked down on, and young men don't like to join. Having said that, we had a missile defense soldier in our church for years, and one of our young believers joined up, so the SDF is still hanging on.