Comments by "Louis Giokas" (@louisgiokas2206) on "Zeihan is a Keynesian" video.

  1. Wow! Just discovered this channel. Very interesting. I do whole heartedly agree with you on the Keynesians. I tend to agree about Zeihan. By the way, I am a big fan of his and have read all his books. As far geopolitical trends, he is basically right on the mark. Watching the news on China, for example, it is like seeing his prognostications play out in real time. I do agree with you, especially on the flexibility of the capitalist, entrepreneurial system, and your comments on productivity driving economics. In the case of Zeihan, especially his pronouncements on the difficulty of moving supply chains, I totally disagree with him. Look at how quickly China went from a dirt-poor peasant economy to an industrial economy. Moving that now would take a fraction of the time, and the CCP is giving lots of incentives to do so. Let me give a couple of examples. One involving moving production to China from the dawn of their expansion and another going the opposite way and happening now. The first case is the production of cell phones. I live in the Chicago area. Many years ago, Motorola built a cell phone plant in the Chicago exurbs. It was a great win for the area. Then, not long after building that plant they up and moved it to China. All it took was a few engineers and managers and they were up and running. I was familiar with the US plant as they were a customer of the software company I worked for at the time. I was also familiar with some of the people involved in the move as an IEEE member. In the second case, happening right now, US companies involved in building equipment for AI are setting up shop in Mexico. Their manufacturing contractors, like Foxconn, are a part of the process. This was just reported in the WSJ yesterday. Also, you need to look at the type of production and processing done in China. It is low tech and in the case of materials processing very, very, very dirty. Such processes would never be allowed in the west, and it is a crime that western governments support it. We have just exported massive pollution to save a few bucks. Back to production, look at iPhone production. Look at the pictures and videos of the inside of the Foxconn facilities that produce them. Some plants have at least 100K workers. The plants are giant conglomerations of low-tech workbenches mostly staffed by local peasants. This is not an exaggeration. It really came home to me when, during the height of COVID, at one of the plants many of the workers, who lived in dormitories on-site, became concerned about outbreaks. They decided to leave, and the police tried to stop them. Many left anyway, and as it was put some walked the day or two it took to return to their villages. By the way, some of this production has already been moved and that was done quickly. As for the demographics, Zeihan has admitted that the US situation is not dire. The latest generation able to do so has had kids, so the base is stable and not shrinking. It is smaller than the baby-boomers, but so are all of them. His comments about the effect on capital formation do have some merit. In addition, the US is the destination of many immigrants. This has always been the case for the US. For example, my grandparents came to the US with fourth grade educations and did well. Some of their kids went to university. ALL of their grandkids did with a lot of MS, PhD and MD degrees among them. This is not an unusual case. Keep up the good work, and I will be watching.
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