#100 - Balaji Srinivasan - The Collapse of the West

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

Recent media that portrays a rich non-Western country. But for the most part, you don't see that kind of media. And the reason is because it's depressing to people in the West who are seeing their living standards declining.

They want to see escapism, and they want to see superhero movies. Like, clocks, watches used to say like New York, London, Tokyo. They were like, they still watches in the 80s with those three. Now, that would be, I think in a few years, if this Mamdani, for example, wins in New York, it'll be Miami, Dubai, Singapore. Even the color servers, China disrupted Red America, and the internet disrupted Blue America. This is only set to go further in the next 10 years, because the internet is doing AI and crypto, so you're gonna take over all media and all money. China is doing robots and drones, so you're gonna take over all manufacturing and all military, because China has already won the war. Like, you can't fight a war with China because they make all the parts. America was the center of the world in the early 2000s, and China and the internet are these sort of barbarian powers kind of growing on either side. So the fall of the USSR is the closest parallel, I think, within our lifetimes to what is going to happen. 2024 or 2025 plus, I think you need to figure out where you want to be on the surface of the earth.

Peter McCormack (1:16)

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Balaji Srinivasan (1:59)

Sir, good to see you.

Peter McCormack (2:01)

Yeah, good to see you. Okay, are we witnessing the end of Western civilization?

Balaji Srinivasan (2:09)

As we know it. And here's why I say that. There's actually a graph, which you can use to kind of anchor everything. All right, I'm going to go right into a reference. Okay. So this is the... Oops, let me move this over a little bit here. This is the GDP geocenter graph.

If you look at this, this is one of the few graphs I think of as like one of the most important. And if you can see that graph, okay, this is showing. Can you see that from over there? Okay. So that is showing that for thousands of years, the global economy's center of economic mass was essentially in Eurasia. That doesn't mean it was like literally in Central Asia. What it means is that if you average roughly China's economy, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, Middle East, Europe, you get something that's roughly in the middle of Eurasia. And that's why Marco Polo sought out China. That's why Columbus sought out India. That's why the Mongols and the Huns were at rough military parity with Europe and actually won wars against them. That's why the Arabs were able to win and conquer Andalusia and so on and so forth. So there's rough military economic parity across Eurasia.

And then with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the West got far ahead. And so the global economy shot out, as you can see in this graph, all the way to Europe. And then with all the new wonder weapons, they all beat each other's brains in. You had World War I, World War II. And when all the dust settled and Japan had been nuked and Russia was Communist and India was Socialist and Eastern Europe was smashed to bits and Central Europe was blown up, and even the UK was bombed. When everybody else was blown up, basically you had 1950, which was peak Westernization, peak Americanization, peak Centralization. The minimum number of jurisdictional entities that had ever existed before in human history, because everything had coalesced into these Giga states, like 300 million of the Soviet Union, 300 million, like a billion in China, a billion in India, all this kind of stuff had happened, right? All these things had coalesced into these Giga states that all beat each other up. And then for about 40 years that continued, then the Soviet Union fell in 1991 And since then, as the Soviet Union fell, communism and Centralization fell in its classical sense. And as countries became capitalist again, Eastern Europe, India, China as well, where they became pragmatically capitalist, even if they kept the label communist. And Southeast Asia, Vietnam is now effectively capitalist, even if they call themselves communist. The world economy rocketed back out to Asia much faster than it had been there. And so this took basically thousands of years. This took hundreds of years, and this happened in tens of years. What that means is that every institution that was founded in 1950 or even post 1991, like the UN, the World Bank, basically the so-called post-war order, is obsolete because the money isn't there. The power isn't there. It isn't in the West anymore. And I can show many more charts like this. But this is the underlying driver, is this U-curve. The world is actually reverting back to what it looked like before 1950 And so the entire MAGA movement and also Build Back Better, that all thinks of 1950 as the way things are supposed to be.