---
title: "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #289"
titleOriginal: "Sami Miettinen | Maailmanloppu on vain alkua #289"
description: "William von der Pahlen, Isak Rautio and Sami Miettinen read Peter Zeihan's The End of the World Is Just the Beginning against Ray Dalio's changing world order — depopulation and deglobalisation on one side, debt and hegemonic cycles on the other. Miettinen takes Zeihan's demographics seriously and his deglobalisation absolutism much less so, and the argument turns on whether markets and automation can outrun a shrinking workforce."
format: "podcast"
show: "Futucast"
episode: "#289"
hosts: ["William von der Pahlen","Isak Rautio"]
date: 2022-08-08
duration: "1:00:53"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSmCqdzUP7s
relatedEpisode: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/futucast-87-podcasts-in-public-debate/
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/futucast-289-the-end-of-the-world-is-just-the-beginning/
---

# The End of the World Is Just the Beginning — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #289

Two books, read against each other. **Peter Zeihan's** *The End of the World Is Just the
Beginning*, whose two engines are **depopulation** and **deglobalisation**, and **Ray Dalio's**
account of a **cyclical** world order in which powers rise and fall. Both are pessimistic. The
episode's actual question is where an optimist should stop being one.

Miettinen sets his own frame first: **markets fix bottlenecks surprisingly fast**. Production
constraints and energy crises get substituted around. What breaks the mechanism is removing the
market — Xi Jinping in China — or removing a supplier from the system by force, as with Russia.
Combine totalitarianism in China with Russian raw materials taken off the grid and even a market
economy struggles, at least in the short run.

## Demography, which he takes seriously

Zeihan's strongest material, on both men's reading. The demographic pyramid has become a ball
almost everywhere and a misshapen one in several countries. Zeihan goes so far as to argue that
Russia's territorial ambitions in Ukraine are partly demographic — absorbing a population of
roughly forty million to fill out its own distorted age structure.

Miettinen's domestic application is Finland's **€10 billion sustainability gap**, which is
essentially the age structure: an ever-larger dependent population, made worse by allocating what
resources remain into care ratios that pull people out of the productive workforce, and by
pension patches that push the state further into deficit.

Zeihan's winners are the countries with both **immigration** and **boomers who had children**,
which is the United States — with Mexico as a demographic blessing beside it — giving it perhaps
two decades of overwhelming advantage over China and Germany, which he places at the top of the
losers' list.

His China claim is the one both men flag as extraordinary: that the population has been
miscounted for a decade or more, with the number of young women overstated by something like a
hundred million. Whether or not the figure holds, the ageing is not in dispute. China went from
agrarian to industrialised in a single generation — where Finland took several — and Zeihan's
argument is that it loses that position in a single generation too, for want of workers. The
birth rate has fallen from five to seven children per woman to around 1.2 within a generation,
and ending the one-child policy did not move it. Miettinen's addition is the mechanism: children
were free labour in an agrarian economy and are expensive in an urban one, and a totalitarian
state with an uncertain future does not encourage having them.

The paradox neither resolves: Chinese **youth unemployment at twenty per cent**, which does not
compute against a shrinking cohort. Miettinen's parallel is that in Finland too, older workers
hold the labour market and the young are admitted through apprenticeship structures.

## Deglobalisation, which he does not

Here Miettinen pushes back hard, and the hosts push with him.

Zeihan's chain is that globalised trade rests on **American naval supremacy** — the US has more
than ten carriers where others have one — and that a United States which is energy and food
self-sufficient, and which is onshoring from China anyway, has no reason to keep providing free
global security and free supply chains. Withdraw the navy and container shipping becomes unsafe,
and the twenty-euro barbecue that arrives from China over six slow months at effectively no cost
stops arriving.

Miettinen's objection is to the absolutism rather than the direction. *This gas will never come
again.* *The price of food will go up and stay up forever.* Statements of that kind are, as he
puts it, close to astrology, because things rarely stay put. His live counter-example: the first
grain ship had just sailed safely from Ukraine to Turkey. The hosts add the structural version —
the world does not run on one variable, and automation, AI and changing work may let smaller
workforces do the same job, in the same way markets are currently solving the energy allocation
problem.

What Miettinen does accept from the argument is the **shortening of supply chains**, which
follows even without the naval thesis: Chinese labour is getting expensive, so China cannot
remain the world's production machine indefinitely. And he accepts a set of hard inputs as real
constraints — less labour, fewer raw materials, less energy, and less room for mercantilist export
strategies. Understanding those, he says, still leaves you able to change a nation's course. What
frustrates him is drifting on old inertia with the wrong strategy because the debt wall always
allows one more year.

He also offers a market check on the doom scenario as it stood: rates had risen, the long end had
collapsed, commodity prices had fallen. A prolonged period of high rates *and* high commodity
prices *and* stagflation — the configuration the pessimistic case requires — looked, on that
evidence, unlikely rather than inevitable.

## Ray Dalio's cycles

The complementary frame. Dalio's internal cycle runs from revolution or renewal through
construction, into a phase where borrowing stops funding development and starts funding the
maintenance of an existing standard of living. Rautio's summary is that people become satisfied
with what they have — psychologically fine, developmentally fatal.

Miettinen picks out three: **internal security**, **external security**, and the **debt and
reserve currency** cycle. On the United States, Dalio is pessimistic despite American strength,
because the debt cycle has run and internal security has deteriorated badly into two countries
that mix like oil and water. Economic inequality feeds the internal insecurity, which makes an
America-first retreat entirely plausible — which is where Dalio and Zeihan meet from opposite
directions.

Miettinen accepts the internal security deterioration as the strongest part. He has made episodes
about identity politics and polarisation; the country is armed; and one plausible resolution is
divergence between states rather than resolution at federal level. His and Rautio's shared
caution is that internet polarisation is not the same as real-world polarisation, and the question
is when people notice they have more in common than not.

Miettinen also notes, drily, that Dalio is a very large investor in China — and that when Zeihan
was asked why Dalio is so optimistic about it, the answer was that his money is there. Dalio's
own defence of China is that a planned economy can simply mandate outcomes: self-driving cars
across a city, because privacy and individual risk are not constraints. The trade-off Dalio
frames is that you cannot have freedom, privacy and the third value simultaneously, and China has
chosen the arrangement with the least freedom — with the Uyghur region as a decades-long test of a
total surveillance state and the Shanghai lockdown as a large-scale trial that did not go well,
though it did identify the dissidents efficiently.

Miettinen's addition on Xi is the one he finds hardest to believe and keeps returning to: that he
is an actual **Marxist**, that dialectics is genuinely being taught, and that young Chinese say
they want state jobs because the party keeps them fed. Private tutoring was banned, which he first
read as keeping Western ideas out and now reads as something more thorough. Rautio's counter is
that this may correct itself within a couple of years, because China remains deeply dependent on
Western trade and raw materials.

## Reserve currency

Dalio's strongest thread, on Miettinen's reading. Hegemony and the unit of account move together:
everything was done in guilders under the Dutch, in sterling under Britain, and in dollars now.
Miettinen holds American equities partly for that reason — market return plus dollar return — and
notes many Chinese investors think the same way, which is why he would not hand the baton to the
renminbi even if he believed the hegemonic shift. Dalio is more pessimistic about the euro than
about the renminbi ever becoming a reserve currency.

## Food, fertiliser and the winners

Zeihan's food thesis rests on three inputs — **nitrogen, phosphorus and potash** — without which
intensive agriculture does not work. Sri Lanka's attempt to farm without them collapsed within a
year, and while a corrupt administration helped, Miettinen reads it as a weak signal that the
food system does not function without fertiliser. With Russia and Ukraine both out, the easy
grains are missing and nobody obviously replaces them, and Russia is a major nitrogen and potash
supplier.

The country picks that follow are the ones he finds genuinely sharp. **Argentina**, whatever else
has gone wrong there, has soil and its own feed — if you were relocating meat production, that is
where. **France**, which was supposed to be a declining and arrogant yellow-vest problem, has
solved energy with nuclear and has food self-sufficiency, no gas dependency and therefore no
exposure to Russian pressure — leaving Zeihan to pick France and Sweden as Europe's winners while
Finland sits in the grey.

**Germany** is the reversal. The worst demographic ball in Europe, a gas dependency built
deliberately around Nord Stream against Baltic objections and not redirectable eastward for want
of pipes, and an economy running a ten per cent current account surplus that has just gone to zero
for the first time in thirty years. Miettinen's point is that the export engine is not coughing
because containers are hard to ship but because **gas is an input**, in chemicals and glass and
much else, and cannot easily be substituted — while the car cluster loses to Tesla. The sick man
of Europe may be Germany again, and Germany was supposed to be the country that paid for everyone
else.

## Taiwan and the constraint that runs both ways

Zeihan revised his own prediction, and Miettinen relays it: he would previously have bet on an
invasion of Taiwan, but China now will not, having watched Russia reduced to pariah status. On
Zeihan's figures China imports **85 per cent of its food and 85 per cent of its fertiliser**, and
would face famine within a year under comparable sanctions — Russia being self-sufficient where
China is very far from it. Belt and Road, on this reading, is a weak attempt to get that deficit
under control; some 13,000 infrastructure loans have been issued in a decade, and the first signs
of strain are loans made so borrowers can service earlier loans.

On semiconductors Miettinen is the sceptic. Basic memory can be made anywhere, Finland makes
specialty wafers from sand, and Apple makes its own processors — so he does not accept that
Taiwan is irreplaceable on the processor side, only that too much sits there if the aim is to cut
China out entirely. His industry note is that a Chinese-owned semiconductor manufacturer is
building substantial capacity in Vantaa, and that the executive he interviewed described a supply
chain so fragmented that geopolitics barely enters the thinking.

The general principle both draw out: in the new order you survive by having something the world
needs, which is what puts you in somebody's alliance chain. Taiwan built a strategic dependency
deliberately. Finland, Miettinen notes, chose the NATO jacket and got into the good guys' club
alongside Japan — which Zeihan credits for accommodating the United States despite terrible
demographics.

## Where the optimism goes

The peace dividend ending is the expensive part. Europe has been running on roughly one per cent
of GDP in defence and must double it — a straight deadweight loss from welfare, on top of
everything else, and no longer with an easy American market to sell into, because the Americans
make it themselves and have the energy and the food besides.

The optimistic case both men land on is technological and specific. Nuclear power is, in
Miettinen's framing, the single largest available lever on several problems at once, demonstrably
good and still resisted — Olkiluoto 3 had just come online, Germany had reluctantly kept three
reactors, and France's position rests on exactly this. If you wanted to do something useful in
the world, he says, you would lobby for nuclear, and the next generations would thank you.

They also discuss — and hedge visibly — the claim that Western anti-nuclear sentiment was
deliberately cultivated by Soviet-era influence operations, citing Douglas Murray and a KGB
defector's interview. Neither presents it as established; Rautio's version is that these ideas may
not have originated there but were amplified because they created disunity.

The episode's most useful piece of self-discipline is the hosts' own, delivered while they google
carrier construction times live on air and read the answer out: **fact-check everything we say.**
Miettinen adds his own version — macroeconomics is a bit like astrology whenever it forecasts —
and admits the book provoked him enough that he now has to read it.

Asked where he would put money for ten to fifteen years without touching it, he says not Europe.
The United States, and if China, then the United States anyway — because it is more pleasant to
be at the mercy of a market economy than of a Marxist. And the closing optimism is deliberately
unserious: Rautio watched *Top Gun: Maverick* a few days earlier and reports a deep and burning
sense that things will be fine.

Original recording (Futucast): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSmCqdzUP7s

From the same session: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/futucast-87-podcasts-in-public-debate/

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Futucast #289 — The End of the World Is Just the Beginning — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #289, 2022-08-08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSmCqdzUP7s. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/futucast-289-the-end-of-the-world-is-just-the-beginning/.