The problem with the Middle East’s explosive population growth

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Belford sound where my favorite places on the planet still in New Zealand. Today we’re going to do the most recent of the demographic series specifically focusing on the Middle East. Now the key thing to remember about the entire swath of territory between roughly Kuwait, fanned Algeria, that whole stretch northeast Africa all the way into the Persian Gulf region, is that there’s there’s not a lot going on from a moisture point of view. Most of these cultures are centered around oases or narrow river valleys, the Tigris and the Euphrates, in many places, the entire coastal plain is less than 10 miles thick, and the coastal plain in places like Libya, very, very similar.
Egypt doesn’t even have water on its coastal plain, it’s just the Nile. So you get these very, very dense population patterns on a very, very concentrated footprint. And the carrying capacity of the land is very, very low. And it wasn’t until the 1900s, when you could introduce things like artificial fertilizer, but you really got a very dense population footprint, even within that cell. So this is an area that was among the last parts of the world to enter the industrial era. And so you had kind of a classic pyramidal formation for the population density until relatively recently in their history. Okay, where was that? There are some exceptions. In Northern Algeria, you got a much wider coastal plains. So agriculture is more favorable there, obviously, the Nile Valley, and Mesopotamia, places that are still desert, but they have irrigation figured the places between the tuberous and Euphrates rivers, hobbies are going back to antiquity, these have had a lot of keeping now. But the general point when it comes to industrial agriculture stamps, you can have a certain concentration, and then it just kind of stopped to be into the desert, which means that these are some of the last areas in the world to experience industrialization, artificial fertilizers, and mechanized agriculture, that sort of thing. And so they don’t, they just have never historically reached the level of population density that you’re able to achieve in, say, the Western world of East Asia. Well, now what that has meant is that there has been a hard population cap on all of these regions, up until today, until one thing changed
oil, whether it’s in Algeria, or Libya, or Egypt, or Iraq, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, once oil became Cardi B equation, the income potential for these re agents had sped up by more than an order of magnitude, in some cases, almost literally overnight, certainly within a decade.
And what that has allowed is these populations to expand beyond the carrying capacity of the land, in the case of Egypt, cotton contributed as well. So these countries could all bring in food, and sell the oil to pay for it, and then generate it’s a very, very different population matrix. And we’re back. Alright, so what this means is, the countries have had all these places have a nutritional pyramid going back to antiquity. And then as we hit industrialization, because of Boyle and the food just kept coming, they were able to maintain very high birth rates, they were no longer doing this with domestic food production, but instead with imported food, so the pyramid has stayed. It’s just gotten broader, broader and broader and broader. Because most of these countries have food subsidies in order to maintain political tranquility. But when the food is cheap, but you’re not producing to yourself, we get more and more people. But it eventually becomes more and more unstable from a demographic point of view. And now, whether you’re in Algeria, or Egypt, or Iraq, and especially in places like say, Lebanon, for Libya, you’ve seen the populations increase by a factor of four or five, even six or seven, over the time since 1945. While food production has gone stagnant, or in many cases, like in Egypt actually gone negative as he switched over to things like citrus, and especially cotton chains. These are the parts of the world that are now most vulnerable to anything that happens with globalization, because if anything impacts their ability to export their non staple food products, and then in four weeks, you get a population crash. That will probably be worst in places like Libya, where food production has maybe doubled since 1945. But her population has increased by a factor of seven or eight. And again, Egypt were a lot of the wheat has gone away and it’s been replaced with cotton and citrus its population has boomed and now even if they switch the call the food production back to wheat, you still would have a 50% shortage and the ability of local food production in order to support the local population. The places have seen some of the greatest expansions in population effort
or human history. And we’re not too far away from them experience some practice, population and human history. What we’re about to see, as the globalization sinks in is a degree of famine that is absolutely unprecedented, and is likely to be even far more extreme than we’re, we’re about to see people.
So remember, when you got to a pure pyramidal population structure with lots of people under age 40, and that sort of situation, you’re going to have high growth because of the consumption, high inflation, because the consumption and not a lot of productive capacity, because you don’t have a lot of skilled workers that are aged 40 to 65, you also don’t have a lot of capital. And so these societies had a hard time lifting themselves out of poverty, except when it comes to things like oil sales, which is then usually the province of the state, and it doesn’t generate the sort of velocity of capital that is necessary for good infrastructure for good education. And for all the other things that we kind of celebrate as the norm in the first world. It also means that you have a lot of young people who don’t really have a stake in the system, because they don’t control the wealth that’s controlled by the sheets and the prince is at the top. So you tend to get very politically unstable systems. And if you add in the coming food crisis, the degree of civil great down that is possible in this in these areas are few. And for those of you who consider yourself students of history, if you look back and the rise and collapse horizon, cloud horizon, collapse of city states and empires throughout this entire region, this is starting to sound a little bit some miliar. This may be where humanity got its start. But it’s also capable of some of the most catastrophic civilizational collapses. And we’re gonna see that next decade or two. Oh, yeah, one more thing. Oh, yeah. When we relocated to Toronto, there is a unique demographic pattern for some countries in the Middle East that is largely based on their intense wealth. Because once you get to a certain level of income, you start paying people to do other things. So for example, if you’re the United States in your top 1%, you probably have a housekeeper. Well, you’ve carried that into the Middle East, where you’ve got this oil and natural gas income, and you’re surrounded by places with a pyramidal demographic structure, and you start hiring people to do
everything. So it’s not just menial chores are raising the kids. It’s building roads, it’s building bridges, it’s doing your oil infrastructure, you bring in labor for absolutely everything. And so if you look at countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or especially the United Arab Emirates, you will notice that they have a pyramidal demographic structure. But on the men side between roughly age 15 and 40, there’s a huge bulge that goes out, which is, in essence, foreign guest workers, who, for the most part, unless you’re on that top end, it’s like doing the air traffic control and stuff, basically, slave labor. And in some cases, that is not just a significant percentage of the population in the case of gutter. That is like half the population for the UAE almost three quarters. So when you’re looking at the geopolitics of the region, you’re like, Oh, well, you don’t like the Iranians, or oh, we don’t like the Iraqis. Just keep in mind that the countries that the Israelis and the Americans to a certain degree have identified as potential allies of the future Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, you’re dealing with slave autocracies. So have fun with that.