Hi everyone. This is Peter Zeihan reporting from below the Matterhorn Pass where I’m coming from. Tomorrow’s project is over there, that’s Dog Head Peak. And then this is Finger Head Peak, which I won’t be doing because I’m not that crazy. Anyway, I copied the whole via, asked Peter and set up my phone before I started this trip.

And while some of you have some very strange questions, one has come up that I think really sums up some issues: something that’s happening in Greece right now. The government recently approved that employers can force their employees to work a six-day week. And you’re thinking: Greece? That Greece, the Greece that bankrupted itself 15 years ago?

The Greece whose governments were run by the far left and basically refused to pay their debts? Well, they’ve been whipped into shape now, but this is a whole new level. Any economic model, whether it’s laissez-faire capitalism, European socialism, Chinese fascism, Biden’s debt-fueled New Dealism or Trumpian Peronism, it doesn’t matter what it is.

All of them are about managing the differences and communication between the four main pillars of economic activity: consumption, production, capital and labor. Different systems favor different methods. For example, socialists generally rely more on labor, capitalists generally rely more on capital, just to give an example. It’s in the name. What happened in Greece is that they ran out of those four pillars.

In part, this is due to a series of very, very, very bad government and financial decisions going back to the 1990s. Remember, the Greeks received the largest bailout in EU history and took on debt equivalent to around 140 percent of GDP. The bailout will take decades to pay back, so the capital side of the equation was already completely out of whack for them.

The second problem is demographic. The birth rate in Greece has been below replacement levels for over half a century, and there are simply no more people under 45 who can work, let alone have children. With these two forces completely out of balance, all that remains is supply and demand in an economy that has been in recession for 15 years now.

That’s not good. So we see the government trying to play a mediating role and decide which of these four forces – supply, demand, capital and labor – needs to be suppressed so that the other three have a chance to work. And this government has chosen labor. That’s obviously going to create some political problems. I’m not saying it won’t.

The Greeks are far from the only country in this situation, and for all their many, many differences, I would say Japan is the second most likely country in the world to face such difficult decisions. Demographically, it is the oldest country in the world and the fastest aging. From a debt perspective, it has had massive Greek, Biden and Trump-style budget deficits for 30 years.

And when you take into account things like pension arrears and local debt, which I think you should, we’re talking about debt that’s somewhere between 450 and 500 percent of GDP. So if you look at a country and think, “Oh wow, that debt is bad,” you look at Japan. The Japanese have used the capital they have to find technological solutions to some of these problems.

Getting people to work longer hours, for example. What the Greeks and the Japanese are doing are unfinished projects. We have no idea whether it will work because, remember, we have never been in this position as a species before. We are looking at the foundation, the bedrock – we have a small piece of the bedrock that makes our economic structures work.

We need to turn inside out. And we need to find a new way forward. I wouldn’t necessarily look at Greece and Japan. I mean, for the experiment, yes, they should be watched closely. But I would look at the more robust countries that are more internationally engaged and have a more dynamic economy. At the top of my list is Korea, which is aging much faster than Japan.

I have to correct myself. Japan is no longer the fastest ageing country in the world; it has perhaps only slipped to 10th place. Korea is in the top five. I would look at Italy as a European example. There the population has been below replacement level for 70 years.

And then, of course, we look at Germany. Germany has had a number of problems in its past when the economic model stopped working and things got gloriously bouncy. That’s it for today. Keep an eye on these countries as they try to reinvent themselves. It’s not all going to go well. If you happen to be in North America, remember that the United States is the furthest removed from this problem for demographic reasons.

Our demographics have been stronger than any other country for some time now, and Mexico has the best demographics in its class. So Mexico City and Washington can watch everybody else and see how they get upset about it, and hopefully we’ll learn something from that.