Page 169 - Psychology of Money - Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

As things looked like they couldn’t get worse, The Wall Street Journal
published a story arguing that we hadn’t seen anything yet. It ran a front-
COBACOBA
page article on the outlook of a Russian professor named Igor Panarin

whose economic views rival the flair of science fiction writers.

The Journal wrote:

Around the end of June 2010, or early July, [Panarin] says, the U.S. will

break into six pieces—with Alaska reverting to Russian control ...
California will form the nucleus of what he calls “The Californian
Republic,” and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will
be the heart of “The Texas Republic,” a cluster of states that will go to
Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York
will be part of an “Atlantic America” that may join the European Union.
Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls “The
Central North American Republic.” Hawaii, he suggests, will be a

protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.⁵⁵

This was not the ramblings of a backroom blog or tinfoil-hat newsletter.
This was on the front page of the most prestigious financial newspaper in

the world.

It is fine to be pessimistic about the economy. It’s even OK to be
apocalyptic. History is full of examples of countries experiencing not just
recessions, but disintegrations.

The interesting thing about Panarin-type stories is that their polar opposite
—forecasts of outrageous optimism—are rarely taken as seriously as
prophets of doom.

Take Japan in the late 1940s. The nation was gutted by defeat from World
War II in every way—economically, industrially, culturally, socially. A

brutal winter in 1946 caused a famine that limited food to less than 800

calories per person per day.⁵⁶