 It's been quite a while since the last time I did a video on the bad world-building of dystopian novels. Last time I released one, corona was still a beer, I had never been tear-gassed by police, and my channel was less than half the size it is now. I just remembered that a stupid lot of people watched the last one and I need to eat this month, so here's another one. If you're new to my world-building analyses, I'm basically looking at fictional settings and examining ways in which they don't add up. I'm like that kid in your high school English class that was very clearly autistic, but he was unaware of it and just talked about niche interests for way too long while others got bored and tried to exit the conversation, except I found a way to make an audience listen to me. Most of these are books I've covered before, just not in this format, and I felt they deserved to have some time dedicated to exactly how dumb their settings are. Having bad role-building isn't the kiss of death, so unless otherwise stated, I'm not saying these books are bad. Rather, this one aspect of them is bad enough for me to rant about. Also, I'm sorry if the sound quality is off in this video. I just moved and haven't figured out how exactly to set up the lighting and sound in my new place yet. Hey James, what are you doing? Well James, I'm doing some thinking, and this is my best thinking position. What are you thinking about, James? I'm thinking about how difficult it is to come up with a new way to introduce this video's sponsor. I've done it many times, but now I'm beginning to run though on ideas, James. Couldn't you just read off the script they gave you, James? Yes, James, but that's a very boring way to advertise a good or service and it causes the audience to tune out what you say. You're saying James a lot, James. Well James is my name, James. Do you want to read the ad now, James? Of course, James. Campfire is an organizational tool that helps storytellers write and world-build. The browser version and offline desktop app have been out for a while, but they've recently released Campfire for mobile as well. Campfire's interconnected tools make for seamless world-building experiences where you can quickly reference information, link story elements together, and collaborate with other users in one place. The app keeps your work safe with unlimited cloud storage on Google's secure servers. Your work even updates across platforms, making it easy to work on whatever device you prefer. It's rare for the app-end desktop version to work the same, yet they do here. Are you intrigued by this, but don't want to commit to yet another subscription? It's okay. There's a free tier for smaller projects, so you can try it out and see if you like it. And you can choose which features you need so that you only pay for what you use. Campfire is available as a subscription service or a one-time payment if you're like me and despise paying subscription fees every month. Sharing is possible with Campfire Explore, where you can publish stories for others to read. Everything is private if you don't want to share, though. It's even updated monthly with new fixes and features. Check out the app or campfirewriting.com. Wow. I sure know a lot about Campfire now, James. Yes. Now leave me alone so I can think of a good ad. Check out Campfire today. Campfire! Yeah, we're going there. You may know of this particular series as being a racist Hunger Games clone. And that's true. Yeah, there's no hidden depths here. Let's just come together and laugh at it. Save the Pearls takes place far in the future, when the ozone layer has been so depleted that solar radiation gives everyone skin cancer. Lighter-skinned people were more vulnerable, therefore more of them died, which resulted in black people taking over the Earth and establishing a caste system with themselves at the top. And it gets worse. All races in this setting are named after gemstones. White people are pearls. Asian people are ambers. Latino people are tiger's eyes. And black people are coals. You did not mishear that. They could have just gone with obsidian or something. The hierarchy is very strict and has white people on the bottom. The only people lower than them are albinos, who are called cottons, and have also been hunted to extinction. Also, everyone lives underground to avoid the blasted desert wasteland the Earth has become. Except for a chunk of the Amazon rainforest that still exists and is inhabited by a tribe called the Hualrani, a real-life indigenous tribe from Ecuador. They're immune to radiation because they eat magical flowers. There are also Aztecs living nearby. Also, one of the main characters turns himself into a furry part way through to become immune to radiation. This somehow turns him into an Aztec god who will bring balance to the world. I'm not making any of this up, by the way. This is all crammed into the same series and absolutely none of it fits together. If you want to know more, watch this video where I talk about it for two and a half hours. Many of you probably noticed that those four racial categories leave out a lot of people. American Indians, Pacific Islanders, South Asians, Middle Eastern people, and other groups of people don't fit into any of those four categories. Yet the government insists that everyone in the world is covered here. Moreover, those groups can all be subdivided into a thousand smaller ones that all consider themselves different races. The Rwandan genocide was a group of black people massacring a different group of black people because they saw themselves as separate races. Just because we lump them together doesn't mean they see themselves that way. Look at the Yugoslav Wars or the Japanese invasion of China during World War II for more examples. This sort of caste system isn't totally unrealistic, though. Governments that have tried to officially categorize people by race have usually left out groups of people. The apartheid South African government considered Chinese people to be black, but Japanese people to be white, for example. That makes no sense on a genetic, cultural, or physical appearance level. So it's not outside the realm of possibility that the government and Save the Pearls would also try to organize people in a way that makes no sense to us. The issue is that the nonsensical nature of this caste system never comes up. No one ever questions it or rails against it except to briefly say that discrimination is bad, even though in this world having lighter skin makes you die younger, which kind of implies that some races actually are better than others, and holy shit this is why you listen to your editors, guys. You could have had, say, Middle Eastern people getting lumped in with Latinos and complaining about how they're not the same, or Italians angrily insisting they're not white and should be treated better. That would at least criticize real world societies and our attitudes towards race by placing them into a different context and exaggerating them to make them easier to notice. You know, the sort of thing the dystopian genre is made for. The lack of criticism here leads me to believe that the author either genuinely believes that everyone on earth is one of those four races, or that she never thought about the world outside of the United States. Either way, it's dumb. Another problem is that Latino doesn't make much sense as a racial category, even though Americans often use it as one. The term just means someone from Latin America, or someone with ancestry from Latin America, and that region has had people from all over the world immigrate there over the past 500 years. What most people think of when they think of Latinos are mestizos, people with a combination of European and indigenous ancestry. There's also people we would consider white, black, Asian, and every other race under the sun. This is the current president of El Salvador, and while he may blend in with mestizos, he's actually Palestinian and Greek. It's almost like trying to categorize people based on appearance as a flawed strategy. Race is a social construct, not because everyone looks the same, but because the way we categorize those physical differences changes depending on time period and location. It's hard to segue into the next topic, partially because this series is so nonsensical and disjointed that even talking about it feels like a mashing eight different books together. So let's talk about the problem with the sunlight. In this series, being in direct sunlight for more than a few minutes will cause you to develop skin cancer and die within months. Seems like that would just burn you, but whatever. If solar radiation was powerful enough to give white people skin cancer that quickly, having some more melanin won't help you. Black people still get sunburned and still get skin cancer. They don't have superpowers, they'd be just as fucked as everybody else in this situation. Also, everyone lives underground, so solar radiation shouldn't affect them anyways, but everyone still dies before the age of 40. What is this author imagining sunlight as? Invisible gremlins that hate white people? The surface is a blasted desert except for a section of the Amazon rainforest in South America, even though a depleted ozone would ravage the rainforest before everything else. There are Aztecs living in the rainforest who still worship their old gods, complete with human sacrifice. Their gods are real, though, and live amongst them as all-powerful furries. How did they avoid being noticed for hundreds of years? I don't know. Aztecs don't live in Ecuador either. They were from Mexico, which is way up here. There are so many small details that I just have to drop on you without any warm-up. I'm sorry if this seems disjointed, but so is the experience of reading these fucking books. Also, white people are required by law to wear blackface in this world. I swear to every god I'm not making this up. The protagonist spends most of the first book wearing blackface, partially as sunscreen and partially because they have to pretend not to be white in public. What the fuck? I would make a joke about the Church of Scientology coming after me, but they probably aren't. They're too busy fighting off evil alien souls that cause depression and anxiety. Scientology jokes are overplayed. We should make fun of other cults. Did you know Falon Gong claims that heaven is racially segregated? They would love Save the Pearls more than they love trying to edit their own Wikipedia page to make themselves look better. Battlefield Earth takes place in the year 3000. A thousand years after an alien race called Cyclos invaded the Earth, killed most of humanity, and began mining the planet's resources. What's left of humanity is reduced to small tribes of primitive hunter-gatherers scavenging the outskirts of destroyed cities while they avoid the Cyclos. The protagonist is named Johnny Good Boy Tyler and he gets captured by a Cyclo who then accidentally teaches him everything he needs to know to overthrow the aliens and save humanity. This takes place mostly in the ruins of the United States because American authors forget that other countries exist. Specifically, Johnny and his tribe live somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, close enough for him to ride from his village to Denver on horseback in a few days. That's the first issue here. The Cyclo attack involved them teleporting a drone to Earth and spraying out poison gas that killed almost everybody. The drone focused on the most populated areas and then they sent in a few infantry and tanks to mop up whatever resistance was left. One of the only battles of note was when a Cyclotank spent several hours fighting with cadets at the US Air Force Academy before killing them all. And therein lies the problem. If there was a major attack in Colorado, including against the cities on the front range, NORAD, and the US Air Force Academy, then how did anyone in the region survive? Most of the other human survivors are in isolated areas, such as the Amazon rainforest, or they were protected from Cyclo attacks by radiation, like in Scotland. We'll get back to that later. The poison gas and soldiers killed everyone who might have gotten in the way of their mining operations, which meant they wiped out all major population centers. To give an idea of how few survivors there were, in the future there are only 30,000 humans left on the planet, and that's after a thousand years of growth. So there shouldn't be anyone left anywhere near Denver. The Rocky Mountains are isolated, but not THAT isolated. I know this because I live in them, and not in a cabin, in a city of half a million people. Denver is less than an hour's drive away from the Air Force Academy, and the Academy is right in the middle of Colorado Springs. Any sort of gas attack would have taken out everyone and everything in the vicinity. But let's say that Johnny's tribe moved into the area from somewhere else over the past thousand years. People migrate a lot, it's possible, unlikely considering there are aliens all over trying to kill them, but possible. The Cyclos themselves are still weird and don't make much sense, in addition to being played by John Travolta, I mean. Cyclos are over two and a half meters tall and weigh around 450 kilograms, which is enormous. Bigger than almost all terrestrial animals. It's said that they grew this large because they evolved on a planet much bigger than Earth with higher gravity. That would probably cause the exact opposite to happen, though. When gravity is higher, falling down is far more likely to cause injury. Smaller animals don't have to worry about hurting themselves in that way. It's basically impossible for a squirrel to die after falling from a tree. On top of that, getting enough food and water to sustain even a single cyclone would be a herculean task. The bigger something is, the more energy it takes to move around. That's just basic physics. At 450 kilograms, a cyclone would be about the size of a horse, and horses can eat 1.5 to 2.5 percent of their body weight every day. So a cyclone would be eating between 6.75 and 11.25 kilograms of food every single day. That's the equivalent of every cyclone eating an Asian elephant every single year. We don't know a lot about the cyclo diet. It is heavy in meat, though. And the thing about meat is it takes a lot more space to cultivate than plants. That's why we switched from hunting to growing our food. A single cow takes an acre of land to raise, and an average-sized cow would only feed a cyclone for about a month, meaning they'd need 12 cows per person per year. If they had the same population as Earth, they would eat 96 billion cows every single year. Even if we assume they raise alien animals that require less space and produce more meat, there's only so far that can go. You can't create matter or energy from nothing. Their home planet shouldn't be able to support more than a few million cyclones, and all the planets they colonize should be able to support even fewer. Simply put, the billions upon billions of cyclones that live across the universe shouldn't be able to exist. There's a phenomenon called the island rule, or the foster rule, where large mammals will shrink when isolated on an island. The reason for this is that there are fewer resources like food and water on islands, so evolutionary pressure forces subsequent generations to shrink in order to need less food and water. Now, the second half of the foster rule states that small mammals, particularly prey animals, get bigger when isolated because they no longer need to hide from predators. That may have something to do with why cyclones got so big, but we don't know anything about the other animals that used to exist on their planet that they had to deal with. So the biology of the aliens in this sci-fi novel doesn't match up with what evolutionary biologists have observed here on Earth. Can you believe that shit? Amateur writing, I swear. The weirdest thing about the cyclones, though, is that the atmosphere they breathe explodes when radiation hits it. Yeah, Johnny realizes this and uses bottles of compressed air as a geiger counter to find uranium in a cave. Then he uses that to create some dirty bombs and teleport them to the cyclo-homeworld. He just wants to destroy the teleportation platform. However, the explosions are so big that they wind up hitting the planet's core. Then the whole thing starts to undergo nuclear fusion, and the planet turns into a star. If the planet had enough mass to do that, it would have been a star to begin with. That's how they form in real life. Gravity pulls a shitload of hydrogen together, and then the mass causes the chemical reaction. After this, all the cyclones continue teleporting home from their colonies without knowing that their home is a star now, and they all die. Say what you will about L. Ron Hubbard. He had an imagination. I know what you're thinking. Lightlark is a fantasy story, not a dystopian one. Well, dystopias are just terrible societies. So a fantasy society that sucks to live in is still a dystopia. Fuck you, it's my video, and I'll put what I want here. At least, I think this world is a dystopia. It switches from light-hearted and whimsical to dark and dreary, depending on what needs to happen in that chapter. The story is about a girl named Isla going to a magical island called Lightlark and trying to undo some horrible curses that affect the people of a bunch of different kingdoms. All the kingdoms used to be one, they just broke apart 500 years ago when the curses hit for the first time, and Lightlark was cut off from everybody else. The people from every kingdom have both a unique magical power and a unique curse that they have to deal with. It's more complex than that, but impossible to explain because it makes no sense and contradicts itself at every level. The island is hidden by a continuous storm that lets up only every 100 years, yet when Isla visits it seems like a quaint town. There are shops, flowers, jewels. Nothing seems to be built to withstand massive storms at all. Nor have the people here developed any sort of unique culture. The island used to be a place where all the kingdoms mixed together, so it has people from every culture. They're all still split up based on the kingdoms they originally came from, so the Sunlings still live with Sunlings. Starlings only live with and marry Starlings, etc. You'd think that being stuffed together and isolated for 100 years at a time might cause them to, I don't know, intermingle a little bit, maybe intermarry and realize that their curses will cancel each other out because that's a thing that happens here, but then that would detract from how special and cool the main character is for having parents from two kingdoms. The people living now wouldn't even remember the last time outsiders came to Lightlark, nor would their parents or grandparents. Linguistic drift alone should have given them a distinct dialect so they talk differently than the others, or maybe they'd have unique foods that the others don't eat or something. Anything to let us know that the author understands that cultures mix and change over time. There's nothing that sets Lightlark apart from any of the other kingdoms. Of course, there's little that sets the kingdoms apart from each other, either. It gets worse when you stop to wonder how these people feed themselves. The island is small enough to walk across in a single day, yet seems to have thousands of people living on it. Moreover, they make chocolate, cotton candy, ice cream, and other luxury items for consumption. They don't even seem to be that expensive, regular people buy them all the time. Those things require ingredients like cocoa beans, sugar, vanilla, milk, and other stuff. Those are all cash crops, they're not something you can subsist off of. If no one can travel to or from the island for 100 years at a time, they must grow all of this there. But the island is small enough to walk across in a single day, and they would still have to grow things like potatoes and wheat to live off of. And they would still need to have space to build houses and giant palaces because we see those all over the place in the book. And there are caves far away from civilization that ghosts hide in but are still somehow on the same small island. Do you see the problem yet? Even if you aren't enough of a pedantic nerd to wonder about crop yields, you'd probably notice that the setting is trying to feel large and expansive while also trying to feel cramped and isolated. It's trying to feel dark and edgy while also trying to feel whimsical and fun. The devil really is in the details. Even if the audience can't point to exactly what's wrong, they know when something is wrong. Lightlark fails the fantasy world vibe check. Beyond that, the curses are, to put it politely, complete fucking nonsense. I could go on all day about these, but let's focus on one. The Curse of the Starlings. All the Starlings die at the age of 25. No matter what, they will not live longer than that. It sounds like a straightforward, awful curse, yet it's never expanded upon. When they reach 25, do they all just drop dead like a light switch was flipped? Is there a specific disease that stays dormant in their bodies until then and then comes out to stop their heart or something? Or are they just guaranteed to have a horrible accident? If they all die at 25, does that mean they can't die younger than that? Do they have a quarter century of effective immortality? A story about people who are guaranteed to die at a specific time so they don't need to worry about anything up until then sounds really cool. A shame it's not covered here. I could go on for a while, talking about things like the way that dozens of people die every full moon because their curse is that the ocean kills them on the full moon. You'd think they would just avoid the water once a month, but okay. It would just devolve into me sitting here for 40 minutes and listing off shit that doesn't make sense because literally everything about the world building here is dumb and bad. It's entirely possible that some of these problems are explained in the book and I've made a mistake here. Please remember that I don't care and the sheer ineptitude of the writing here makes it hard to pass through for information, even if I did care. Ah, the testing. A series that seems like it's designed to criticize the focus that American education puts on standardized testing but is actually about a government so insane that it allows college students to set bombs in each other's dorm rooms as part of a hazing ritual. The testing takes place in a country called the United Commonwealth which is in the ruins of the old United States because of course it is. It follows a teenage girl named Melencia Vale. Jesus Christ, these names. Usually called Sia, who gets top marks in her school and is thus selected to become a candidate in something called the testing. It's a government program where all the smartest kids out of high school undergo a rigorous testing to determine if they're good enough to go to university where they can study to become doctors or engineers. Note that the testing is mandatory for everyone selected. If they don't go, they're arrested for sedition. Then when they graduate college they all get assigned to work in different parts of the country and are never allowed to contact their families again and their memories of the testing are erased afterwards. No one thinks any of this is suspicious. The first round of testing is a bunch of written exams, which makes sense. Then there's a round where they have to identify a bunch of poisoned plants and fix a radio and if they screw up they die of poisoning or the booby traps in the radio will kill them. Then all the kids are dropped off in the ruins of Chicago and have to get to Kansas City on foot with very few supplies fighting past mutants and shit. They also kill each other along the way even though there's an unlimited number of slots for those that complete the task. Got all that? Pretty stupid. Let's examine why. For starters, the entire setup of the testing is dumb and any government that tried it would actively alienate large segments of the population. If they knew that getting good grades meant that their children would be taken away from them forever a lot of people would actively sabotage their kids from doing well in school even if just by asking them not to try. Maybe the government could come up with ways of monitoring citizens to prevent this sort of thing from happening and that would be an interesting setup for a story but it never comes up. Citizens of the Commonwealth are just very excited to send their kids away to a mysterious government training center to never be seen again, I guess. Also, the testing bureau is its own branch of government meaning the president and legislature have no ability to limit its actions so the president of the country has to ask a college freshman to assassinate the head of the bureau to allow her to change things. I swear to God this is a real plot point in a real published book. I can see the logic behind having an intense education to try and produce as many doctors and engineers as possible. The world has ended in the process of healing the land from chemical and nuclear waste is going to be very difficult and the books say as much. There's no logic behind putting kids into a situation where they'll die if they get a question wrong. If you're never allowed to make mistakes you become more concerned with being right than with learning and that leads to things like cheating or trying to bribe officials to give you a better grade. These things happen in real life so they'd be guaranteed to happen when it's a matter of life and death. Being able to fight mutants while fleeing for your life isn't going to make you a better engineer either. Not sure what they were thinking with that. I could go into other stuff wrong with this series. Like how the government has elected but no one votes for politicians or how hovercrafts can only float 10 feet off the ground. I won't though. The entire setup for the story is flawed on a fundamental level. Obviously everything on top of that sucks. Also the people who fail the testing and don't die get taken to a lab and turned into mutants like the heroes fight in the wasteland. How does turning them into mutants help anything? That's a rhetorical question. It doesn't. This series was just written over the course of an afternoon while the author was high on cough medicine. I feel obliged to mention before we start that I like this book. It's a batshit combination of X-Men, Mad Max, and a crappy high school teen drama. Those things do not go together and yet the end result is somehow great. It takes place in Los Angeles, which is in the United States. And it's after a series of apocalyptic events have ravaged the world because, obviously. Specifically, some people in LA dug really deep underground and then lightning struck a fault in the tectonic plates which caused a gigantic earthquake that destroyed most of the city except for a single tower in the middle of the rubble. I'm not sure how this one tower survived, but whatever. It makes for dramatic scenery and I'm willing to work with it. Most people are trapped there because the US government has its hands full responding to a slew of other disasters including storms, wildfires, and wars. All it can do is airdrop some food and other supplies into the city. The main character is a girl named Mia Price who is addicted to being struck by lightning and she moved to Los Angeles because there's rarely any thunderstorms there. Christ on a bike, this all sounds even weirder when you say it out loud. Mia, along with her mom and brother, have been living in the remains of their house for several weeks while Mia goes to school during the day. Wait, what? Yeah, she just takes a shower and drives down the freeway to school every morning and then goes to math class. So the school is still functioning while the entire city has fallen apart. Uh, how? How are the teachers and other staff being paid? How are they planning lessons and getting materials like notebooks and pens? Most of the kids are only going there in order to get lunch since they don't have much food at home. Absolutely nothing like the real world. Part of the government relief drops are probably earmarked for schools to make sure kids are fed which might explain how they have food when no one else does. However, Mia specifically states that the local government was completely wiped out in the earthquake. Everyone from the mayor to the county commissioner to the city council died. Without that local infrastructure to organize the distribution of supplies, who is making sure that food goes to the schools? What's to stop the cops or gangs or anyone else from just taking the air drops for themselves? I doubt that Mr. Thompson, the calculus teacher who hasn't run a mile since the 80s, is going to be able to guard crates of food from a city full of starving people. You could maybe say that the federal or state government are keeping things running in the absence of the local governments, but in the U.S. local governments run most of the schools. Education is largely funded and controlled by county or municipal officials. Washington would need to send in bureaucrats and other officials who know how to run things and likely a few soldiers or police to help maintain order or at least keep the polls from getting any ideas about protecting themselves without the approval of their betters. They're not sending anyone in, though. Like I said, they're preoccupied. So how are the schools functioning? I'm making this sound very intellectual and analytical. I don't think I actually need to, though. The fact that school is ongoing after the apocalypse is just absurd on the surface and deserves to be laughed at. I'm just offering the rest of you solid reasons to hate this and giving you something to listen to in the background while you play Dark Souls. Honestly, the school thing is the only real problem I have here. The rest of the setting is also weird but in a fun way that seems intentional. Like the villain who leads a cult and legally changed his surname to Prophet, or how X-Men mutant powers are real because humans are batteries and some batteries have more charge than others, or how the one tower that survived the earthquake is home to a perpetual rave with thousands of partiers. It would be dumb to criticize something like that, so I won't. For real, though. Reach struck. It's a good book. Finally, we've gotten to the last entry on the list. A post-apocalyptic book series about a disease that kills everyone over the age of 18 written by the same guy who directed the second Twilight movie. That's not a joke. Chris Weitz worked in Hollywood for years before publishing this trilogy. He also made the first few American pie films. The basic setup is what I said. A disease comes around that kills everyone over the age of 18 within a matter of weeks. Moreover, the virus stays in all the young people's bodies, so once they get old enough, they die too. And no one can get pregnant, so it seems that after the fall of civilization, humanity is slowly dying out too. So a bunch of surviving kids in New York go off on an adventure to find a cure, and thus the story unfolds. I've joked about how so many of these take place in the ruins of the United States, and some of you in the comments probably made a joke about how the rest of the world is just chilling while the apocalypse hits us. Well, that's literally the case here. North and South America were hit by the virus and quarantined, so the rest of the world is safe. The public also believes that everyone died. They don't know there are still millions of kids trapped there. Some remnants of the U.S. government and military remain, though. Some officials and citizens were overseas when the virus hit, or managed to escape before being infected, and all the overseas military bases and personnel are also in operational order. That last part is the most important. The military, specifically the Navy, has taken control of all the world's major trading routes, and, along with help from the United Kingdom, rule over most everything left. Beyond that, day-to-day life goes on as it did before for most people. And that's the bit that I find weirdest of all. Sure, it's odd that a virus as transmittable as what we see here wouldn't be able to spread outside of the Americas, but the virus is just a plot device. I don't care that much. There is just no conceivable way that the rest of the world would be orderly following the complete death of the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. Navy is one of the most powerful military forces in the world, far beyond anything that any other country can put out there. That's undeniably true. It can only exist because of a huge support network, though. 300 million taxpayers, all producing goods and services before handing off a slice of our labor's value to the Treasury. And a bigger slice to our employer, but that's another discussion. The Navy has a 2023 budget of $230 billion, equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Ecuador. No matter how much tribute you extract from all the people you now rule over, you can't replace that much money easily. Under normal circumstances, with all the remaining world economies functioning at 100%, you could maybe get that much from them. It would be damaging to society since that money wouldn't go to more important things like roads and schools, but it could be done. Other economies would not be anywhere near 100% productivity, though. If the U.S. government fell, it would default on all its debts, and the average person doesn't understand just how badly this would fuck the world economy. Every country on Earth, as well as a bunch of corporations, central banks, and private individuals, hold U.S. Treasury bonds. Why? Because the U.S. government has never once defaulted on its debts. All interest payments are made on time, and all principal amounts are paid back at maturity. It's viewed as a completely risk-free investment, a safe way to get a small return on your money. Even if you don't own any bonds yourself, it's likely that you are indirectly exposed to them through retirement funds or your bank. To call T-bills ubiquitous in the financial world would be akin to calling water ubiquitous in the ocean. This is $31 trillion of debt floating around, and if it wasn't paid back, then suddenly a lot of money that was supposed to be there would be gone. Poof! Like magic. All that money suddenly drying up would immediately spiral into a crisis. Banks and other companies that rely on those regular interest payments to function would go out of business. Then they would default on their own debts to others, meaning a lot of them would go out of business. This chain reaction would make people lose their jobs and more and more money would just vanish into thin air. There wouldn't be enough for people to buy and sell things as they normally do. This is called a liquidity crisis, and it grinds everything in an economy to a halt, leading to recession. This is what happened in 2008, and we still feel the effects of that today. Governments and central banks would have to scramble to try and stabilize things, probably by printing currency like MAD. That can only go so far, though, and if it doesn't work properly, it could lead to hyperinflation. Now add in the defaults of debt from other countries that are gone, like Canada and Brazil, and the problem gets even worse. That's just what would happen if the government didn't pay back its debts, though. With the death of a billion customers and workers, the economy would be even worse off. For example, with less people driving, countries that make their money from exporting oil, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, would suddenly have a lot fewer people to sell to. Companies that sell or repair cars would also have fewer customers, meaning they'd have to downsize and fire most of their workers. Good for fighting climate change, bad for just about everything else. This is only one example, though. Imagine how bad it would get for other industries, like medical supplies, electronics, weapons, paper, furniture, and a hundred other things we consume every day. The United States is also the biggest exporter of food in the world. Things like corn, grain, soybeans, fruits, vegetables, and meat are sent out all over the place, and a lot of it goes to places that don't produce enough food to sustain themselves. The third biggest exporter of food is Brazil, which would also be gone. Not to mention other countries like Canada, Mexico, and Argentina, which are also major agricultural producers. All gone. Just like that. The rest of the world could, theoretically, survive without the Americas. There would be a bit of an adjustment period, though. And by adjustment period, I mean mass starvation, riots, governmental collapse, refugee crises, war, insurrection, and outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. What I'm saying here is that if the apocalypse hits the Americas, it wouldn't be business as usual everywhere else. Americans are not the center of the world, but we're not some separate, isolated entity either. If you pull too many blocks out of the Jenga Tower, the tower will fall. Also, this series ends with the heroes infecting the rest of the world with the virus, but they have a cure now, so it's okay, I guess. What a bunch of dicks. I hope we've all learned a few things here today. Things about biology, things about economics, and the reason why no one wanted to be friends with me in elementary school. The biggest thing to note is that the world building of a dystopia or apocalyptic world is more important than in other genres. The setting is the foundation for everything else, not just set dressing for the story. In a dystopia, the world is what the heroes are struggling against, whether successfully or in vain. But it's not just generic jackbooted thugs for the heroes to kill, it's the ideas they represent. That's what makes a good dystopia stick with the audience. Save the Pearls failed as a dystopia not because it was against racism, but because it was against racism while having no idea what racism is or how it works. Battlefield Earth failed not because it had a hero who was too perfect and defeated the bad guys all by himself, but because the bad guys he fought were so inept that he doesn't look impressive compared to them. The testing failed not because it shows children going through an absurd trial to determine the course of their future, but because it thinks no one would ever question this pointless exercise except the super special main character. And Lightlark was just stupid on every fucking level. Subscribe. Oh my goodness, people are still watching this? 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