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If you want to read the concise version, read what is in bold, and if you want more, it’s all available to you.
The next chart shows the relative wealth and power of the 11 leading empires over the last 500 years.
Values (e.g., in religions and ideologies) matter a lot too. History shows us that widening values gaps, especially during periods of economic stress, have tended to lead to periods of greater conflict, while shrinking values gaps tend to lead to periods of greater harmony.
the Old Testament describes a year of Jubilee every 50 years, in which debts were forgiven. Knowing that the debt cycle would happen on that schedule allowed everyone to act in a rational way to prepare for it.
we estimate that when there are 60–80 percent of the red flags present, there is around a 1-in-6 chance of severe internal conflict. When lots of these conditions are in place (greater than 80 percent) there is around a 1-in-3 chance of a civil war or revolution—so not very probable but still too probable for comfort. The US is in the 60–80 percent bucket today.
From studying 50-plus civil wars and revolutions, it became clear that the single most reliable leading indicator of civil war or revolution is bankrupt government finances combined with big wealth gaps.
each cycle consisted of a relatively long period of peace and prosperity (e.g., the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution) that sowed the seeds for terrible and violent external wars (e.g., the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the two World Wars).
maintaining power consumes resources, most importantly your time and your money. Also, with power comes the burden of responsibilities. I have often been struck by how much happier less powerful people can be relative to more powerful people.
Sometimes there is too much debt around the world and it is in all governments’ interests to devalue their currencies. At such times gold (and recently digital currencies) can be preferable.
The Chinese word “country” consists of the two characters for “state” and “family,” he explained, so Chinese leaders seek to run their state the way they think parents should run their families, with each person knowing their place and having filial respect for those above them.
Traditional Chinese military philosophy teaches that the ideal way to win a war is not by fighting but by quietly developing one’s power to the point that simply displaying it will cause an opponent to capitulate.
Confucian ideology probably played a role in this, as merchants/businesspeople were of lower status compared to scholars, a viewpoint that strengthened as more conservative strains of Confucianism gained sway in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Deng Xiaoping reiterated this view in an interview with “60 Minutes” in 1986, in which he said that the capitalism he was adopting and communism were not incompatible. “According to Marxism,” he said, “communist society is based on material abundance… Only when there is material abundance can the principle of a communist society—‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’—be applied. Socialism is the first stage of communism…”
Estimated deaths from conflict
Based on backtesting, these estimates would have predicted a country’s average growth rate over the next decade within 1 percent of the actual growth 59 percent of the time, and within 2 percent about 90 percent of the time, with a correlation to subsequent growth of 81 percent.
