Today’s unprecedented times are speeding up the paradigm shift, and as a result, Ray is seeing a lot of the drivers emerging that lead to world powers rising and declining – i.e. some central banks printing money but not all being able to stimulate the economy. Ray believes it is incredibly important for people to understand the drivers behind why countries succeed and fail because the choices countries make now to address the COVID-19 crisis and economic fallout will impact how well they are able to weather the storm.
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Drivers Behind The Rise And Eventual Fall Of World Powers
To help people best do this, Ray is releasing the study he has been working on for some time about this phenomenon in installments via his LinkedIn page. Today, he released the first installment, which lays out the 17 drivers behind the rise and eventual fall of world powers. Key takeaways include:
- The drivers that lead to the rise of world powers unfortunately lay the ground for their eventual demise – e.g. education increases productivity and inventiveness, and therefore in turn, wealth, but once people get wealthy, they get lazy and their productivity decreases.
- We are seeing several of these drivers at play right now, especially those that lead to powers decline, including:
- Decline in education of the population
- Deterioration of the infrastructure
- Increase in wealth gaps
- High levels of indebtedness and central banks inability to stimulate economic growth
- Polarization of political views, and the rise of populism and autocratic leadership
Chapter 1: The Big Picture in a Tiny Nutshell
This chapter gives my description of the cause-effect relationships behind the archetypical rise and decline of the most powerful empires. It is my distillation of the dynamics I saw in studying the three reserve currency empires (the Dutch, the British, and the American) and the six other significant empires (Germany, France, Russia, India, Japan, and China) over the last 500 years, as well as all of the major Chinese dynasties back to the Tang Dynasty around the year 600. Besides seeing wealth and power shifts we see notable shifts in all dimensions of life, including technology, culture, and the arts. These individual case studies will be provided in Part 2. By going back and forth between this archetype and those cases, you will be able to see how the individual cases fit the archetype (which is essentially just the average of those cases) and how well the archetype describes the individual cases.
Contiine reading the full article here.
