Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail

no system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.

History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.

Having a reserve currency is great while it lasts because it gives a country exceptional borrowing and spending power and significant power over who else in the world gets the money and credit needed to buy and sell internationally. However, having a reserve currency typically sows the seeds of a country ceasing to be a reserve currency country. That is because it allows the country to borrow more than it could otherwise afford to borrow, and the creation of lots of money and credit to service the debt debases the value of the currency and causes the loss of its status as a reserve currency. The loss of its reserve currency status is a terrible thing because having a reserve currency is one of the greatest powers a country can have because it gives the country enormous buying power and geopolitical power.

I believe that the reason people typically miss the big moments of evolution coming at them in life is because they experience only tiny pieces of what’s happening. We are like ants preoccupied with our jobs of carrying crumbs in our very brief lifetimes instead of having a broader perspective of the big-picture patterns and cycles, the important interrelated things driving them, where we are within the cycles, and what’s likely to transpire.

stronger education leads to stronger technological innovation, which leads to increased productivity and increased shares of trade, greater wealth, more military power, and eventually the establishment of a reserve currency. Further, having strong leaders, a population that is well-educated and civil with each other, a system that efficiently allocates capital and other resources, access to natural resources, and favorable geography all help a lot, and when they decline, they tend to decline together.

debt eats equity but central banks can feed debt by printing money instead.

As I studied history, I saw that it typically transpires via relatively well-defined life cycles, like those of organisms, that evolve as each generation transitions to the next.

when people are willing to die for their country, their country will be more likely to be protected than if the individual self is more important, in which case individuals will run from deadly combat.

Taoism teaches that it is of paramount importance to live in harmony with the laws of nature.

There is an old saying that “gold is the only financial asset that isn’t someone else’s liability.

money and credit are stimulative when they’re given out and depressing when they have to be paid back. That’s what normally makes money, credit, and economic growth so cyclical.

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.

Marx’s most important theory/system is called “dialectical materialism.” “Dialectical” refers to how opposites interact to produce change, and “materialism” means that everything has a material (i.e., physical) existence that interacts with other things in a mechanical way. In a nutshell, dialectical materialism is a system for producing change by observing and influencing the “contradictions” of “opposites” that produce “struggles” that, when resolved, produce progress. Marx meant it to apply to everything. The conflict and struggle between the classes that is manifest in the conflict between capitalism and communism is just one of many such examples.

Adolf Hitler, the leading populist/fascist, tapped into the mood of national humiliation to build a nationalistic furor, casting the Treaty of Versailles and the countries that imposed it as the enemy. He created a 25-point nationalistic program and rallied support around it.

the decline of China from around 1840 to 1949, known as the “Century of Humiliation,” came about because the Western powers and Japan exploited China.

In war one’s ability to withstand pain is even more important than one’s ability to inflict pain.

using the market values of what one owns to measure one’s wealth gives an illusion of changes in wealth that don’t really exist.

Stage 2: People and Their Countries Are Rich but Still Think of Themselves as Poor. Because people who grew up with financial insecurity typically don’t lose their financial cautiousness, people in this stage still work hard, sell a lot to foreigners, have pegged exchange rates, save a lot, and invest efficiently in real assets like real estate, gold, and local bank deposits, and in bonds of the reserve currency countries. Because they have a lot more money, they can and do invest in the things that make them more productive—e.g., human capital development, infrastructure, research and development, etc. This generation of parents wants to educate their children well and get them to work hard to be successful. They also improve their resource-allocation systems, including their capital markets and their legal systems. This is the most productive phase of the cycle. Countries in this stage experience rapidly rising income growth and rapidly rising productivity growth at the same time. The productivity growth means two things: 1) inflation is not a problem and 2) the country can become more competitive. During this stage, debts typically do not rise significantly relative to incomes and sometimes they decline. This is a very healthy period and a terrific time to invest in a country if it has adequate property rights protections. You can tell countries in this stage from those in the first stage because they have gleaming new cities next to old ones, high savings rates, rapidly rising incomes, and, typically, rising foreign exchange reserves. I call countries in this stage “late-stage emerging countries.” While countries of all sizes can go through this stage, when big countries go through it, they are typically emerging into great world powers.

I consider the conflicts between the classes (i.e., the “haves” and the “have-nots”) to be among the main drivers of the rise and decline of empires, and hence the progress of history, with those drivers being the three big cycles—money and credit, internal order/disorder, and external order/disorder—discussed earlier in this book.

Americans are more interested in telling you what they think.

Americans hold the individual above all else while the Chinese put the family and the collective above everything.

I’m not saying that they don’t have political and other challenges that lead to disagreements, including some brutal fights over what should be done, because they do (in private). What I am saying is that the Chinese have much longer-term and historically based perspectives and planning horizons, which they break down into shorter-term plans and ways of operating, and they have done an excellent job of achieving what they have set out to do by following this approach.

Its ultimate goal is to make the Chinese economy about twice the size of the US’s and to have the benefits of its growth broadly shared.

Americans are impulsive and tactical; they fight for what they want in the present. Most Chinese are strategic; they plan for how they can get what they want in the future.

There is a significant chance that the US would lose wars against China and Russia in their geographic areas of strength—or at least would be unacceptably harmed—and it could also be unacceptably harmed by some second-tier powers too. This is not the good ol’ days of right after 1945 when the US was the sole dominant power.

Before we had them, nobody could have imagined them—e.g., the telephone (1876), the electric light bulb (1879), the internal combustion powered vehicle (1885), the radio (1895), movies (1895), the airplane (1903), television (1926), antibiotics (1928), the computer (1939), nuclear weapons (1945), nuclear power plants (1951), GPS (1973), digital cameras (1975), online shopping (1979), the internet (1983), online search (1990), online banking (1995), social media (1997), Wi-Fi (1998), the iPhone (2007), CRISPR gene editing (2012),

This never-ending process of learning, building, using, and refining in partnership with computers describes what I do,

I also know from experience that if I wait to learn enough to be satisfied with what I know before acting or sharing, I’d never be able to use or convey what I have learned.

Wealth Decline = Power Decline. There isn’t an individual, organization, country, or empire that hasn’t failed when it lost its buying power. To be successful one must earn an amount that is at least equal to the amount one spends.