Ray Dalio on the lifecycle of empires

A couple of interesting charts from Ray Dalio’s new series, The Changing World Order.

This chart looks back 1400 years and charts the estimated relative supremacy of the great empires. Of note: the blue American A-frame with a peak around 1955, and the meteoric rise of red China.

This chart breaks out 8 broad dimensions along which an empire can be evaluated, and shows the timing of their rise and fall relative to what Dalio calls an archetypical empire — a representation of what typically happens based on analysis of a set of specific cases.