gaps, c) people working effectively together to produce prosperity, d) good education and infrastructure, e) strong
and capable leadership, and f) a peaceful world order that is guided by one or more dominant world powers. These
are the prosperous and enjoyable periods. When they are taken to excess, which they always are, the excesses lead
to 2) depressing periods of destruction and restructuring, in which the country’s fundamental weaknesses of a) high
levels of indebtedness, b) large wealth, values, and political gaps, c) different factions of people unable to work
well together, d) poor education and poor infrastructure, and e) the struggle to maintain an overextended empire
under the challenge of emerging powerful rivals lead to a painful period of fighting, destruction, and then a
restructuring that establishes a new order, setting the stage for a new period of building.
Looked at even more simply, the items shown below are the main forces that drive the rises and declines of
countries. For any country, the more items it has on the left, the more it is likely to ascend; the more items it has on
the right, the more it is likely to decline. Those that make it to the top acquire the characteristics on the left (which
causes them to ascend), but with time they move to the right, which makes them more prone to decline, while new
competitive countries acquire the characteristics to the left until they are stronger, at which time the shift occurs.

That, in a nutshell, is what my research has shown makes the cycles of rising and declining empires occur. Now,
for the fun of it you might want to go through a little exercise of ticking off where each of those measures is for
each country you’re interested in. Rank each country on a 1-10 scale for each attribute, beginning with 10 on the
far left and 1 on the far right. If you add these all these rankings up, the higher the number, the greater the
probability of the country rising on a relative basis. The lower the number, the more likely it will fall. Take a
moment to calculate where the United States is, where China is, where Italy is, where Brazil is, and so on. Later in
this report we will do exactly this in a systematic way for each of the largest 20 countries using key performance
indicators that I will show you.
Because all of these factors, both ascending and descending, tend to be mutually reinforcing, it is not a coincidence
that large wealth gaps, debt crises, revolutions, wars, and changes in the world order have tended to come as a
perfect storm. The big cycles of an empire’s rise and decline look like those in the chart below. The bad periods of
destruction and restructuring via depression, revolution, and war, which largely tear down the old system and set
the stage for the emergence of a new system, typically take about 10 to 20 years, though variations in the range can
be much larger. They are depicted by the shaded areas in the chart. They are followed by more extended periods of
peace and prosperity in which smart people work harmoniously together and no country wants to fight the world
power because it’s too strong. These peaceful periods last for about 40 to 80 years, though variations in the range
can be much larger. Within these cycles are smaller cycles like the short-term debt/business cycle that last about 7
to 10 years.