“Given China’s impressive track record and how deeply imbued the culture behind it is, there is no more chance of the Chinese giving up their values and their system than there is of Americans giving up theirs. Trying to force the Chinese and their systems to be more American would, to them, mean subjugation of their most fundamental beliefs, which they would fight to the death to protect. To have peaceful coexistence Americans must understand that the Chinese believe that their values and their approaches to living out these values are best, as much as Americans believe their American values and their ways of living them out are best.”

Ultimately, he concludes that “If the US continues to decline and China continues to rise, what matters most is whether or not each can do so gracefully.”

I spoke to Dalio by video call, and he acknowledged that before doing the research, he “really didn’t have much of an understanding of the connection with internal conflicts, external conflicts, the cost of war — financial and non-financial — and the impact of nature.”

He was particularly shocked by the role of natural disasters on economies. “Nature, meaning climate, it was surprising to me — that it caused more revolutions and more deaths and wars and depressions,” he said.

Dalio said he’s not a pessimist. “I’m not trying to be fatalistic,” he said. “I am trying to give that arc. I’m trying to get measurements that are objective.”

Asked to name a comparable period in history that ended well, Dalio pointed to the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty, when the value of the dollar was decreasing and inflation was increasing rapidly. “We got through that with adjustments,” he said, “though we didn’t have an external power that was as strong as China.”

Another point of optimism, he said, is that “the worst case doesn’t affect most people as badly as it sounds when you read it.” He cited the Great Depression as an example. “Most people remained employed, and going through the wars, most people remained alive.”

Still, he is not convinced that central bankers can solve current challenges such as supply chain shortages and inflation, which is one of the reasons that he has become intrigued by cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin.

He said one of the superpowers of the central bank is that most people don’t understand the relationship between monetary policy and the value of their money.

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“It’ll be hidden,” he said. “People will look at how much they’re worth in nominal dollars, not in inflation-adjusted dollars. So they’ll say, ‘I’m safe,’ as they will lose 4, 5, 7 per cent per year.”

Dalio is convinced that if people better understood this and understood the various cycles of economies, their outcomes would be better, and crises would be easier to avert.

“I have a principle: If you worry, you don’t have to worry. And if you don’t worry, you have to worry.”