We like to believe success is about brilliance, hustle, or luck. But look closely across history — from Meiji Japan to Silicon Valley — and you’ll find that timing is the real determinant of destiny. Every society passes through a roughly 30-year “window of opportunity”, when information asymmetry is high, competition is thin, and natural demand rewards even imperfect execution. Enter during that window, and your skills compound for decades. Arrive too late, and even mastery feels invisible.

These windows don’t appear randomly. They follow a predictable cycle: chaos, construction, consolidation, and collapse. Each phase rewards a different archetype — the founder, the administrator, the consolidator, and finally, the arbitrageur. Understanding where your society sits in that cycle isn’t philosophy — it’s career strategy.

1. The Law of the 30-Year Window

Every country and city goes through a roughly 30-year window of opportunity — a period when information asymmetry is high, competition is low, and skill development is naturally rewarded. Those who enter during this phase can ride that wave for the rest of their careers. Once information spreads and the market saturates, the rewards for the same skills collapse.

This is the basic rhythm of social-liberal capitalism: openness invites innovation; innovation invites imitation; imitation kills outsized reward.

2. The Startup–Bureaucracy Cycle

Societies oscillate between two archetypes of opportunity: startup eras (chaos, innovation, founding) and bureaucratic eras (stability, administration, scaling). Each lasts around 30 years before the next begins.

United States Example

  • Startup Era (1880–1910): The industrial explosion — Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie. The chaos after the Civil War created open terrain for founders.
  • Scaling (1910-1930): The industrial expansion of factories. Entering corporates here would have been decent upper middle class, but will not satisfy the great ambition. The great era ended when the government implemented The Great Reform Bill of 1932.
  • Bureaucratic gold age Era (1910–1940): As the startups golden era ended, the new window of opportutnies opened in beurecratic need for US government grew. They suddenly needed military administrator, and new class of specialists in both Asia and Europe. You're trained for the next big boom in the post WW2 boom. The basis of training was in NY, Boston, Washinton DC.
  • Administrative Expansion (1940–1960): The U.S. globalized, exporting institutions to Europe and Asia. Bureaucrats and diplomats thrived. Ironically, US thrived alongside Soviet Union in hte sphere of influence in this period.
  • Post Expansion Fight (1960-1980): This is the era of Henry Kissinger. The administrative influence growth peaked and it needed to compete for its share. It aligned with China to strip away the Soviet influence. The Vietnam war was forceful administration away from China. In this period, 40 colonies from Nigeria to Singapore became independent from the British and French Empires (under the help of US). They all fell under US administration.
  • Silicon Valley Startup Era (1970–2000): Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Musk. The new frontier was digital, not industrial. They moved the center of poles to the west coast.
  • Scaling and Saturation (2000–2020): The window closed. New founders could still get rich — but not transform society. They expect you to know and smart, not to educate you. Even on the newbie friendly place like X, the top influencer is Musk, a product of the previous wave.
  • Scaling and Saturation (2000–2020): The window closed. New founders could still get rich — but not transform society. They expect you to know and smart, not to educate you. Even on the newbie friendly place like X, the top influencer is Musk, a product of the previous wave.
  • Stagnation of Sillicon Valley (2020-2040): The window of rapid growth is closed. It'll be more bureaucratic, and tech starts coercing with the government to maintain its dominance either via tariff or government contract.
  • Bureaucratic Frontier (2000-2030): We've started to see the new type of beurecracy that's needed. They're much more internet savvy and semi-conductor industrial policy focus. They started emphasizing on China in 2000, but might still adjusting the focus on administering Arctic zone from Alaska and Greeland or even Canada. (ie: US army started Japanese language officer training program in 1908, decades before Pearl Harbor). That adjustment will scale in 2030-2050 (meaning those new bureaucracy will remove the old elites focused on Europe and Middle East).

Today, the U.S. has hit the limit of both commercial and administrative expansion. It’s a civilization at the top of the S-curve.

3. The Chinese Counter-Cycle

China entered its modern growth phase around 1978, when Deng Xiaoping opened the economy. Its cycle mirrors America’s — just 100 years later.

  • Startup Era (1978–2008): Private entrepreneurs, reformers, and industrial founders rose. Jack Ma, Pony Ma, and the rise of Shenzhen all emerged in this golden window.
  • Commercial Scaling (2008-2028): We're starting to see Chinese commercial products everywhere outcompeting the west from EV to TikTok.
  • Bureaucratic Frontier (2010–2040): The bureaucracy needs to manage the assets accumulated from the commercial era. The best opportunities now lie in administration, not entrepreneurship — in managing Belt and Road projects, yuan internationalization, and AI regulation.  For young Chinese today, the founder era is over; the bureaucratic ascent has begun to train on the new class of Chinese internationalists from BRICS to Belt and Road Initiative. Even RCEP is in the horizon (see, China-backed Asian trade bloc looks to expand, Sept 22).

From 2040-2060, China’s administrative footprint will be solidified and scale — BRICS+, Asia, Africa, the Middle East. It'll be the accepted norms (in sacrifice to the regional autonomies in those participants).

4. The Shrinking Phase — The U.S. Old Elites and Its Allies

When both the commercial and administrative cycles mature, the system turns inward and defensive. That’s where the U.S. finds itself today:

  • Commercially: Dominance of the FAANG giants and tech monopolies. True innovation is incremental.
  • Administratively: Bureaucracy bloated; foreign influence limited by backlash. Old elites of Europe class is feeling the squeeze in the government budget.
  • Strategically: The U.S. turns to its allies for extraction — expanding energy, defense, and technology markets in Europe, Canada, and Australia. NATO and G7 become tools for consolidation, not exploration.
  • Cascading Effect: The countries that lose the pie and influence will start fighting down usually at the geographical neighbor or even civil war. France losing influence in EU, might start looking inwards with the fight between private wealth vs state.

The shrinking stage is characterized by friend cannibalization — the center feeding off its periphery to maintain itself.

5. How to Read Your Time and Place

  1. Startup openings appear after systemic collapse or sudden liberalization — think Meiji Japan, Deng’s China, or 1980s Silicon Valley.
  2. Bureaucratic openings follow — as new systems scale and need administrators, diplomats, and lawyers. This stage creates clear winners and losers globally. Formal education matters.
  3. Saturation periods reward conformity, not originality — the wrong time to start anew. The career ladder becomes top heavy with the older generation.
  4. Shrinking periods reward arbitrage — finding the next frontier while others defend the old.

If you’re born into a country at the peak of its administrative pyramid, your job isn’t to climb — it’s to pivot early into the next periphery before everyone else sees it.

6. The 21st Century Window of Opportunity Today

  • China (2010–2030): Bureaucratic specialists in BRICS, RCEP, Belt and Road, and Yuan internationalization. Military expansion.
  • U.S. (2000–2030): Bureaucratic specialists in China/India and North Atlantic.
  • India (2020–2050): Bureaucratic specialists in Middle East, China. Military expansion.
  • Singapore (2025–2055): Bureaucratic specialists in geopolitical and multilateral trade deals beyond US world order. Ship route protection. Military expansion. PS: Singapore had its founder incubation era already from 1995-2025. Meanwhile, it’s at scale stage for founders — although YC-style experimentation (‘throw the baby in the bath’) remains active. The growth will come and the corporations recruit ever more foreign engineers/professionals. But we will not see the friendly ecosystem towards founders who haven't proven anything anymore.
  • Japan (2005–2035): Founder era similar to that of Sillicon Valley 1990s. Nurturing ecosystem from the state and corporations.

7. The Meta-Lesson

Every civilization’s opportunity curve is finite. The wise don’t fight the wave — they time it.

The next thirty years won’t reward the same behaviors that made the last generation rich.

If you understand where your society is in its 30-year cycle, you can choose whether to build, administer, arbitrate, or migrate — before the rest catch on X.