He breaks it down into eight key pillars—education, innovation, competitiveness, military strength, trade influence, economic output, financial center dominance, and reserve currency status—and then uses something called z-scores to compare countries across each one.

Having recently written to you about the ongoing U.S.–China trade war (see here and here), I was curious how this framework would stack up when applied to the two major powers today. So I went digging—and sure enough, I found a recent dataset that applies the same methodology using updated numbers. I've plotted it in this week's chart below.

Again, what you're seeing here are z-scores—basically, a way to show how far above or below the global average a country sits in each category. A score of 0 means you're at the global average. Scores below 0 mean you're trailing it. Anything above 1 means you're solidly ahead. Above 2? You're in rare company—top-tier status.

Now, the U.S. still dominates in the areas you'd expect—finance and military power. For example, America's financial center strength (2.7) dwarfs China's (0.2). Same goes for reserve currency status: 1.9 for the U.S., versus -0.6 for China.

Naturally, I'm not exactly sold on that financial dominance narrative. A bit hard to claim that with nearly $37 trillion in debt, deficits that would make a drunken sailor blush, and a global reserve status that's losing altitude fast.

Either way, here's where things get interesting…

Data shows that while, yes, the U.S. still leads in finance and military power, China's catching up fast in the areas that matter most for the future.

Take trade: China (1.7) now leads the U.S. (1.3). No surprise there—they're the top trading partner for over 120 countries now.