Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy where the King serves simultaneously as head of state, head of government, and custodian of Islam's two holiest mosques — a concentration of political, economic, and religious authority unmatched among major economies. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has consolidated power by sidelining rival branches of the royal family, detaining hundreds of princes and businessmen at the Ritz-Carlton in 2017, and restructuring succession from lateral (brother to brother) to linear (father to son). Vision 2030 represents the most ambitious state-directed economic transformation since the Asian Tigers: diversifying from oil dependency into tourism, entertainment, technology, and manufacturing, funded primarily through the Public Investment Fund. The economy's existential constraint is the fiscal breakeven oil price, which exceeds $80 per barrel including PIF spending. The biological parallel is metamorphosis — the organism is attempting to transform its fundamental metabolic structure while maintaining the existing body, a process that in biology requires near-total dissolution of the previous form.