History! Read it and weep!

History gifts us many lessons, but our direct life experiences, which span a mere seventy years or so, limits our capacity to learn them. Ray Dalio’s book The Changing World Order amply demonstrates what can be learnt by studying the last five hundred years and beyond. And those lessons provide guideposts for what we may see in the future if we care to look for them.

Ray Dalio is an investment manager whose motivation for this study came from his need to understand cycles that he personally h...