Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail

by Ray Dalio

With these evolutions in mind, let’s start looking toward the future. If we look back carefully to see how the present was created, we can see that these evolutionary advances didn’t just happen on their own: every day, there were events that affected the present while people’s actions shaped them. At the same time, we know that we never could have anticipated them individually—if we had tried to predict each of the specific wars, droughts, pandemics, inventions, prosperous periods, declines, etc., we would have failed. But even without knowing about any of those specific developments, we could have pretty confidently said that advances would occur that would enable significantly larger populations to live significantly longer while enjoying significantly higher standards of living because of the evolution that has already occurred, and that we have every reason to expect to continue to occur, from humanity’s inventiveness. We could have also confidently asserted that there would be booms and busts, feasts and famines, and periods of great health and disease along the way.