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

by Ray Dalio

The biggest thing affecting most people in most countries through time is how people struggle to make, take, and distribute wealth and power, though they also struggle over other things, most importantly ideology and religion. I saw how these struggles happened in timeless and universal ways, and how these struggles had huge implications for all aspects of people’s lives, starting with what happened with taxes, the economy, and how people were with each other through periods of boom and bust and peace and war, and how they unfolded in cyclical ways, like the tide coming in and out. I saw that when these struggles took the form of healthy competition that encouraged human energy to be put into productive activities, they produced productive internal orders and prosperous times, and when those energies took the form of destructive internal fighting, they produced internal disorder and painfully difficult times. I saw why the swings between productive order and destructive disorder typically evolved in cycles driven by logical cause/effect relationships and how they happened in all countries for mostly the same reasons. I saw that those that rose to achieve greatness did so because of a confluence of key forces coming together to produce that greatness and those that declined did so because these forces dissipated. At the time of this writing, there is growing disorder in a number of leading countries around the world, most importantly in the United States. I wanted to put th...