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Principles For Dealing With the Changing World Order: Why Nation

(2022-11-09 06:57:03) 下一个

Principles For Dealing With the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52962238-principles-for-dealing-with-the-changing-world-order

By Ray Dalio, January 1, 2021


The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Principles, who has spent half a century studying global economies and markets, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order examines history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes—and to offer practical advice on how to navigate them well.

A few years ago, Ray Dalio noticed a confluence of political and economic conditions he hadn’t encountered before. They included huge debts and zero or near-zero interest rates that led to massive printing of money in the world’s three major reserve currencies; big political and social conflicts within countries, especially the US, due to the largest wealth, political, and values disparities in more than 100 years; and the rising of a world power (China) to challenge the existing world power (US) and the existing world order. The last time that this confluence occurred was between 1930 and 1945. This realization sent Dalio on a search for the repeating patterns and cause/effect relationships underlying all major changes in wealth and power over the last 500 years.

In this remarkable and timely addition to his Principles series, Dalio brings readers along for his study of the major empires—including the Dutch, the British, and the American—putting into perspective the “Big Cycle” that has driven the successes and failures of all the world’s major countries throughout history. He reveals the timeless and universal forces behind these shifts and uses them to look into the future, offering practical principles for positioning oneself for what’s ahead.

About the author Ray Dalio

 
Raymond Dalio (born August 8, 1949) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. Dalio is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds.
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The Changing World Order
 
 
Founder, CIO Mentor, and Member of the Bridgewater Board

The times ahead will be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, though similar to many times in history. How do I know that? Because they always have been.

Over the last 50 or so years, in order to handle my responsibilities well, I have needed to understand the most important factors that go into making countries and their markets succeed and fail. I learned that to anticipate and handle situations that I had never faced before I needed to study as many analogous historical cases as possible to understand the mechanics of how they transpired. That gave me principles for dealing with them well.

A few years ago, I observed the emergence of a number of big developments that hadn’t happened before in my lifetime but had occurred numerous times in history. Most importantly, I was seeing the confluence of huge debts and zero or near-zero interest rates that led to massive printing of money in the world’s three major reserve currencies; big political and social conflicts within countries, especially the US, due to the largest wealth, political, and values gaps in roughly a century; and the rising of a new world power (China) to challenge the existing world power (the US) and the existing world order. The most recent analogous time was the period from 1930 to 1945. This was very concerning to me. I knew that I couldn’t really understand what was happening and deal with what would be coming at me unless I studied past analogous periods, which led to this study of the rises and declines of empires, their reserve currencies, and their markets. In other words, to develop an understanding of what is happening now and might happen over the next few years, I needed to study the mechanics be- hind similar cases in history—e.g., the 1930–45 period, the rise and fall of the Dutch and British empires, the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, and others. [1] I was in the midst of doing those studies when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, which was another one of those big events that never happened in my lifetime but had happened many times before. Past pandemics became a part of this study and showed me that surprising acts of nature—e.g., diseases, famines, and floods— need to be considered as possibilities because those surprising big acts of nature that rarely come along were by any measure even more impactful than the biggest depressions and wars.

As I studied history, I saw that it typically transpires via relatively well-defined life cycles, like those of organisms, that evolve as each generation transitions to the next. In fact, the history and the future of humanity can be seen as just the aggregate of all the individual life stories evolving through time. I saw these stories flow together as one all-encompassing story from the beginning of recorded history up to this moment, with the same things happening over and over again for basically the same reasons, while still evolving. By seeing many interlinking cases evolve together, I could see the patterns and cause/effect relationships that govern them and could imagine the future based on what I learned. These events happened many times throughout history and were parts of a cycle of rises and de- clines of empires and most aspects of empires—e.g., of their education levels, their levels of productivity, their levels of trade with other countries, their militaries, their currencies and other markets, etc.

Each of these aspects or powers transpired in cycles, and they were all interrelated. For example, nations’ levels of education affected their levels of productivity, which affected their levels of trade with other countries, which affected the levels of military strength required to protect trade routes, which together affected their currencies and other markets, which affected many other things. Their movements together made up the economic and political cycles that occurred over many years—e.g., a very successful empire or dynasty could have its cycle last 200 or 300 years. All the empires and dynasties I studied rose and declined in a classic Big Cycle that has clear markers that allow us to see where we are in it.

This Big Cycle produces swings between 1) peaceful and prosperous periods of great creativity and productivity that raise living standards a lot and 2) depression, revolution, and war periods when there is a lot of fighting over wealth and power and a lot of destruction of wealth, life, and other things we cherish. I saw that the peaceful/creative periods lasted much longer than the depression/ revolution/war periods, typically by a ratio of about 5:1, so one could say that the depression/revolution/war periods were transition periods between the normally peaceful/creative periods.

While the peaceful/creative periods are certainly more enjoyable for most people, all these realities have their purposes for advancing evolution, so in the broader sense they are neither good nor bad. The depression/revolution/war periods produce a lot of destruction, but like cleansing storms, they also get rid of weaknesses and excesses (such as too much debt) and produce a new beginning in the form of a return to fundamentals on a sounder footing (albeit painfully). After the conflict is resolved, it is clear who has what power, and because most people desperately want peace, there is a resolution that produces new monetary, economic, and political systems—together, a new world order—and fosters the next peaceful/creative period. Within this Big Cycle are other cycles. For example, there are long- term debt cycles that last about 100 years and short-term debt cycles that last about eight years. This short-term cycle also has within it longer, prosperous expansion periods that are interrupted by shorter recession periods, and within these cycles are shorter cycles, and so on. Before I get your head spinning with all this cycle stuff, the main thing I want to convey is that when the cycles align, the tectonic plates of history shift, and the lives of all people change in big ways. These shifts will sometimes be terrible and sometimes terrific. They certainly will happen in the future, and most people will fail to anticipate them. In other words, the swinging of conditions from one extreme to another in a cycle is the norm, not the exception. It was a very rare country in a very rare century that didn’t have at least one boom/harmonious/prosperous period and one depression/ civil war/revolution period, so we should expect both. Yet, most people throughout history have thought (and still think today) that the future will look like a slightly modified version of the recent past. That is because the really big boom periods and the really big bust periods, like many things, come along about once in a lifetime and so they are surprising unless one has studied the patterns of history over many generations. Because the swings between great and terrible times tend to be far apart the future we encounter is likely to be very different from what most people expect.

For example, my dad and most of his peers who went through the Great Depression and World War II never imagined the post-war economic boom because it was more different from than similar to what they had experienced. I understand why, given those experiences, they wouldn’t think of borrowing and putting their hard-earned savings into the stock market, so it’s understandable that they missed out on profiting from the boom. Similarly, I understand why, decades later, those who only experienced debt-financed booms and never experienced depression and war would borrow a lot in order to speculate and would consider depression and war implausible. The same is true with money: money used to be “hard” (i.e., linked to gold) after World War II until governments made money “soft” (i.e., fiat) to accommodate borrowing and prevent entities from going broke in the 1970s. As a result, most people at the moment of my writing this book believe that they should borrow more, even though borrowing and debt-financed booms have historically led to depressions and internal and external conflicts.

Understanding history in this way also raises questions whose answers provide us with valuable clues on what the future will be like. For example, throughout my life, the dollar has been the world’s re- serve currency, monetary policy has been an effective tool for stimulating economies, and democracy and capitalism have been widely regarded as the superior political and economic systems. Anyone who studies history can see that no system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail. Naturally I asked myself how would I and the people I care about know when we are entering one of these depression/revolution/war periods and how would we know how to navigate them well. Because my professional responsibility is to preserve wealth regardless of the environment, I needed to develop an understanding and strategy that would have worked throughout history, including through these sorts of devastating times.

The purpose of this book is to pass along what I learned that has helped me and that I believe might help you. I present it for your consideration.

HOW I LEARNED TO ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE BY STUDYING THE PAST

While it might seem odd that an investment manager who is required to make investment decisions on short time frames would pay so much attention to long-term history, through my experiences I have learned that I need this perspective. My approach isn’t an academic one created for scholarly purposes; it is a very practical one that I follow in order to do my job well. The game I play requires me to understand what is likely to happen to economies better than the competition does, so I have spent roughly 50 years closely observing most major economies and their markets—as well as their political conditions, since those affect both—trying to understand what is happening well enough to bet on it. From my years of wrestling with the markets and trying to come up with principles for doing it well, I’ve learned that one’s ability to anticipate and deal well with the future depends on one’s understanding  of  the  cause/effect  relationships  that  make  things change, and one’s ability to understand these cause/effect relationships comes from studying how they have changed in the past.

I arrived at this approach after the painful learning that the big- gest mistakes in my career came from missing big market moves that hadn’t happened in my lifetime but had happened many times before. The first of these big surprises for me came in 1971 when I was 22 years old and clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a summer job. I loved it because it was a fast-pasted game of making and losing money played on a trading floor with people who liked to have a blast with each other—so much so that traders used to have water pistol fights right on the trading floor. I was engrossed in this game of watching the big developments in the world and betting on how they would drive the markets. Sometimes it could be dramatic.

On a Sunday night—August 15, 1971—President Richard Nixon announced that the US would renege on its promise to allow paper dollars to be turned in for gold. As I listened to Nixon speak, I realized that the US government had defaulted on a promise and that money as we knew it had ceased to exist. That couldn’t be good, I thought. So on Monday morning I walked onto the floor of the ex- change expecting pandemonium as stocks took a dive. There was pandemonium all right, but not the sort I expected. Instead of falling, the stock market jumped about 4 percent as the dollar plummeted. I was shocked. That’s because I hadn’t experienced a currency devaluation before. In the days that followed, I dug into history and saw that there were many cases of currency devaluations that had had similar effects on stock markets. By studying further, I figured out why, and I learned something valuable that would help me many times in my future. It took a few more of those painful surprises to beat the realization into my head that I needed to understand all the big economic and market moves that had happened in the last 100-plus years and in all major countries.

In other words, if some big and important event had happened in the past (like the Great Depression), I couldn’t say for sure that it wouldn’t happen to me, so I had to figure out how it worked and be pre- pared to deal with it. Through my research I saw that there were many cases of the same types of things happening (e.g., depressions) and that by studying them just like a doctor studies many cases of a particular type of disease, I could gain a deeper understanding of how they work. I studied these qualitatively and quantitatively through my experiences, by speaking with preeminent experts, reading great books, and digging into statistics and archives with my great research team.

From that learning came a visualization of an archetypical sequence of how rises and declines in wealth and power typically happen. The archetype helps me see the cause/effect relationships that drive how these cases typically progress. With that archetypical template specified, I can study deviations from it to try to explain them. Then I put these mental models into algorithms both to monitor conditions relative to my archetypes and to help me make decisions based on them. This process helps me refine my understanding of the cause/ effect relationships to the point where I can create decision-making rules—i.e., principles for dealing with my realities—in the form of “if/then” statements—i.e., if X happens, then make Y bet. Then I watch actual events transpire relative to that template and what we are expecting. I do these things in a very systematic way with my partners at Bridgewater Associates. If events are on track, we continue to bet on what typically comes next; if events start to deviate from our template, we try to understand why and course correct. This process has helped me both understand the big cause/effect sequences that typically drive their progressions and gain a lot of humility. I do this continuously and will continue to do it until I die, so what you are reading is a work in progress. [2]

THIS APPROACH AFFECTS HOW I SEE EVERYTHING

Seeing events in this way helped shift my perspective from being caught in the blizzard of things coming at me to stepping above them to see their patterns through time.[3] The more related things I could understand in this way, the more I could see how they influence each other—e.g., how the economic cycle works with the political one— and how they interact over longer periods of time.

I believe that the reason people typically miss the big moments of evolution coming at them in life is because they experience only tiny pieces of what’s happening. We are like ants preoccupied with our jobs of carrying crumbs in our very brief lifetimes instead of having a broader perspective of the big-picture patterns and cycles, the important interrelated things driving them, where we are within the cycles, and what’s likely to transpire. From gaining this perspective, I’ve come to believe that throughout history there are only a limited number of personality types[4] going down a limited number of paths, which lead them to encounter a limited number of situations to produce a limited number of stories that repeat over time. The only things that change are the clothes the characters are wearing, the languages they are speaking, and the technologies they’re using.

THIS STUDY AND HOW I CAME TO DO IT

One study led to another, which led me to do this study. More specifically:

 

  • Studying money and credit cycles throughout history made me aware of the long-term debt and capital markets cycle (which typically lasts about 50 to 100 years), which has led me to view what is happening now in a very different way than if I hadn’t gained that perspective. For example, interest rates hit 0 percent and central banks printed money and bought financial assets in response to the 2008 financial crisis. I had studied that happening in the 1930s, which helped me see how and why central bank actions of creating a lot of money and credit/debt 90 years ago pushed financial asset prices up, which widened the wealth gap and led to an era of populism and conflict. We are now seeing the same forces at play in the post-2008 period.
  • In 2014, I wanted to forecast economic growth rates in a number of countries because they were relevant to our investment decisions. I used the same approach of studying many cases to find the drivers of growth and come up with timeless and universal indicators for anticipating countries’ growth rates over 10-year periods. Through this process, I developed a deeper understanding of why some countries did well and others did poorly. I combined these indicators into gauges and equations that we used (and continue to use) to produce 10-year growth estimates across the 20 largest economies. Besides being helpful to us, I saw that this study could help economic policy makers because, by seeing these timeless and universal cause/effect relationships, they could know that if they changed X, it would have Y effect in the future. I also saw how these 10-year leading economic indicators (such as the quality of education and the level of indebtedness) were worsening for the US relative to big emerging countries such as China and India. This study is called “Productivity and Structural Reform: Why Countries Succeed and Fail, and What Should Be Done So Failing Countries Succeed.” (This study, and every other study mentioned here, is available for free at economicprinciples.org.)
  • Soon after the Trump election in 2016 and with increases in populism in developed countries becoming more apparent, I began a study called “Populism: The Phenomenon.” That highlighted for me how gaps in wealth and values led to deep social and political conflicts in the 1930s that are similar to those that exist now. It also showed me how and why populists of the left and populists of the right are more nationalistic, militaristic, protectionist, and confrontational—and what such approaches led to. I saw how powerful the conflict between the economic/political left and right could become and the significant impact this conflict has on economies, markets, wealth, and power, which gave me a better understanding of events that were and still are transpiring.
  • From doing these studies, and from observing numerous things that were happening around me, I saw that America was experiencing very large gaps in people’s economic conditions, which were obscured by looking only at economic averages. So I divided the economy into quintiles, looking at the top 20 percent of income earners, the next 20 percent, and so on down to the bottom 20 percent, and examined the conditions of these populations individually. This resulted in two studies. In “Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue: The Two Economies—The Top 40% and the Bottom 60%,” I saw the dramatic differences in conditions between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” which helped me understand the greater polarity and populism I saw emerging. Those findings, as well as the close contact my wife and I were having through her philanthropic work with the reality of wealth and opportunity gaps in Connecticut communities and their schools, led to the research that became my study called “Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed.”
  • At the same time, through my many years of international dealings in and research on other countries, I saw huge global economic and geopolitical shifts taking place, especially in China. I have been going to China for 37 years and am lucky enough to have become well-acquainted with the thinking of top economic policy makers and a broad range of others. Having this direct contact has helped me see up close the reasoning behind their actions, which have produced remarkable advances. It is a fact that these people have led China to become an effective competitor with the US in production, trade, technology, geopolitics, and world capital markets, so how they’ve done this must be examined and understood without bias.

 

My most recent study, on which this book is based, came about because of my need to understand three big forces that hadn’t happened before in my lifetime and the questions they prompt:

1. The Long-Term Debt and Capital Markets Cycle: At no point in our lifetimes have interest rates been so low or negative on so much debt as they are as of this writing. The value of money and debt assets is being called into question by the supply-and-demand picture for them. In 2021, more than $16 trillion of debt was at negative interest rates and an unusually large amount of additional new debt will soon need to be sold to finance deficits. This is happening at the same time as huge pension and healthcare obligations loom large on the horizon. These circumstances raised some interesting questions for me. Naturally I wondered why anyone would want to hold debt yielding a negative interest rate and how much lower interest rates could be pushed. I also wondered what will happen to economies and markets when they can’t be pushed lower and how central banks could be stimulative when the next downturn inevitably comes. Would central banks print a lot more currency, causing its value to go down? What would happen if the currency that the debt is denominated in goes down while interest rates are so low? These questions in turn led me to ask what central banks would do if investors flee debt denominated in the world’s major reserve currencies (i.e., the dollar, the euro, and the yen), which would be expected if the money that they are being paid back in is both depreciating in value and paying interest rates that are so low.

A reserve currency is a currency that is accepted around the world for transactions and savings. The country that gets to print the world’s primary currency (now the US, but as we’ll see this has changed through history) is in a very powerful position, and debt that is denominated in the world’s reserve currency (i.e., US dollar-denominated debt now) is the most fundamental building block for the world’s capital markets and the world’s economies. It is also the case that all reserve currencies in the past have ceased to be reserve currencies, often coming to traumatic ends for the countries that enjoyed this special power. So I also began to wonder whether, when, and why the dollar will decline as the world’s leading reserve currency, what might replace it, and how that would change the world as we know it.

2.  The Internal Order and Disorder Cycle: Wealth, values, and political gaps are now larger than at any other point during my lifetime. By studying the 1930s and other prior eras when polarization was also high, I learned that which side wins out (i.e., left or right) will have very big impacts on economies and markets. So naturally I wondered what today’s gaps will lead to. My examinations of history have taught me that when wealth and values gaps are large and there is an economic downturn, it is likely that there will be a lot of conflict about how to divide the pie. How will people and policy makers interact with each other when the next economic downturn arrives? I was especially concerned because of the limitations on central banks’ abilities to cut interest rates adequately to stimulate the economy. In addition to these traditional tools being ineffective, printing money and buying financial assets (now called “quantitative easing”) also widens the wealth gap because buying financial assets pushes up their prices, which benefits the wealthy who hold more financial assets than the poor do. How would that play out in the future?

3.  The External Order and Disorder Cycle: For the first time in my life, the United States is encountering a true rival power. (The Soviet Union was only a military rival, never a significant economic one.) China has become a rival power to the United States in most ways and is becoming strong in most ways at a faster rate. If trends continue, China will be stronger than the United States in the most important ways that an empire becomes dominant. Or at the very least, it will be a worthy competitor. I have seen both countries up close for most of my life, and I now see how conflict is increasing fast, especially in the areas of trade, technology, geopolitics, capital, and economic/political/social ideologies. I can’t help but wonder how these conflicts, and the changes in the world order that will result from them, will transpire in the years ahead and what effects that will have on us all.

To gain the perspective I needed about these factors and what their confluence might mean, I looked at the rises and declines of all the major empires and their currencies over the last 500 years, focusing most closely on the three biggest ones: the US Empire and the US dollar, which are most important now; the British Empire and the British pound, which were most important before that; and the Dutch Empire and the Dutch guilder before that. I also focused less closely on the six other significant, though less financially dominant, empires of Germany, France, Russia, Japan, China, and India. Of those six, I gave China the most attention and looked at its history back to the year 600 because 1) China was so important throughout history, 2) it’s so important now and will likely be even more important in the future, and 3) it provides many cases to look at of dynasties rising and declining, which helped me better understand the patterns and the forces behind them. In these cases, a clearer picture emerged of how other influences, most importantly technology and acts of nature, played significant roles.

From examining all these cases across empires and across time, I saw that the great empires typically lasted roughly 250 years, give or take 150 years, with big economic, debt, and political cycles within them lasting about 50 to 100 years. By studying how these rises and declines worked individually, I could see how they worked on average in an archetypical way, and then I could examine how they worked differently and why. Doing that taught me a lot. My challenge now is trying to convey it to you.

You can miss seeing these cycles if you watch events too close up or if you are looking at the averages rather than the individual cases. Almost everyone talks about what is happening now and nobody talks about these big cycles, even though they are the biggest drivers of what is happening now. When looking at the whole or at averages, you don’t see the individual cases of rises and declines, which are far greater. For example, looking at a stock market average (e.g., the S&P 500) and not looking at individual companies will lead you to miss the important fact that almost all the individual cases that make up the average have periods of birth, growth, and death. If you experienced any one of these, you would have had a hell of a ride up followed by a hell of a ride down into ruin unless you diversified and rebalanced your bets (e.g., the way it is done by S&P to create the index) or were able to discern the rising periods from the declining periods ahead of the crowd so as to be able to move well. By “move” I don’t just mean move your position in markets—in the case of rising and falling empires, I mean “move” in nearly everything, including where you live.

This leads me to my next point: to see the big picture, you can’t focus on the details. While I will attempt to paint this big, sweeping picture accurately, I can’t paint it in a precise way. Also, in order for you to see it and understand it, you can’t try to do so in a precise way. That is because we are looking at mega-macro cycles and evolution over very long time frames. To see them, you will have to let go of the details. Of course, when the details are important, which they often are, we will need to go from the very big imprecise picture to a more detailed one.

Looking at what happened in the past from this mega-macro perspective will radically alter how you see things. For example, because the span of time covered is so large, many of the most fundamental things that we take for granted and many of the terms we use to describe them do not exist over the full period of time. As a result, I will be imprecise in my wording so that I can convey the big picture without getting tripped up on what might seem to be big things but, in the scope of what we are looking at, are relative details.

For example, I wrestled with how much I should worry about the differences between countries, kingdoms, nations, states, tribes, empires, and dynasties. Nowadays we think mostly in terms of countries. However, countries as we know them didn’t come into existence until the 17th century, after the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. In other words, before then there were no countries—generally speaking, though not always, there were states and kingdoms instead. In some places, kingdoms still exist and can be confused with being countries, and in some places they are both. Generally speaking, though not always, kingdoms are small, countries are bigger, and empires are big- gest (spreading beyond the kingdom or the country). The relationships between them are often not all that clear. The British Empire was mostly a kingdom that gradually evolved into a country and then into an empire that extended way beyond England’s borders, so that its leaders controlled broad areas and many non-English peoples.

It’s also the case that each of these types of singularly controlled entities—states, countries, kingdoms, tribes, empires, etc.—controls its population in different ways, which further confuses things for those who seek precision. For example, in some cases empires are areas that are occupied by a dominant power, while in other cases empires are areas influenced by a dominant power through threats and rewards. The British Empire generally occupied the countries in its empire while the American Empire has controlled more via rewards and threats—though that is not entirely true, as at the time of this writing the US has military bases in at least 70 countries. Though it is clear that there is an American Empire, it is less clear exactly what is in it. Anyway, you get my point—that trying to be precise can stand in the way of conveying the biggest, most important things. So you are going to have to bear with my sweeping imprecisions. You will also understand why I will henceforth imprecisely call these entities countries, even though not all of them were countries, technically speaking.

Along these lines, some will argue that my comparing different countries with different systems in different times is impossible. While I can understand that perspective, I want to assure you that I will seek to explain whatever major differences exist and that the timeless and universal similarities are much greater than the differences. It would be tragic to let the differences stand in the way of seeing the similarities that provide us with the lessons of history we need.

REMEMBER THAT WHAT I DON’T KNOW IS MUCH GREATER THAN WHAT I KNOW

In asking these questions, from the outset I felt like an ant trying to understand the universe. I had many more questions than answers, and I knew that I was delving into numerous areas that others have devoted their lives to studying. One of the benefits of my circum- stances is that I can speak with the world’s best scholars who have studied history in depth as well as with the people who are in, or have been in, the positions of making history. This allowed me to triangulate with the best of them. While each had in-depth perspectives on some pieces of the puzzle, none had the holistic understanding that I needed to adequately answer all my questions. But by speaking with all of them and triangulating what I learned with the research I did myself, the pieces started to fall into place.

The people and tools at Bridgewater were also invaluable to this research. Because the world is a complicated place, playing the highly competitive  game  of  making  sense  of  the  past,  processing  what’s going on in the present, and using that information to bet on the future requires hundreds of people and great computer power. For example, we actively consume about a hundred million data series that are run through our logic frameworks that systematically convert this information into trades in every market we can trade within every major country in the world. I believe that our ability to see and process information about all major countries and all major markets is un- paralleled. It was through this machine that I could see and attempt to understand how the world I’m living in works and I relied on it in doing this study.

Still, I can’t be sure that I’m right about anything.

While I have learned an enormous amount that I will put to good use, I know that what I know is still only a tiny portion of what I need to know to be confident in my outlook for the future. I also know from experience that if I wait to learn enough to be satisfied with what I know before acting or sharing, I’d never be able to use or convey what I have learned. So please understand that while this study will provide you with my very top-down, big-picture perspective on what I’ve learned and my very low-confidence outlook for the future, you should approach my conclusions as theories rather than facts. Keep in mind that even with all of this, I have been wrong more times than I can remember, which is why I value diversification of my bets above all else. So please realize that I’m just doing the best I can to openly convey my thinking to you.

You might be wondering why I wrote this book. In the past, I would have been silent about what I’ve learned. However, I am now in the phase of my life that silently achieving more isn’t as important to me as passing along what I have learned in the hope that it can be of use to others. My main objectives are to convey to you my model for how the world works—to share with you a single digestible story of the last 500 years that shows how and why history “rhymes” with what is happening today—and to help you and others make better decisions so we all might have a better future.

HOW THIS STUDY IS ORGANIZED

As with all my studies, I will attempt to convey what I learned in both shorter, simpler ways (such as videos you can find online), longer, more comprehensive ways (like this book), and even more comprehensive ways for those who want additional charts and historical examples (available along with everything else not printed in the book at economicprinciples.org). In order to make the most important concepts easy to understand, this book is written in the vernacular, favoring clarity over precision. As a result, some of my wording will be by and large accurate but not always precisely so.

In Part I, I will summarize all that I learned in a simplified archetype of the rises and declines of empires, drawing from all my research of specific cases. I will first distill my findings into an index of the total power of empires, which provides an overview of the ebbs and flows of different powers and which is constituted from eight in- dices of different types of power. I will then go into more detail on a list of 18 determinants that I believe to be the key forces behind the rises and falls of empires and then I will cover in more detail the three big cycles mentioned previously. In Part II, I will show the individual cases in greater depth, walking through the story of the major reserve currency empires over the last 500 years, including a chapter focused on the present day conflicts between the US and China. Finally, in the concluding Part III, I will discuss what all of this means for the future.

[1] To be clear, while I am describing these cycles of the past, I’m not one of those people who believes that what happened in the past will necessarily continue into the future without understanding the cause/effect mechanics that drive changes. My objective above all else is to have you join with me in looking at the cause/effect relationships and then to use that understanding to explore what might be coming at us and agree on principles to handle it in the best possible way.

[2] For example, I have followed this approach for debt cycles because I’ve had to navigate many of them over the last 50 years and they are the most important force driving big shifts in economies and markets. If you are interested in my template for understanding big debt crises and seeing all the cases that make it up, you can get Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises in free digital form at economicprinciples.org or in print form for sale in bookstores or online. I’ve studied many big, important things (e.g., depressions, hyperinflation, wars, balance of payments crises, etc.) by following this approach, usually because I was compelled to under- stand unusual things that appeared to be germinating around me. It was that perspective that allowed Bridgewater to navigate the 2008 financial crisis well when others struggled.

[3] I approach just about everything this way. For example, in building and running my business, I had to understand the realities of how people think and learn principles for dealing with these realities well, which I did using this same approach. If you are interested in what I learned about such non-economic and non-market things, I conveyed it in my book Principles: Life and Work, which is free in an iOS/Android app called Principles in Action or is for sale in the usual bookstores.

[4] In my book Principles: Life and Work, I share my perspective on these different ways of thinking. I won’t describe them here but will direct you there should you be interested.

 

Published by

Ray Dalio
Founder, CIO Mentor, and Member of the Bridgewater Board
Published • 2y
 
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 646 reviews
This isn't a good book. Ray Dalio gets basic facts wrong, e.g. the timing of World War I, the impact of the Treaty of Versaille reparations on Germany and Mitteleuropa, the definition of right-wing populism (it isn't about making billionaires wealthier: it is populism!), which US president took us off the gold standard and when. He praises China for its weaknesses (totalitarianism) rather than its strengths. He contradicts himself repeatedly within the same chapter, sometimes even the same page.

So the general problem with The Changing World Order is that Dalio gets historical events muddled up, things that are easily checked and widely accepted, then he uses that incorrect information to draw causal relationships about shifts in global political economy, e.g. US dollar losing its reserve currency status, and as Joe Biden said, "China's going to eat our lunch!" I don't know about that! China has comparable much worse income and wealth inequality as the USA. Also, Chinese and Indian citizens continue to send their children to American universities in droves, so our education system hasn't gotten THAT bad... not yet. Oh, and Chinese flight capital lands primarily in big American and Canadian cities. Dalio doesn't mention any of this.

Also, Dalio's central focus, about long term money and debt cycles, has been analyzed and refined repeatedly over the past 100 years. I'm referring to Kondratieff waves (circa 1926, capitalist economies are subject to spontaneous and recurrent depressions and recoveries every 50-60 years) and Kuznets business cycles (for which Kuznets won the Nobel prize in economics in 1971). Then there's Peter Turchin (he's a bit pseudo-sciencey but is a legitimate mathematical statistician) who tries to empirically determine how human societies evolve, and why we see extremes of inequality in economic performance as well as ineffective governments. Turchin's work is in progress right now, even though I don't think he does as good a job as Simon Kuznets did! Oh, and there are also the guys who wrote "The Fourth Turning", about recurring social and economic cycles in American and world history. I've read work by the latter two (and studied Kuznets). Their writing is mostly accessible, i.e. clear and succinct, and accurate about known facts of demography and history.

As other reviews mentioned, The Changing World Order is repetitious. It has some of the most awful time-series graphs ever. I suspect that Dalio's stature as founder and CEO of hedge fund Bridgewater is such that no one dares to edit him.

I am a financial economist. I'm STEMy. I work at a bank. I fully realize that Dalio knows how to invest money and make extraordinary returns. That's his forte! It *is* kind of fascinating how disconnected his abilities as an asset manager are from this book.

EDIT: I read the intro, Chapters 1, 2, and 6. There are two chapters 5, with one being chapter 4. The book will be available on Kindle and in paperback in May 2021. It was published in hardback in November 2020. Dalio made it available early as a series of html web pages. That's how I read it. Update 29 May 2022: Thank you to the person who commented about relative income inequality of the USA and China; I corrected that sentence above.
"Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times."
-- G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"

Dalio's recent book is exactly about these four sentences. Or, to be more precise, about the rise and fall cycle of every powerhouse in history. Dalio approaches the topic carefully and dives deep - but focuses primarily on economics and politics (which are important, but there are other important aspects). The book's 'grande finale' is the analysis of current empires: fading one (US) and the rising one (China). To show their similarities to the past empires (the Netherlands and Britain), Dalio provides blitz walkthroughs through their history.

IMHO this book is a-must-read. It's hard to find an equally important topic these days and Dalio is very straightforward when it comes to his analysis (he doesn't pretend to be a diplomat). It's not that he acts as an alarmist - he aims to be very pragmatic and remains cool-headed. He doesn't demonize China and does quite well in illustrating the cultural differences behind certain occurrences in their history. He also spends a lot of time on the concept of war (and the prospect for the next one coming).

Two points I find particularly interesting:
1. Dalio doesn't even try giving advice on how US could potentially "extend" its supremacy. This is not the goal of this book.
2. There's a lot about monetary policies in this book, and the role they play in the "cycle". What I have missed badly is the impact of the new, decentralized currencies - not even the current situation, but what can happen in the forthcoming years - keeping in mind the liberal approach in Western economies and strict approach in China; IMHO that's a very interesting topic to consider.

In the end. This is a helluva good book. Strongly recommended.
Summary: This is what people think right now among those that have a lot of influence, so you should read it. While I largely agree with many parts, I do not hold the same framework and these are fundamental differences in how I see the world.

Having read his newsletters for more than a decade, I will never be anything but a huge fan of Dalio. He's brilliant and anyone who believes otherwise has missed the point. The star removal is because we do not agree on a few fundamental things, and I know he's smart AF, so it could only possibly be because he is refusing to see it that way.

My notes are for me, so I'm more citing, b/c I sometimes have to repeat why I feel the way I do. This is not a review in the normal sense.

p.14 "I believe the reason people typically miss the big moments of evolution coming at them inlife is that we each experience only tiny pieces of what is happening."
"From gaining this perspective, I've come to believe that there are only a limited number of personality types going down a limited number of paths that lead them to encounter a limited number of situations to produce only a limited number of stories that repeat over time.

.... something to think about in the context of his previous book and the idea that we can sometimes be academically lazy in reinforcing our own viewpoints.

p. 15 - He talks about how he came to this path of thought of this book. He was studying money and credit cycles and hoping to go backwards with his lens: "... central bank actions push financial asset prices and the economy up, which widen the wealth gap and led to an era of populism and conflict."

p. 36 - He talks about ways to distribute wealth to advance society: ... "... the formula for success has been a system in which educated people come up with innovations, receive funding through capital markets, andn own the means by which their innovations are turned into the production and allocation of resources allowing them to be rewarded by profit making. This happens best in capitalism and the government systems that work symbiotically with it. At the same time, how this is happening continues to evolve. For example, while ages ago agricultural land and agricultural production are worth the most and that evolved into machines and what they produce being worth the most, digital things that have no apparent physical existence (data and information process) are evolving to become worth the most." This is one of a couple of foundation stone in his thought process that implies the way he's thinking about it is waves of preferences. I don't see it that way because this set-up embeds a particular thought process about causality and active action that I don't agree with. I would likely flip it backwards.

p. 44 He states the measure of power and wealth: "1) education, 2) competitiveness 3) technology, 4) economic output, 5) share of world trade, 6) military strength, 7) financial center strength, and 8) reserve currency.

p. 63 "However, unlike what most people intuitively think, there isn't a fixed amount of money and credit in existence. Money and credit can easily be created by governments. Their creating it is liked because it gives people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments more spending power." He then talks about the idea that if you have too much debt the paying it back can be difficult. Here is where we are not quite on the same page. Because there is a period of time before money. While some might find that is irrelevant, the challenge with excluding it fails to incorporate the years prior to the dominance of money in politics. In other times, you might have just enslaved a bunch of people (or gone to war and brought back slaves). Alternatively, you can just have very rich people donate it (time, resources, money....etc) outright. That's not money. That's something else, i.e. making a bunch of people do something they don't want, inspiring people to do something you want them to do. That becomes important later to understand a particular unexplored area of cases and solutions in the book.

p. 70 "For example, when the money and credit that central banks are creating no longer go into lending that fuels increases in economic demand and instead go into other currencies and inflation-hedge assets, it fails to stimulate economic activity and instead causes the value of the currency to decline and the value of inflation-hedge assets to rise. At such times high inflation can occur because the supply of money and credit has increased relative to the demand for it, which we call monetary inflation. That can happen at the same time there is weak demand.".... Can't tell if he's implying that is the case right this minute. If yes, I respectfully disagree.

p. 71 "In other words, using market values of what one owns to measure one's wealth gives an illusion of changes in wealth that doesn't really exist. As far as how the economic machine works, the big thing is that money and credit is stimulative when it's given out and depressing when it has to be paid back. That's what normally makes money, credit, and economic growth so cyclical."

p. 76 "Soon people treated these paper "claims on money" as if they were money themselves. After all, they were as good as money because they could be redeemed for tangible money. This type of currency system is called a linked currency system because the value of the currency is linked to the value of something, typically hard money such as gold."
Ok... at this point it became clear to me that he is using the idea of money and currency in a way that is very different from the book "1000 years of debt" that clearly and cleanly demonstrates that even currency is a form of debt. here we are not on the same page, because i agree with that author. In thinking of money in this way he is thinking of money in terms of stored value that can be physically produced. In fact, that is not what money is or is moving toward. Money has always been a store of value and the idea of currency or debt has been surrounding how do store value for portability both geographically and temporarily in a manner that can be confirmed. This means that for a few chapters Dalio and I must agree to disagree, because he goes in the direction of the Gold Standard concepts and produces a history that, while true, is not the way I see it.

p. 78 - "Money is what settles claims - i.e. one pays one's bills and one is done. Debt is a promise to deliver money. In watching how the machine is working it is important to watch a) the amounts of both debt and money that exist relative to the amount of hard money (e.g. gold) in the bank and b) the amount of goods and services that exist, which can vary, remembering that debt cycles happen because most people love to expand their buying power (generally through debt) while central banks tend to want to expand the amount of money in existence because people are happier when they do that." IMO, no. this is merely a framework we've created. What settles a claim is the other person acknowledging the terms, of which money has become the predominant manner to do so. The amount of goods and service and your ability to provide this become the primary relevance, the amount relative to anything specific is irrelevant, as long as you debtor and debtee agree... this has to do with my definition in the previous section and leads to a very different conclusion. We both land on the same idea that the reserve currency is all good, but with different nuances.

p. 81 - "When credit cycles reach their limit it is both the logical and classic response for central governments and their central banks to create a lot of debt and print money that will be spent on goods, services, and investment assets to keep the economy moving. That is what was done during the 2008 debt crisis, when interest rates could no longer be lowered because they had already hit 0%."

p. 85 - "Some people think there needs to be an alternative reserve currency to go to, but that's not true as the same dynamics of the breakdown of the monetary system and the running to other assets happened in cases in which there was no alternative currency to go to(e.g. in China and in the Roman Empire). The debasement of the currency leads it to devalue and have people run from it and debt denominated in it into something else." .... It almost ...and I really mean almost, that this is his pot shot at e-currencies/bitcoin.

p. 86 - "By keeping an eye on the amount of debt that needs to be paid relative to the amount of hard money that there is to pay it, the amount of debt payments that have to be made relative to the amount of cash flow the debtors have to service the debt, and the interest rewards that one is getting for lending one's money, one can assess the risk/reward of holding the time bonds." Yes... but .... and the but has to do with reserve currencies and also the idea that in such a case there is a desire to ignore in this any hard assets a country has that have nothing to do with assets. This is how China has taken over random mines and raw materials in a host of countries, so it's not a kinda nuanced point. A bit of a pet peeve that people talk about balance sheet without incorporating all assets.

p. 96 - "The US dollar now accounts for about 55% of the world's international transactions, savings, and borrowing. The Eurozone's euro accounts for about 25%. The Japanese yen accounts for less than 10%. The Chinese renminbi accounts for about 2%.

p. 104. "There is a real economy and there is a financial economy which are intertwined but different. The real economy and the financial economy each has its own supply and demand dynamics."

p. 115 - Here he talks about why the US was the net beneficiary of WWI and WWII.

p. 120 - Here he talks about not holding bonds late in debt cycles. Interesting....

p. 157 - "At its peak in the 19th century, the UK's 2.5% of the world's population produced 20% of the world's income and the UK controlled over 40% of global exports. This economic strength grew in tandem with a strong military which, along with the privately driven conquests of the British East India Company, drove the creation of a global empire upon which "the sun never set."
p. 158 - it took 20 years after WWII for the US to gain dominance over the British pound. He attributes that to post-war debt. I would say yes and.... the US rise is more important on a relative basis and also what they had already lost from the colonies situation and their ability to exploit cheap later via that route, which dominated the period of imperialism. I know... this book tries to stay away from the idea of slavery for good reason in this political environment, but let's just call it what it is ok....

p. 179 - ok... top paragraph on the Soviets being a rival to the US post WWII.... even if we made them a rival country and did this whole cold war, it's f-in stupid IMO. .. the idea that the Soviets were a comparable rival power at any point is just disrespectful AF to what the Russians suffered post WWII and how that carried through. Super not fair. The scary thing to me is that Dalio knows that so why he's putting it this way is awkward.

p. 182 - this 10 years of economic warfare before we actually take guns out... scary stuff.

p. 206 - talks about the importance of gold and reserve currencies in cross border transactions. I'm gonna say yes... and yet again, but he's not willing to go all the way to where I mentioned atop, i.e. that the point is not money, it's the ability to agree on value portability both temporary and geographically. As such, we then have to listen to all this on gold and ignore any conversation about electronic currencies such as bitcoin which have no sovereignty attached. I'm going to call it a microaggression.

p. 207... This is why I love Dalio. He's willing to admit that Post WWII the US was super rich and as such it paid off a bunch of countries to do certain things.... those countries benefited .... btw... they are all the countries surrounding the borders of Russian and specifically China.

p. 215 -... Ok Look, I get why he's blaming moving from the gold standard. There are so many tellings of this across the board. But seriously.... this love of Volker... really? I mean, let's be really honest.... oil prices and food prices, doesn't matter what you do on a monetary side, it wouldn't have changed things given what was happening with the Middle East Nations and how they felt about it. That would take decades of oil policy that we are currently undoing and it sure as hell wouldn't have undone mother nature making crops not grow and our own stupid AF policies related to the way we paid farmers not to farm... and I KNOW Dalio knows this. so why is this being presented as such??????????

p. 218 - I had no idea that he had an early bad series of calls. Wow. vulnerable. #Respect.

p. 221 - he indicates the rise of EM due to the swap out of middle income American jobs to overseas outsourcing. He indicates he knows this is a massive simplification. I'll allow it.

p. 225 - He puts the rise of income gap to the idea of a Money Financed Capitalist boom. The logic of this is that printing money and buying back stock largely made the wealthy wealthier at the expense of the poor.... I always hate these because another way to look at it is globally and you'll see a very different picture, i.e. the US poor are just middle class in a global scale and the rich are coming up to the global scale. But then you have to incorporate the really poor countries to properly see it over the history of humanity. Still....

This leads to his point that domestically in the US you end up with social and economic inequality that leads to the rise of Trump. Maybe... or ... something else.... I think the something else is even more nuanced than what he's saying here. So I don't love this logical short cut.

p. 237 - He shows how large China's reserves are (in reserve currencies and other...) he then says ... "... the US is very powerful because it can print the world's money and would be very vulnerable if it lost its reserve currency status." This is true.

p.. 238 - "... if the US dollar were to lose its reserve status and significantly depreciate in value it would have a devastating effect on the finances of those countries holding those reserves as well as private-sector holders of dollar-debt assets. Who would be the winners? Those with dollar-debt liabilities and those with non-dollar assets would be the big winners." True... but his path drawing might be abrupt, and the scenarios you'd have to have if someone were to pay me cash money to assess how would you dislodge the US as the reserve currencies… it won’t just be China rising further.

p. 255 - His depiction of China is so spot on... strategic with a far longer history to pull from for that strategy.

p. 259-260 He talks about the idea that there are few wars outside of China but many internally. YESSSSS!!! I have said this over and over again. China is not a European country.... why they would go to war is WAY the heck more limited. Their history tells you this. It’s not their deal to be the aggressor. They are FAAARRR more likely to use other means.

p. 266 - This idea that the Chinese like to save more. I'm not a believer. The public at large doesn't have as many options on the investment side. If there is no lending market at a reasonable rate with a legal system that easily supports it then yeah… people save.
p. 269 - He intro's the Century of Humiliation and the stakes that Taiwan has. Ok... so like this concept is from the last 20 years as a rallying cry for China to centralize together internally against an outside group.

p. 277-279 - He's got a telling of China that is very quick, but largely, it's fine. I do worry how laymen will read it who know nothing of the nuance of how he's saying it.

p. 280... ths is a very fast history of China.. wow... hope people learn more ... while accurate it's a bit glib. But I get it. Dalio's got a lot of ground to cover.

p. 286... The long term goal of Reuniting China is a bit odd to say this way. I mean HK and Macao had specific lease terms during imperialism. If we hadn't done a bunch of stupid shit including the having Taiwan semi be lodged on that island, then possibly the island of Formosa could be "worked out." at this point, I'm not convinced the politicians know how to do this correctly..... I mean you have to dial back the microscope for a better understanding of Chinese territorial history.....but the whole world keeps leaning in to these highly biased nasty pictures of things… particularly recently....

p. 328 - "China will probably advance its technologies and the quality of its decision making that is enabled by them faster than the US will. Big data + Big AI + big computing = superior decision making." Way to skirt the implications of why, which Dalio obviously knows..... and obviously it's not because they are investing more....

p. 332-334 - This idea of the strengthening of China's military... I wish he'd just show the borders and what territory they are trying to control and it would make it less inciting and mysterious as to why they have to do that.

p. 342 - I like how he walks through each of the current reserve currencies and why even at 2% we should care a lot about the state of the RMB.

p. 357 the Enemy is Us is an intriguing one....It's a long list... some of which includes defunding the military. I mean, you could also retool it if it's that controversial.

also... I totally heart this: "The internal wars and challenges in both China and the US are more improtant and bigger than external wars and challenges."
 
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