Ray Dalio. The Changing World Order.

Ray Dalio & Friend 

It is surprising how enlightened the book is, given his advisers, Thomas "Make-the-war-war-war" Friedman and Niall Ferguson, thanked in his "Acknowledgements".  But all the correct things there are non-original and most original - incorrect. Previously, incomparable Azar Gat developed a static approach to measure the "strength of nations" quantitatively. His formula was based only on population and GDP and was not subject to much ideology-driven manipulation. Dalio's approach is dynamic -- it has a predictive power - but it includes many subjective factors that can be fudged. Not surprising that Dalio, a hedge fund tycoon, gives an exaggerated weight to the financial markets. That would not be so wrong, even if one remembers that most of the world largest banks at the end of the Cold War were in Japan, and that by 1900 the strongest bourses were London, New York, but also St. Petersburg (grain) and Buenos Aires (meat). But his ignorance of cultural factors and poorly digested history makes one suspect of his conclusions. 

The largest European powers by the controlled territories on the eve of XVII century were the Polish Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. They also had the mightiest armies. The problem with them was that they were dominated by militaristic elites with narrow-minded sectarian outlook, bent on incessant conquest and religious proselytization of subject populations. A string of Catholic bigots on the Polish throne reduced this world power to insignificance and then to the disappearance by the end of the XVIII century. Another Catholic bigot, Louis XIV refused to consider any pragmatic solutions and emptied the treasury of then the richest land in Europe in futile search of military gloria. He could not contemplate neither deportation of the Huguenots to the French America -- proposed by Colbert -- nor mending his religious fervor by the alliances with Protestant powers. A relative financial weakness of France on the eve of the Revolution had its roots in the destruction of the most productive class of the French population in the late XVII century by Louis and his bigoted mistress, Madame de Maintenon. 

But all that said, Dalio, because of his independent wealth, can publish books on social policy, which can inspire some thought apart from a conventional neocon garbage. Yet, even he cannot or would not openly challenge neocon orthodoxy.