Some books are so mind-blowing and powerful that they should quickly be elevated to the level of an investment classic. Ray Dalio's Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order is so important, that maybe it should be taught in our secondary school history classes.
This book is important because of an investor's need to cut through the proliferation of books on intellectual masturbation written by academics and political scientists. We know that Ray Dalio has a lot of skin in the game because if he misreads the prospects of the countries he invests in, a lot of his money can be lost. He also has this wonderful talent of turning really subjective measures like Character/Civility/Determination of a country into a quantitative scoring system. Doing this may give a political science professor a brain aneurysm, but it lends a certain amount of credibility to this analysis. The...