Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

Post Reply New Topic

I was watching Tom Bilyeu's second interview with Rayhim a little earlier and they brought this video up. I definitely see his point. There's a lot people have been saying with respect to, effectively, WTH happened in 1971 or 1973, it could be in part what Eric Weinstein was suggesting with the 'easy pickings' or easily-industrialized physics heyday ending but I also see Ray's point that if our move off of the gold standard was seen as a default then this really could have been the beginning of the need to keep up the appearances of 'business as usual' while things were actually collapsing (the wage/productivity break in 1973 followed by it's ever-increasing gap, mid 2000's credit bubble, all the things Mark Blyth talks about regularly).

What's real obvious is the quantitative easing and just how much we've been trying to print our way out of trouble, which is a sign of post-decadence and the place on an arc relatively soon before a dominant superpower economically and militarily falls to a rising superpower.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio

Raymond Thomas Dalio is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager, who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, since 1985.  He founded Bridgewater in 1975 in New York.  Within ten years, it was infused with a $5 million investment from the World Bank's retirement fund.  Dalio is regarded as one of the greatest innovators in the finance world, having popularized many commonly used practices, such as risk parity, currency overlay, portable alpha, and global inflation-indexed bond management.

With his wealth, he and his family will likely survive any change in the "World Order" while the rest of us die from starvation, bad water, and poisoned air.

Good point. People shouldn't speak on subjects they've demonstrated that they know something about.

You missed the point, which is explicitly stated in the last sentence.  Try again.

I typically keep my attention to what makes sense.

. . . to you.

I've accepted that there are people in the world who can't vet or process content on it's own internal merits, and in place of that all they can do is play guilt by association games to make sense of the world they live in. I'm forced to assume these people are intellectually below me and incapable of actually processing content, if they weren't they wouldn't do it as an immediate go to - reliably. An intellectual equal who disagrees would carve up the content on its own merits and point out where they disagree.

Not everyone can manage that. It's okay.

What I'm really loving about this is the topic gets derailed from the very first post and stays there, and it stays there by the insistence of just one poster. It's a great look - keep it up.

---

i Usually Check Resources before i Spend Any
Minutes Watching a YouTube Video For Pursuing
New Avenues of Information And Arts; And There is

Nothing in Ray Dalio's Online Biography That Suggests He
Would Be An Unreliable Resource on Global Economics and
Yes, Even Rise and Falls of Empires As He Surely isn't the First

Human Being to Study the History of Empires Falling and Rising.

Yawn, If We Upset the Balance of Nature Enough, There is going to Be
No Escaping the Harm to All of Humanity, No Matter Human Resources.

Obviously, Folks With More Resources Stand a Chance to Survive Longer When
Trouble Comes; Yet There are No Long Term Assurances When it Comes to the

Balance of Nature.

1. Don't Spend/Use More Than We Have;
(Be Satisfied With What We Do Have Now)

2. Be Kind to Each Other and Work Together.

3. Yes, i Tend to Be Fiscally Conservative This Way;
And Socially Liberal This way too; Open Minded Enough
And Intelligent Enough to Understand Humans Are Different

And Worth Getting Along With, if We Learn to and ACTuALLY take the Effort.

Recent Studies Show 50 Percent of USA Folks, Who Make 50,000 to 100,000 Dollars, Live Pay-Check to Pay-Check

And 40 Percent of Folks Who Make Over 100,000 Dollars, Reaching into A More Upper Income Level of Pay.

Humans Aren't Evolved Well for Instant Gratification; And Science Shows Modern Humans Have An Average
American Attention Span Of Less Than A Gold Fish, Less Than 3 Seconds. It's A Real Problem When Humans
Lose Their Attention Span And Basically Live A Life 'Addicted' to Short Quick Hits of Dopamine. So Yes, What

Do You Do With

A 'Nation of Addicts';

Perhaps a '12-Step Program;'

Yet That Would Require Folks
Acknowledging They Have a Problem.

Immigrants Are Still Giving Up A Decade of their
Life in Sacrifice From Other Countries FOR Just A Chance

FOR 'The American Dream'; Are They Going to China; Nope, Not So Much
as Let's Face it, China is Still Not Known For A 'China Dream;' Fortunately,

The Immigrants

Aren't 'Spoiled Addicts;'

i've Seen Their Work Ethic;

i've Seen What They WiLL Do;

As Long As This Country Provides
An 'American Dream' There is a Chance
A 'Better Dream' Will Be Fulfilled; i Can't Imagine

A Better Place to Live; Yet i Didn't Need to Watch
The Video to Understand Our Leadership and our People
Are Failing in Many Avenues For What Takes a Representative

Democracy to Survive;

Yep, i Agree with Ray,
Fiscally Conservative,
And Socially Liberal as Well..

One Difference is, i Don't Need (Want)
to Sell A Book Or Make More Money Now;

IF, People Could Learn to Be More Naked,
Enough, Whole, And Complete the World Would

Naturally Be A Kinder/GREATER Place to Live As Folks Who Live
Their Life Being "Party Poopers," Would Have no one to CR8P on;

Except Their
Self, Which is Evident
From That Condition At Hand.

Anyway, While i Don't Waste my Time
Listening to 'Garbage' on YouTube; You
Always Present Avenues to Learn Something New;

This is How We Grow; This is How We Evolve; This is How

We Don't
Stagnate

And Rot In
Our Same Old Cr8p...

Thanks For What You Share...

Just A Suggestion, in the Future if You Will
Provide The Links as Well as the Videos as
Anything Above iOS 15.0 On an Apple Product

Will Not Work With Embedded Videos Here.

i'll Have More of an Opportunity to Listen to what
You Share With my iPhone on the Road That Way...

As Long As My Wife Doesn't Insist on Music, Hehe..

---

Good to know. I spend so much time in front of laptops and even desktops (programming, making music and other media) that I don't often have a full grasp on what limitations people are getting hit with whose laptops are their smart phones.

The link to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

Tom Bilyeu's 4/26/2022 interview with Ray on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6bv8_pj-E

Fnord is right though. This isn't Dalio speaking, this is a scripted and animated video, presenting a narrative as fact. In other words: propaganda.

Around minute 35 Dalio tells us that empires in decline raise taxes on the rich, which leads to capital flight, which leads to lower tax revenue, which accelerates the decline of the Empire.
Well, f**k Dalio, amazon Europe is getting taxed in Luxembourg but bizarrely for the revenue they made only in Luxembourg They twist their books so all costs happen in Luxembourg and end up making a billion dollars loss per year in there, paying no corporate tax whatsoever, while the EU wide, the untaxed revenue amazon walks away with is 50 billion. The Empire is in decline precisely because rich people are not paying taxes.
(Which, btw., Is Mark Blyth's conclusion, who does not spend money on fancy, easily accessible propaganda animations)

That's the obvious part. Beneath that is a less obvious assertion: that empires have a natural lifecycle like humans.
Well... No. Empires have a history, but the lifecycle annalogy implies that death is inevitable, and there's nothing anyone can do, it's natural, but no meed to accelerate it either.
Well, no, this analogy is intuitive but wrong. Empires are not people. They don't live. They are narrative inventions. There's zero need to care about empires, and 100 percent need to care about people. Healthcare might destroy the empire, but i don't hear Austrians complain about having healthcare, public housing, but no empire any longer.

It's time to eat the rich before they can flee to their fortresses. Take their money before they build penis shaped rockets or waste it on a text messaging app, and fix stuff here, now.

If his posts looked anything like yours I wouldn't have needed to slug it out with him so it's a moot point.


It's Dalio's book.


There are probably certain kinds of limitation as to how far or exotic of places rich people are willing to move to evade problems, however we do see a lot of flight in the US from larger California cities to Texas, New York City to Florida, crime is rising in these places and - pulling in Blyth again - we've seen acceleration of the gap between wages and productivity, referring back to the video we do see acceleration of currency debasement (the whole 'money printer go brrrr') and we have seen plenty of increase in political polarization - by and large due to the pain level that most people are feeling, realizing they don't have many good choices, and it ends up funneling into more extreme partisan and populist politics. All of that checks out. If I understand this right the message is accurate but the messenger is evil so we should be picking sides over that.


That's the beauty of being able to buy legislators. It's a problem.


Empires in some sense are actually worse and less free than people because they're collections of network effects. Those network effects set the incentive structures that people follow and a lot of these cycles are really cycles in local network dynamics. The only thing that can occasionally change that for the better, less often than not (maybe okay if it's a new way to make food or energy, terrible if it's a new information or social technology - like books and social media), is if some new technological disruption means that a particular locality which might have been in decline all of a sudden finds itself in possession of some hot new commodity or resource which a few years ago was largely considered either significantly less valuable or next to worthless.


What do we do with the natural flow of Pareto distribution eating equality on a regular basis? Wealth is a lot like thousands or millions of shakes of a Markov chain or matrix and it's a situation where productivity and resources keeps going to those who have them and away from those who don't. That's a wicked problem, sending proletariat against the 'kulaks' yields something as bad or worse - ie. a semi-stable militarized witch hunt that can last for decades and easily end with millions, even tens of millions, within that country dead. A third way of dealing with this is really needed - badly (that's the side I'm on).

I still see nothing in the video (really a condensation of his book) that I disagree with and the only thing I really see here is that you're shifting the emphasis of capital flight from being a description of something that happens (it's part of what made the US rich in the early 50's when capital fled from Europe) to something like a) Ray Dalio is rich b) Ray is talking about capital flight therefore c) Ray is promoting fear of capital flight as the real covert aim of the discussion.

For the empires part - can you say a bit more about what you're seeing with their rise and fall that conflicts with what I said above? To recap I said that it's something like an interaction between network dynamics and local patterns of resource and scarcity. Unless we get to a world of hyperabundance a lot of the behavior seems to be relatively deterministic and is driven by and large by a lot of players whose behaviors are driven by deterministic consequences of various kinds of action or inaction. Great leaders may occasionally happen but they're a roll of the dice, their capacities rely a lot on the political climate, most of the big changes happen when everything's up in the air (not in a good way), I don't see a whole lot that seems like it can aid this aside from - and I say this as being somewhat hopeful but largely skeptical - the idea that increased accounting of externalities, through things like block chain and other ideas which might spark from that later, may have a lot of the benefits we're looking for, but we don't know what the negative side effects will be yet and whether they'll be mild or worse than current problems.

The messenger is deliberately switching cause (tax evasion) and effect (empire in decline, populism, therefore taxes get raised on the rich).
Taxes on the rich are lower than during the gilded age, for christ's sake. At which point are billionaire's going to argue that we need to give them money or they will leave to countries where they are given more money?

What's the reason for the US not tearing itself apart on the 30s, why it neither became socialist or fascist, even though unions and socialism was very widespread, and Nazis and Anti-Semitism and racism was rampant?
My bet would be on the New Deal. Much more than any narrative about individualism vs. Collectivism.
People just weren't miserable enough, while in Tsarist Russia, the Weimar Republic in times of hyperinflation, or in France in 1789, they were.


Proper taxation was doing that, gor a while, until neoliberal globalization. Reducing the speed over which any one individual can accumulate wealth.
It's the middle way between letting the rich take it all, and taking all from them.
Dalio's video is speaking of the far right and the far left as equal, populist movements. But I don't see any relevant far left parties in any major country. Everywhere I look it's either off the charts right wing, or economically right wing, liberal parties.
France just reelected Macron, 57 to 42. But even in the one-on-one, 30% of the voters couldn't be bothered. It doesn't matter economically whether it's LePen or Macron, Biden or Trump, Merkel or Scholz (although there's room for further neoliberalisation in most of Europe).

And let's not forget: what Americans consider dangerous far-left, even socialist populism, is still "moderate-conservative" in Europe.



Europe was a wreck after the war, and taxes in the US were high enough. I don't think that was capital flight for reasons of tax evasion, I think life was just better in the US at that point, and they could afford it.
Plus, most rich people fled before and during the war.
Britain didn't collapse, as the video suggests, because they had to pay for their financial extravagance, but because they could no longer control their colonies, yet all manufacturing had been outsourced - there just wasn't a lot of industry left in Britain.

But yes, I do question the motivations behind Dalio's storytelling, after I listened to the story and found some things that don't line up with other things I've learned about the world. The tone and presentation of Dalio's story also makes me consider his intention - mainly because I work in animation and I have worked on educational-appearing videos like this and it has been part of my job to consider the style as a message in itself.
An authoritative voice and corporate-neutral graphics are usually picked to appear factual and modern. Sciency, businessy. Something not to be argued with. I have convinced clients to not pick this style on graphics where they wanted to illustrate data that is uncertain or part of an ongoing discussion, where the public was asked to join the discusion.
This style communicates: this is already done snd over, deal with the facts we are presenting you.



What you are describing - networks that create incentives, loops, etc.- is different from the analogy to a human life cycle.
The first step to fix things needs to be transparency and education.
There's a German party which had two (now they're down to one) members of parliament in the EU parliament.
The two are satirists by trade, and they did a fantastic job showing newsteams around their offices, explaining their work day, and also why exactly nothing they do can have any impact, for structural reasons.
One got very depressed, the other is trying to get into Germany's national parliament now, because, as he says: I'm pretty sure Berlin will still exist in 30 years time. I'm not so sure about the EU.

Now, corrupt governments are of course part of the networks, there's incentives for individual politicians, all that is encompassed in the network version, including the billionaires doing the corrupting, because it is in their interest.

Not so with Dalio's natural lifecycle analogy.
In a network, you can think about which parameters to adjust. If it's natural law, there's nothing that can be done.
The pareto principle however isn't exactly special relativity.

Thanks..

A couple things on that:

1) It's never specifically stated that the flight of the rich is the country's fault, just implied because Dalio himself is rich.

2) For tax rates being low, I don't think that gets us to the core issue - ie. Darwinian game theory. How low is low enough? Enough to outcompete other countries by a margin that keeps them. That very well could be negative tax back to the rich and robbery of the middle class. Law of the jungle either way as self-interested actors will do what self-interested actors do. That's not saying it's a good thing or agreeing with the mentality behind it, it's saying something as mundane as 2 * 3 = 6.


A lot of this merges with another point I'll hit at the bottom.


Defund the police would be moderate-conservative in Europe? I think the only place this really applies is when you have a steady NewsMax viewer calling centrist democrats 'radical left'. The person saying this is typically older than 70, a normie-conformy, or a tribal bootlicker. They're not exactly the best, brightest, or most well educated.

What I see with my own country is that we have the decadence and solipsism that comes with the believe that we live on 'magic soil' given to us by Jesus and that bad things just won't happen here because we're the chosen people (admittedly this flavor was a lot stronger in the late 90's and early 2000's than it is now). Hardly anything says decadence more so than that kind of hubris.


Would a collapsing country be an attractive place to stay if the taxes remained low? I don't think these decisions are made in isolation. For example if your country is really the best place to be, in theory, you could raise taxes and very few people would leave on account of that.

Maybe one thing I'll shake out of this that we might agree on - the tax issue is just one of many that would decide whether a countries entrepreneurs want to stay there or expatriate.



Where I'll admit a handicap - I'm not NT enough to get sucked in, feel like I've been raptured by the truth, and go out to chase the world down, my tribe down, etc. to believe a thing as gospel truth because it impressed me as authoritative on some level and perhaps worse - I can't empathize with it or what would trigger me to throw logic and reason out the window. It does seem like you've spent more time with that, I'd love people to just stop being that way for f' sake but I get that most people, at least when it comes to reason and logic, are broken machines and Darwinian thrift could care less about truth vs. dominion which is all-important.





I'm not sure how much attention you pay to the gerontocracy factor. The people with political power aren't the young, they aren't the people out on the battlefield of life, economy, and education seeing the problems in motion, it's the old who've accumulated wealth and whose primary concern is the safety of themselves in retirement and their money, and if they're a bit more decent (than many boomers out there) the safety of their children and grandchildren. A nation's policies will always favor them because it needs to listen to the people who have money. They're set in their ways of thinking to such a degree that they're still quite often living several decades behind the present moment. That amplifies our mistakes and put us in a place where things go in fatalistic directions by and large because not only does Darwinian evolution not care all that much what's true, wealth accumulation is a technical skill and it's no guarantee that people don't highly prefer self-delusion, sticking their heads in the sand on major threats, etc..

In a way I think we're lucky to have Elon Musk running around with over $200 billion, I'm hoping Sam Bankman-Fried ends up in this category as well (he's one of the leaders in the effective altruism movement) because having relatively young multi-billionaires who care about current / pressing issues and are working on innovative solutions rather than just their accounts or simply being the status quo industrialist with the fattest stacks of cash is one way to wrest a nation's planning and priorities away from both metaphorical and literal pearl-clutching.

Am I completely misunderstanding the video from minute 33 onward, here? (I don't want to rule that out entirely, but I rewatched it and I still understand that an empire in crisis will tax the rich more, leading to the rich fleeing, reducing tax revenue etc.)

A minute later he talks about "the Roosevelt revolution", comparing it to the French, Russisn and Chinese revolutions, framing the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions as possible outcomes of something that begins like the New Deal.
But instead of detailing how "the Roosevelt Revolution" was successful, the video then details how a Russian Revolution on the US would make the Empire a target of international conflict. I mean, fair enough, but let's maybe get back to that "Roosevelt Revolution". The other three were all about ending hereditary monarchies, after all.