Famed investor Ray Dalio makes the case in How Countries Go Broke that the United States government is too heavily indebted and that significant changes to spending, taxes, and interest rates all need to be made, and soon, to save us from looming fiscal catastrophe.
This position is mostly uncontroversial outside of the halls of Congress, and practically the conventional wisdom in most economic policy circles today. Yet Dalio’s approach to making this argument is prefaced by almost 400 pages of intellectual empire-building and chart-making. This approach turns what could have been a tightly argued Substack essay into a quasi-memoir/manifesto.
Dalio’s business thought-leader status is currently quite secure. He has written…