When America Was a Developing Country

The famous hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, of Bridgewater Associates, has written about this. He identifies four stages in the “lifecycle of a typical empire.” Dalio writes: “Economic conditions affect human nature and human nature affects economic conditions. This typically happens dynamically in a sequence that leads countries to rise and fall for ... See more

To simplify it only a little: in the first stage, a country is poor, and thinks it is poor. This is the baseline for basically every pre-industrial society and for some third-world countries today.

In the second stage, it is rapidly becoming rich but still believes it is poor. The prospect of acquiring wealth and of being a nation on the upswing lea... See more