Principles for Dummies
It’s still not entirely clear to me what ‘Principles’ is. Part of the reason is that its author is not entirely sure what principles are.
By Matthew Walther
Review essay: Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio, Simon & Schuster, 2017, 592 pages
On the first page of his best-selling memoir, Ray Dalio unburdens himself of the opinion that he is “a dumb shit.” Nothing in the ensuing six hundred or so pages convinced me that I should dissent from this verdict.
I can say honestly, in keeping with the book’s own serial inducements to “radical transparency,” that my endorsement of Dalio’s conclusion about his own intelligence was arrived at without prejudice. Cognitive bias had no role, only the preponderance of textual and pictorial evidence. Before I was asked to review Principles, I had never heard of its author or of Bridgewater, the investment firm that Dalio founded in his apartment four decades ago. As far as I knew, the present volume would turn out to be a monograph on virtue ethics or a history of post-Trotsky dissent within the Eastern bloc for general readers.
It’s still not entirely clear to me what Principles is. Part of the reason for this, no doubt, is that its author is not entirely sure what principles…
