The Investor's Shelf — one person
Ray Dalio
Founder and former co-CIO, Bridgewater Associates 1975-2022
Principles and the debt-cycle template are primary sources that a large secondary literature now builds on.
5 books of their own · 2 biographies about them · 23 letters · 12 articles · 64 books they recommend
Books they wrote 5
· 2018 · Free PDF at economicprinciples.org; first issued as A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises.
· 2021 · Open Library lists the short title "Changing World Order".
Biographies about them 2
One investigative biography; Dalio's own Principles is the counter-narrative and belongs in the author files.
Sebastian Mallaby · 2010 · Bridgewater's macro method placed in hedge-fund history.
Rob Copeland · 2023 · Adversarial and heavily contested by Dalio.
Letters 23
Bridgewater's Daily Observations go to clients and counterparties only and have never been published; bridgewater.com/research-and-insights carries firm-authored pieces rather than Dalio's client letters. What is public is his own research series at economicprinciples.org. The free full text of Big Debt Crises is not posted there, but the successor study How Countries Go Broke is, in four parts plus the full book PDF. His running essay series is now Principled Perspectives on Substack (raydalio.substack.com), which superseded the LinkedIn essays he published from 2015 to 2022 (linkedin.com/in/raydalio/recent-activity/articles/); those are recorded under articles.
- How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle (complete study)2025 · Economic Principles research paper
- How Countries Go Broke, Part 12025 · Economic Principles research paper
- How Countries Go Broke, Part 22025 · Economic Principles research paper
- How Countries Go Broke, Part 32025 · Economic Principles research paper
- How Countries Go Broke, Part 42025 · Economic Principles research paper
- How Countries Go Broke — references2025 · Economic Principles research paper
- Investing in Light of the Big Cycle2025 · Economic Principles research paper
- The Changing World Order — country power index appendix (2022 update)2022 · Economic Principles research paper
- The Big Cycle of External Order and Disorder2021 · Economic Principles research paper
- The Changing World Order — country power index appendix2021 · Economic Principles research paper
- The Changing World Order — the power index2021 · Economic Principles research paper
- The Changing World Order — citations and bibliography2021 · Economic Principles research paper
- Large Drivers of Life Expectancy Through Time2021 · Economic Principles research paper
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order — chart pack2021
- A Deeper Look at Capital Wars2020 · Economic Principles research paper
- Why and How Capitalism Needs To Be Reformed2019 · Economic Principles research paper
- Paradigm Shifts2019 · Economic Principles research paper
- MP3 and Modern Monetary Theory2019 · Economic Principles research paper
- Why Capitalism Is Failing2019 · Economic Principles research paper
- A Primer on Universal Basic Income2017 · Economic Principles research paper
- Populism: The Phenomenon2017 · Economic Principles research paper
- Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue: The Two Economies2017 · Economic Principles research paper
- How the Economic Machine Works: Leveragings and Deleveragings2012 · Economic Principles research paper
Articles and essays 12
- A Clear and Classic Big Test of U.S. PowerPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- How Countries Go Broke: The Dynamic Behind What is Happening NowPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- The Tribute System: The New World OrderPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- Why I Recommend Being a Global Macro Long-Short InvestorPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- The Concept and Mechanics of an All Weather PortfolioPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- Investing In Light Of The Big CyclePrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- It's Official: The World Order Has Broken DownPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- Gold is the Safest MoneyPrincipled Perspectives, 2026
- How Countries Go Broke (study landing page)Economic Principles, 2025
- The Changing World Order (study landing page)Economic Principles, 2021
- Why and How Capitalism Needs To Be Reformed (essay landing page)Economic Principles, 2019
- How the Economic Machine WorksEconomic Principles, 2013
Blog
Books they recommend 64
Dalio has described his reading practice in interviews, on LinkedIn, and in the bibliographies of his own books. The common thread is what he calls 'timeless and universal' patterns: debt cycles, reserve currency transitions, the internal decay of democracies, the mechanics of war. He gravitates toward books that span centuries rather than decades. The list is assembled from Bridgewater's published reading recommendations, Dalio's LinkedIn posts, references embedded in The Changing World Order, and interviews with institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations.
Book recommendations listed on their Good Books profile 34
Psychology and Behaviour 11
Science 6
Biography and Memoir 4
General History 2
Biography of Scientists 2
Religion and Spirituality 2
Leadership 2
Business and Management 2
Travel and Exploration 1
War and Strategy 1
Medicine and Biology 1
Superbook reading list 15
Not yet given a topic 5
Edward Gibbon · not in an entry yet
“Gibbon remains one of Dalio's touchstones for studying imperial overextension. He cites Rome repeatedly in The Changing World Order as a template for how reserve-currency empires exhaust themselves through military spending, debasement, and internal polarization.”
Thucydides · not in an entry yet
“Thucydides on the Athenian-Spartan conflict is for Dalio a case study in what he calls the 'Thucydides trap' — the structural tension between a rising power and a dominant one. He references it in discussions of the US-China relationship.”
Karl Marx · not in an entry yet
“Dalio has said he reads Marx not as a political prescription but as an economic diagnostician — specifically for Marx's analysis of capital concentration and the conditions under which wealth inequality becomes politically destabilizing. He treats it as a risk factor to monitor.”
Peter Frankopan · not in an entry yet
“Frankopan's history of trade routes and the civilizations that competed along them maps the geographic logic of Eurasian power that Dalio applies to his China analysis. The book reframes European history as a temporary anomaly in a longer story centered on Asia.”
Francis Fukuyama · not in an entry yet
“Fukuyama's second volume — on how institutions degrade through interest-group capture — is the book Dalio references when discussing the internal pressures on democratic systems. He sees institutional decay as a leading indicator in his big-cycle model.”
Financial History 3
Ray Dalio
“A companion to his macro work, this book dissects 48 historical debt crises to extract the common template. Dalio recommends it as the reference for understanding why credit booms end the way they do and what policy tools are — and are not — available.”
Michael Lewis · not in an entry yet
“Lewis's account of the 2008 crisis is one Dalio has recommended for understanding how institutional incentives and information failures compound into systemic collapse. He cites 2008 as one of the debt-cycle templates in his own research.”
Roger Lowenstein
“Lowenstein's account of LTCM's collapse is a recurring reference in Dalio's discussions of leverage and tail risk. He uses it to illustrate how models that work almost all the time can destroy everything they touch in the rare moments they don't.”
General History 2
Jared Diamond
“Diamond's argument about why civilizations diverged shapes Dalio's thinking on the deep determinants of national wealth. He values books that explain macro outcomes through structural rather than individual causes, and this is the canonical example.”
Will Durant, Ariel Durant
“Dalio cites this slim volume — the Durants' distillation of their 11-volume Story of Civilization — more than almost any other book. He values its compression of historical patterns into testable propositions about inequality, war, and the limits of reform.”
Politics and Government 2
Samuel P. Huntington
“Huntington's civilizational framework is one Dalio has cited as useful for thinking about the current world order — not as prediction but as a way to map the fault lines along which great-power competition tends to run.”
Henry Kissinger
“Kissinger's account of the Westphalian system and its modern fractures informs Dalio's geopolitical framing. He has discussed Kissinger's view that great-power stability requires shared legitimacy, not just balance of force, as directly relevant to the current moment.”
Economics 2
Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson · not in an entry yet
“Acemoglu and Robinson on inclusive versus extractive institutions provides the political-economy lens Dalio applies when assessing country risk. He sees institutional quality as one of the key variables in his 'big cycle' model of national rise and decline.”
Adam Smith
“Smith's foundational account of how free markets generate prosperity is in Dalio's background reading for understanding what conditions produce long economic expansions. He returns to it as a baseline against which mercantilist and nationalist deviations stand out.”
Business and Management 1
Ray Dalio
“Dalio's own synthesis of 40 years of pattern-recognition at Bridgewater. He describes it as the operating manual he wishes he'd had at 25 — a set of tested rules for decision-making under uncertainty, drawn from his own mistakes as much as his successes.”
The Tim Ferriss Show #264 — full transcript, Ray Dalio (he names his current stack and 'the three books I'd give every graduating senior') 9
Science 2
Psychology and Behaviour 1
Philosophy 1
Economics 1
General History 1
Medicine and Biology 1
Christian Ziegler, Egbert G. Leigh · not in an entry yet
Biography of Scientists 1
Not yet given a topic 1
World Book Day post, April 2023 3
Science 1
General History 1
Philosophy 1
The Tim Ferriss Show #264 — official transcript 1
Finance and Markets 1
Tony Robbins
“it was a great book because what Tony did was to take concepts and make them very clearly conveyed for the average reader”
Dalio on giving Duhigg's book to everyone at Bridgewater 1
Productivity and Habits 1
Charles Duhigg
“I love his [Charles Duhigg's] book. By the way I got his book and gave it to everyone in the company [Bridgewater].”
Ray Dalio Reddit AMA, r/IAmA (u/RayTDalio) 1
General History 1
Paul Kennedy
“The River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy”
Where they publish 10
- Ray Dalio's World Book Day post naming the books that inspired him
- Ray Dalio on The Tim Ferriss Show, official transcript
- Investment Masters Class book recommendations
- Good Books — Ray Dalio profile
- Superbook reading list
- Bridgewater Associates reading list (archived)
- Ray Dalio, The Changing World Order (bibliography)
- Ray Dalio LinkedIn — recommended readings post, 2021
- Council on Foreign Relations interview with Ray Dalio, 2022
- The Tim Ferriss Show #264 episode page — 'Selected Links from the Episode'