[avmich]

The problem with cyclical view appears as soon as one tries to review the underlying causes why this movement happens. You can have rises, prosperity, overshoots, bad habits, slowdowns and depressions coming one after another in a mostly closed system. Or you may consider a system which can be affected by externalities, those which can be so powerful as to cause opium depression or technology copying rise. It's a little like pendulum with external forces, which dictate what's the actual behavior of the pendulum is - disregarding its own internal properties.

[chubot]

It's true, but really it's both ... there is "progress" and there are also cycles. Dalio explicitly superimposes them on each other

I don't think I believed this until 2017 or 2020 or so, but it seems clear that the USA is on a natural downcycle and probably will be for several decades

I think the causes are pretty well laid out in the book - basically having the global reserve currency is kind of an unfair advantage, and it leads the population to become decadent and unproductive, it leads to institutional decay, etc.

---

That brought to mind the tweet/slogan "what if your whole personality depends on low interest rates?", and now I see that something similar was discussed on Hacker News too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946342

Basically people live in a particular part of a cycle, which lasts longer than their lifetimes

(but there are also non-cyclical changes / progress, and yeah there are big flaws with trying to go back 1000 years)