Paul Kasaija

1/20/2021

11:29 PM

 

Yesterday could not have prepared me for the rabbit hole of curiosity that I fell into while reading articles online today. Though, usually, it is a good thing when your daily surge of information diverges into enough topics to fill up a 12 chapter book. But there has to be at least one topic that makes the most sense and is most important to you as an individual; for me, there was one most important topic: I found out a side of a billionaire that I had thought I had already figured out.

 

Most of the time and like most people, I unconsciously reject any truth to the belief in socially productive “good” billionaires until proven otherwise by new evidence. Without any real evidence, one can’t assume that a stranger who built great wealth off of industry secrets, shutting down competition, and making all manners of hard decisions for profit has good intentions even if charitable claims are made. In any case, Bayesian logic applies: the only way to show a stranger’s good intentions is if additional evidence is added to the mix. This evidence was presented in the form of a video by billionaire and writer Ray Dalio, who made his 18 billion dollars from his Bridgewater Associates investment management firm. What’s most interesting and the most compelling evidence is his perspective on running an “idea meritocracy, rational thinking, and rational relationship” type of business was very insightful and (though hard to praise a billionaire) inspiring. In hope of producing results for the expansion of idea-driven meritocracies, he presented software tools that shined a light on his ideas of making it into a reality in real corporations. No matter how much money you have, one can choose to spend their “second arc of life”, as Dalio calls it, teaching others and leaving the tools of success in their hands.

 

As a disclaimer, I’m not saying by juxtaposition that Peter Thiel, another billionaire writer, isn’t doing it right like Dalio; he is also teaching others in a way that only he can with his unique experiences on startups-- the only thing is that I believe the positive impact that Dalio’s forward-thinking social formula can have on businesses outweighs the benefits of Thiel’s cut and dry beliefs on building an innovative and successful monopoly no matter what. The “ordinary man” Dalio is the type of billionaire that I would like to see more emulate-- the one who actually has a foot in almost every type of philanthropy and wants to actively see better “human” businesses rather than more of the same big bulky brutish monopolies nowadays that threaten the right of privacy and individual’s free choice and access to content. “Human businesses” will represent the human interests of employees, because the team is on the same page and knows each other well, while also creating an environment that fosters progress and ideas that prevent harmful business practices. If they adopt Dalio’s technology, the wake of Dalio’s idea has the possibility to change corporations on a systemic level, and I’m all for it.

 

Of all of the things I read about, of behavioral economics and of the debt crises of the nations, and of the early theories of Bayes and Popper, of in-depth book recommendations by Ash’s Almanack, political articles on what a new presidency looks like, and various Investopedia pages on economic processes-- of all of it the only thing that truly piqued my optimistic side is the hour-long video that Dalio made to introduce these ideas. In the next book and the book that I read after that, the potential of “human” businesses will remain an idea that I hope to see echoed more pervasively than the bland business rhetoric, contrarian analysis of industry ideas, and psychological books that simply re-brand an industry that does not want change.