rule of law.
Four years ago, I was in Ghana for a small consulting project.
I was there with a group of five or six others. During our couple-week stay there, we got to talk business, soak in the culture, eat some crazy food, and generally experience life in a brand new way.
It was an incredible adventure, and in retrospect, I think a very formative experience in my journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
Money is breaking in Ghana.
The country is technically no longer "third-world" -- its GDP is on the rise, yet its currency is headed the opposite direction.
When I was in Ghana -- much less aware of the nature of money -- I learned that my purchasing power shot up 5x simply because I was holding onto dollars. I was feeling like a king. But at the same time, this immediately highlighted the struggle of the average Ghanian's financial life to me; What did I do to deserve 5x as much wealth -- just because I'm from another country?
And just four years later, my purchasing power is now 12x greater relative to the Cedi.
When a nation's money breaks, so does its law enforcement.
And as Jeff Booth recently explained with George Gammon on WBD, money is superordinate to law.
A 3-4 hour trip on the highways of the USA translates to about a ~13 hour journey in Ghana. I know that because we had to make that journey ourselves -- traveling from the center of the country down to Cape Coast.
Anyways, In two separate occasions during that roadtrip, our mini-van was pulled over for "traffic violations." But the officers had zero interest in enforcing rule of law -- they wanted to get bribed.
And bribed them we did. We bribed, exchanged a few jokes with the officer, and were let off the hook just fine, each time.
It just goes to show that without proper incentives, a country has no foundation. No rules to work with, and thus no competition. How are you expected to play chess if the rules change arbitrarily all the time?
Infrastructure doesn't get built, goods and services can't move freely, stagnation overwhelms.
Lack of good money has countless seemingly "unrelated" downstream effects, and as stronger currencies like the USD continue to move closer to that of the Cedi, this'll only become more clear to the world, I'm betting.
So that being said...what else do nations lack when good money is nowhere to be found?