Þe Destinies of þe Former Soviet Empire
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-19 We
CONDITION: First Day of School
Over zoom, to a class of students:
Barry [Eichengreen] already cited my line about how when the course goes well you [students] talk, and when the course goes badly we [professors] talk. He threatened you with a final exam if you do not do the reading beforehand, and participate actively, with the idea of making this class into a true discussion dialogue seminar, rather than a lecture. I now threaten you with making you write weekly memos on the current week’s reading, due before the class begins, as a way to “encourage” reading and preparation for thoughtful discussion.
But we're going to start by treating everyone, all of us, as adults—assuming that it's all going to work, and it's all going to work well.
Unfortunately, that just does not work on the first day.
It is psychologically and sociologically next to impossible to get people to do serious amounts of reading before the first day of class. Thus, almost invariably, first-day discussions about readings go over like lead balloons. I would be eager to be proved wrong today—to have this turn into a discussion. Right now, however, I'm envisioning that this first class is simply going to turn into a lecture. But you all are going to do the reading for the first week over the course of the next week, right? And if there is interest, we will take time next week to include short discussions of the papers on the first week of the reading list.
Note that it is not just that this course goes well in the sense that it is more fun if you discuss, and badly if we lecture.
It is also the case that if we lecture, maybe 10% of what we say becomes durably engraved on your neuronal patterns, and becomes part of your intellectual panoply on which you can draw in the future. And if it becomes a genuine, interactive, broad-based discussion, it becomes a truly marvelous and wonderful thing. People remember 90% of it. Afterwards, people speak of it as an intellect-changing experience.
But what we are, we are. And if we cannot move heaven and earth, we still do what we can, here in this fallen sublunary sphere, here at the start of the third year of the third millennium’s first global plague…
First: The Destinies of the Former Soviet Empire
Back in The Day, at the end of the 1980s, when we were pushing for a Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe—arguing that the United States should be willing to spend 1/10 of what we had spent on the Cold War in providing aid for infrastructure and institutional development, so that Eastern Europe could have a very good post-communism—there were widely variable opinions about the likelihood of success (with or without a Marshall Plan equivalent). I remember Rudi Dornbush occasionally letting his hair down, sighing, and stating that the division-of-labor would have to be broken down and then built up again, person-by-person, workshop-by-workshop, and that it would be very long and painful. But even he thought that it would be ultimately successful, and in the end Eastern Europe would re-join what the first Marshall Plan had enabled the Western European norm to become.
I think Noah Smith's assessment, 30 years on, of what has happened is by-and-large correct:
Noah Smith: How Are the Post-Soviet Economies Doing?: ‘Four buckets….
1. Western-oriented industrializing success stories: These include most of the former Warsaw Pact countries and the three Baltics… got their industrialization back on track, joined the EU, largely maintained political stability and peace, and are now catching up….
2. Central Asian resource economies… have muddled along much as resource-based economies tend to do.
3. Russia and Belarus: Russia is its own strange hybrid of still-dysfunctional but often high-tech manufacturing economy and Central Asian resource economy, while Belarus is basically a satellite… whose fortunes rise and fall with Russia’s.
4. Frozen-conflict countries: Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova… breakaway regions… military conflicts… prevented… from joining the EU (which is often Putin’s reason for supporting the breakaway regions and prosecuting the wars), which in turn has prevented them from getting on the fast track to industrialization…. It also tends to cause political instability….
Milanovic’s verdict was prematurely pessimistic—freed from the shackles of communism, countries that aren’t dependent on natural resources have generally tended to converge…. But… unresolved post-Soviet territorial conflicts and the malign influence of the fearsome Vladimir Putin have prevented… achieving… potential…
LINK:
It turned out that if you could drive your truck in a day to Vienna (of float your boat to Stockholm or Helsinki) or equivalent, you have, all in all, done OK. (Though I confess I did not expect the neo-fascist turn.) I should have foreseen the dilemmas of resource-rich Central Asian economies, but I did not. Those two baskets are things that I think I understand.
But I confess I do not understand the trajectory of Weimar Russia (plus Belarus). The educational system is still very good, in the main. All of the outward signs of a market economy in which the pursuit of productive efficiency is at least as good a road to riches as is the cultivation of politically-enforced monopoly are there. And yet only some of the investments are made. And a great deal of what should be productive entrepreneurship does not happen.
And I am not at all sure about Noah’s fourth bucket: “frozen conflict”. It seems to me that political instability, international conflict, taunting the bear, and failures of development are all linked in a web in which I find it difficult to untangle cause-and-effect.
Things were much easier back when people could still ignorantly invoke the bourgeois culture as it developed in the 300-mile circle around the port of Dover, Kent, England, as the secret sauce…
One Video:
Asianometry: How ASML Won Lithography (& Why Japan Lost): ‘In the mid 1990s, two companies dominated the lithography space. Both of them were Japanese… <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB8qIO6Ti_M>
Two Pictures: IBM 701 & Intel 486
Very Briefly Noted:
Scott Lemieux: You Love to See It: ‘As with many urban progressives, AOC’s history on housing policy has been…not good. So I was pleased to see that’s she’s not only adopted the actual progressive position but is doing something about it… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/01/you-love-to-see-it>
John Stoehr: Martin Luther King Jr Would Have Understood that the Line Connecting Vladimir Putin & Donald Trump Runs Through Dixie: ‘The American south as mini-Russia… <https://www.editorialboard.com/martin-luther-king-jr-would-have-understood-that-the-line-connecting-vladimir-putin-and-donald-trump-runs-through-dixie/
P.Z. Myers: Thanks I Hate It: ‘There was a time when I could walk into a classroom, plug my laptop into a cable to the video projector, and run my Keynote/Powerpoint presentation with a minimum of fuss. No more… <https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/01/16/thanks-i-hate-it/>
Wikipedia: 2022 Hunga Tonga Eruption & Tsunami<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga_eruption_and_tsunami>
Linda Chavez: The Racist Underbelly of MAGA Restrictionists: ‘The Jan. 6 attack partly resulted because the neo-right has been trotting out the Great Replacement Theory to stoke white anxieties… <
Xi Jinping: ’If major economies slam on the brakes or take a U-turn in their monetary policies, there would be serious negative spillovers… <
Paragraphs:
Noah Smith: What Makes an “Optimistic” Vision of the Future?: ‘fIt should feature the following elements: 1. Material abundance. Egalitarianism—broadly shared prosperity, relatively moderate status differences, and broad political participation. 3. Human agency—the ability of human effort to alter the conditions of the world…
LINK:
Nitish Pahwa: The Radical Chiropractor Facebook Banned & then Studied: ‘And what it reveals about the lie machine the company has built…. What should Facebook do about harmful conspiracy theories? The researchers’ recommendations for stemming this problem focus on closing the “gaps HCT actors exploit,” such as the ability to create sock puppet accounts and backups in case of deletion and the ability to mass-message random users and invite them to HCT-themed groups. The authors pushed to “dedicate additional policy resources on conspiracies harmful enough to warrant our strongest enforcements.” At the same time, they allowed that the harms HCTs can inflict—alongside “real world acts of physical violence”—include “excessive expenditure of FB resources” and “undue reputational risk.” At this point, it’s hard to consider such things harms against Facebook, which allows figures like the chiropractor to thrive in the first place. “Self-harms” might be more apt…
Adam Gurri: A Liberal at Home: ‘I accept that I am an American, indeed I feel quite lucky to be one. But as an American, I don’t feel it’s right for me to tell someone else what it means for them to be an American. And as a liberal, I don’t feel it’s right to expect that someone else is proud of being an American, or for them to believe that there is such a thing as being an American save for a legal status, or indeed to believe in liberalism or anything else. Freedom of conscience, freedom of association, all of it, is rather foundational to what liberalism is, what it stands for. Odds are I will not settle this matter in a single essay. I certainly have not settled it by writing this…
LINK: <https://endofsafety.substack.com/p/a-liberal-at-homeU>
Nathan Gardels: China’s Inclusive Authoritarianism: ‘Digital connectivity makes responsive government without democracy possible…. We in the West are not wrong to suspect that an unprecedented 21st-century techno-totalitarianism is taking shape in China. But to dismiss the inclusive and adaptive nature of connectivity with Chinese characteristics risks misreading the sustainability of the system. To the extent the Party-state remains responsive to the public mood and concerns gathered from ubiquitous monitoring, a kind of systemic accountability perpetually refreshes its own legitimacy. As in all else, everything depends on the balance…
LINK: <https://www.noemamag.com/chinas-inclusive-authoritarianism/>
David Armitage: In Defense of Presentism: ‘five distinct… presentism[s]… the teleological (and ideological) presentism classically dubbed the “Whig interpretation of history”… the idealist presentism assumed by historians from Leopold von Ranke via Croce and Collingwood to E. H. Carr… present-centeredness… perspectival presentism that has shrunk the attention of students and scholars alike to the near-present; and lastly, the omnipresent presentism proposed by François Hartog as part of our inescapable historical condition.… Can we plausibly deny that we choose our subjects according to our own present concerns and then bring our immediate analytical frameworks to bear upon them?… Human flourishing… is at once present-centered, future-oriented, and past dependent…. If historians too freely use presentism as a slur or as a taboo, then we may be guilty of depriving our readers, and indeed ourselves, of one valuable resource for promoting human flourishing: history. (We might also, as a result, put ourselves out of business)…. Yet once we accept that “every history was, is, and will be a history of the present,” we can at least start to make the case for our contribution to the larger enterprise of human betterment
LINK: <https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/armitage/files/in_defence_of_presentism.pdf>