[hga]

The successive editions of his books show a steady backing off of how wonderful their economy was as more and more facts about it couldn't be ignored.

At the very least he believed their BS statistics; it's been so long since I looked at this in detail (like the '80s), I'd have to re-do the research, but you should be able to find something on the net about it. But it was utterly disqualifying, at least if you have a policy of avoiding Gell Mann Amnesia: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

Especially given how horribly difficult the topic of macroeconomics is, if you want to have a chance of getting it right there's no room at all for fundamental mistakes like his.

[dredmorbius]

I'm starting to form a different model from the standard (gross managerial incompetence / systemic failures of the Communist model) for why the USSR failed, though I'm largely in the information-gathering stage.

On Samuelson, I'm increasingly less impressed with him over time. I studied with his book (~17th edition or so, mid/late 1980s), and have compared later editions with the first (1948 IIRC). I'm not sure how much the economics improves, if any, but the tone and style of the earlier edition is much higher than the later books, which read as very nearly childish.

That said: if you've any narratives on the fall of the USSR you'd like to suggest, I'm all ears.

[hga]

The most interesting narrative is from Jerry Pournelle, who points out that part of bankrupting of the USSR was their outfitting the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) with 3 complete armies of mechanized equipment, from trucks to tanks (this kind of army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_army).

One was used up piecemeal. One was stomped flat by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the air support provided by us (one of the first big uses of precision guided bombs), with 40,000 of it's 150,000 men counting themselves lucky to get back to the North sans equipment. And of course the third, using more armor than any WWII battle, finally succeeded when the Democrats used Nixon's Watergate infirmity to defund the South, not much a solider can do when he has less than a basic load of ammo and one grenade.

That, plus of course the general screwed up economy, lots of direct Reagan economic warfare and sabotage (e.g. those natural gas pumping turbines), supporting the Mujahideen (still cheap at the price), and the potential of our negating their entire $$$$$$ Strategic Rocket Force's inventory if we built out SDI, prompted their leadership to drastically change course. And in a way pretty much no one predicted, they failed but in a mostly peaceful way, no WWIII needed to end the Protracted Conflict.

Pournelle was a player in this in the '70s or so as a strategic "think tank" guy (worst thing the DoD asked him (and I assume his people) to evaluate was a proposal to flood the Midwest and hide subs in the resultant lake (I kid you not, and I've heard of this insane scheme independently)), then helping to get SDI launched in the Reagan administration.

Of course, the simplest narrative is that Reagan was the first US president who decided to end, rather than "contain", the USSR.

[dredmorbius]

Hrm. I'd have to see Pournelle's specifics, though I'm not particularly inclined to find him highly credible. The narrative is interesting.

A few pieces I've been putting together from numerous sources:

1. The USA and USSR were the two dominant oil suppliers of the first half of the 20th century, and are still typically trade off the 2nd & 3rd spots, after Saudi Arabia, today. Oil is much of what made the 20th century. See Daniel Yergin's The Prize (mentioned several times in this thread), and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power -- he notes this in the introduction. The book is an exporation of how energy shaped history.

2. The final collapse of the Soviet Union happened in large part through the oil glut of the late 1980s. The USSR had overextended its domestic committments, had been forced into an unsustainable arms race by the US (which had greater capabilities than the USSR through much of the postwar period, total ground fources excepted).

3. William Ophuls, a little-known author, who combines ecology and political science. In his 1977 book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, he calls much of the subsequent three decades of development, including the fall of the USSR, the industrialisation of China, and the nonindustrialisation (mostly) of India and Africa. Moreover, he gets the dynamics right, a far more crucial element IMO than timing, which is hugely uncertain.

I've found it interesting that command economies (USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, East Germany) often see a very rapid initial growth stage, then a stagnation. One might argue that there are exceptions (Saudi Arabia is essentially a family-government-enterprise-state institution based on oil), and there are market-democratic states that fare poorly. But that quick-launch-early-plateau dynamic seems fairly common.

Appreciate the ref even if I'm taking it skeptically.

[hga]

About to go to bed, but this item:

The final collapse of the Soviet Union happened in large part through the oil glut of the late 1980s.

Is at least claimed to be part of Reagan's economic warfare against the USSR.

Note also that not any one or even two of these things were likely sufficient to bankrupt it, they all piled on particularly in the '80s, and most of it was external and intentional.

[dredmorbius]

Collapse tends to be a process of knocking out of foundations until something ultimately precipitates the rapid chain-reaction of failure.

In the case of energy, there's much in the dynamic and magnitude which offers itself as a principle mode of failure. And yes, it does fit into the "Reagan's economic warfare" mode.

On which, a couple more observations.

1. There are those who claim "economic warfare" isn't, and cannot, be a thing. I have words for such people, which generally aren't welcomed on HN. I also have references to comprehensive policy books on the topic of economic warfare: Yuan-Li Wu, Economic Warfare (1952), http://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-warfare/oclc/330856&r...

2. There are those who claim that trying to defeat other nations through energy policy and markets is absurd. Alex Epstein, a particularly exemplary case of idiot, is one such. The USSR-oil case really seals the argument against his assertion. I've noted this previously elsewhere.