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by Semiapies 1900 days ago
It's similar to the "miracle" of Soviet industrialization. The USSR hired scads of advisors from Western companies to direct their efforts, then chest-thumped about socialism.

Or, for that matter, the Nazi economic "miracle". In their case, they started from the wreckage of WW1 and the Weimar Republic, but they used knowledge and corporate organization that predated both to rebuild, while letting their ideology and leadership take credit.

1 comments

There was no Nazi economic miracle - it was built on debt and was unsustainable, which is why it's discounted. Not because somehow it used existing expertise, of course it did, that's entirely normal.

As far as that, I don't see how hiring foreign advisors somehow make your own economic achievements worthless - anyone can do that, and it's stupid to expect everyone to reinvent the wheel.

There was no Nazi economic miracle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

As far as that, I don't see how hiring foreign advisors somehow make your own economic achievements worthless

Because there were no "own economic achievements" in this case. The USSR claimed to pioneer a new and superior economic system to the capitalist West, but their greatest period of growth and improvement was accomplished through Western direction.

It wasn't through Western direction - they did not implement free capital market, which was the "Western direction".

They imported technical experts from the West to help them design and build things until they figured out how to do it themselves. That is orthogonal to the economic system.