Asfand Yar Batmagellich

The damage and the cost of that war is the thing that really set Iran back.

For them, Iran was a place of childhood memories.

My father went back to Iran for the first time in 2009.

And I was an impressionable high school student at that point.

And Iran became real in a way that it hadn't been up until that point.

There was a concerted effort on the part of Iranian leaders, and here we're talking about in the Islamic Republic,

to belatedly make good on the promise of the revolution to improve the living standards of ordinary people.

It was surprisingly neoliberal.

Part of the reason for this being that

many of the economists who were in senior positions in government at the time, despite having stayed in Iran after the revolution, they had nonetheless been trained in the US and Europe in the 70s when this kind of neoliberal consensus was really consolidating.

These are people who felt that Margaret Thatcher had done a lot of great things.

You could see that this was a country where most of the things in the stores were made in Iran, where unlike most countries, the cars that people were driving were made in the country.

This was a country where you had a diversified economy with a large services sector and you had

local manufacturing you had of course agricultural sector as well and then the oil sector was like you know a part of it how did that manifest as you're like on the ground walking around with your dad

Yeah, I mean, it seems crazy, but traditionally people would be buying their food and household goods in a bazaar.

But the country was moving towards basically modern supermarkets.

And in fact, in Iran at the time, there was a joint venture between the French supermarket giant Carrefour and a UAE company called Maggi Del Futame.

And they were building hypermarkets, supermarkets the size of like a Walmart.

And it was revolutionizing modern retail in Iran.

It was as though these things were taking place, but in a mood that was ultimately quite depressed.