Dwarkesh Patel

But to your point, well, if you want to be able to show that these countries are going to experience growth under capitalism, then you want them to not be under the subjugation of communists.

But then you have to support sometimes objectionable regimes.

I thought when you pointed out that it would cost 60 billion Deutsche Marks for...

West Germany to pay Gorbachev to basically let him or not let him but let East Germany join West Germany.

That's a lot of money.

But if you think about decades and decades of future growth, it just like it's a huge bargain, right?

So it's a mistake to think about how expensive things seem at the moment.

It's just like another huge country that you've turned.

To try to add a different thesis on you.

Yeah.

Through this period, the Soviet Union is also trying to buy off other countries, especially when it thinks this economy can grow, and especially when oil... So after the 1973 oil crisis, oil prices...

just skyrocket and this is why some soviet citizens remember the brezhnev era favorably just that oil made it possible for um the soviets to not only import stuff but also to through the brezhnev for you it actually there's a net export of resources to eastern european satellites rather than the other way around that's probably their data

But the larger question being that it's not like the Soviet Union didn't think of doing things like the Marshall Plan.

Obviously, nothing to that extent.

But this idea that you can win people's favors by providing them military aid, providing them foreign aid.

It's just that they didn't have the resources to do it to the extent that the U.S.

could.

Mm-hmm.

Economics is such a big part of the story of why the Soviet Union fell apart that if you don't look at the numbers, you really can't understand this lecture.

There's this one slide that Sarah has that shows the yearly budget deficits and declines in GDP that you saw in the late 80s in the Soviet Union.