Dwarkesh Patel

If you can't use actual prices and property to figure out who gets what allocation of scarce resources, it's just backroom dealing, which makes the problem worse.

Okay, so you were mentioning the problem that Eastern European countries especially had, which is that they're going more and more into debt because they're not able to produce globally competitive exports.

Um, and in order to, so they have this like last dish effort that we're going to, uh, we're going to solve our problems with some technological miracle.

We need to have go even be, get even more over leverage.

We'll get some Western machinery or technology, and then we'll be able to finally produce something that the world wants.

Um,

I'm curious up to what point this was a plausible hope, you know, through the 80s and even till the end of the 80s, they still believe that, you know, Czechoslovakia or East Germany or something could catch up with West Europe.

At this point, I bet you were wondering why you didn't write a biography of Napoleon and so you could just visit Paris instead.

By the way, the point about the grocery stores having 74 items, it's interesting in two ways.

One,

central control works much better if you have a much smaller amount of items to optimize over.

So if things are standardized, you know, it can work much better.

And second, to your point about GDP being hard to compare between the Soviets and the United States, how do you compare a rotten tomato or a rotten potato to the Idaho ones that you can get?

Exactly, right?

Oh, so you said you were there in 88 and 89.

So this is before the Berlin Wall has fallen.

Yeah.

Okay, in 88, was the mood—obviously things are going terribly, but did people realize that they're only two years away or three years away from the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union?

That does you zero good.

So around this time is when people are finally learning about what actually happened during the Stalinist period.