This is a Guest Post by AK of Fallible
AK has been an analyst at long/short equity investment firms, global macro funds, and corporate economics departments. He co-founded Macro Ops and is the host of Fallible.
This video is the beginning of our China series where we’ll explain what’s going on in China and why it doesn’t look good for Chinese stocks like JD.com & Alibaba.
On November 18, 1956, during a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev declared to his audience of Western diplomats that “We [the Soviet Union] will bury you.” This was not a military threat but rather an economic boast. And it was a remark taken very seriously by the West.
The Soviet economy delivered exceptionally high growth rates in the decades following WWII, far outpacing developed Western nations. This growth mesmerized Western academics, policymakers, and intellectuals with its astonishing pace. The Soviet Union was hailed as an “economic miracle” and many became convinced that the Soviet’s Command and Control economy was far superior to the West’s capitalist system… and that it was only a matter of time before the Soviets became the largest economic power in the world.
This was not a fringe belief. In fact, it was the mainstream narrative and accepted as a matter of certainty. Acemoglu and Robinson relate in their book Why Nations Fail, that:
The most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel-prize winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that the Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012.