Has Jeffrey Sachs changed his tune...

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Tue Sep 15 14:34:01 PDT 1998



>
>One comment: why does the transition have to be from the old USSR system to
>capitalism?

I don't know what else to do. I would hope (or, more accurately, would have hoped) that the Russian people would have chosen something like Swedish social democracy rather than the American model for the same reasons that I keep wishing that Mississippi would become more like Massachusetts, or California more like Connecticut.

But the old Yugoslav model is very unattractive for lots of reasons, and unless you want a centrally-planned economy some variant of the capitalist mode of production--whether laissez-faire, social-democratic, developmental-statish--is the only other way we know to work an industrial economy.

Of course, as Paul Krugman puts it, it is worst of all to be ruled not even by honest kleptocrats in for the long haul but by short-term smash-and-grab looters...

Brad DeLong



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