>Probably because there were lots of people at the end of World War II who
>forecast "overtaking"--think of Paul Sweezy, or of Khrushchev's "we will be
>there at your funeral".
>
>The claim, after all, was always "this is the one true road to Utopia." It
>was not "this is a slightly better development strategy than the one that
>the Dictator Salazar is pursuing in Portugal."
Just because that's the claim doesn't mean we latecomers have to accept it as the criterion. People tend to idealize (rare today) or demonize (almost universal today) the Soviet experience, but neither point of view takes it very seriously as something to be learned from.
Doug