[lbo-talk] BDL on Sweezy

[Brad DeLong]

>That evil unreconstructed Stalinist, Eric Hobsbawm, says (in _The Short
>Twentieth Century_ ) that by the time Stalin died, the USSR did very little
>trade with the outside world and was essentially self-sufficient. This in
>spite of monumental calamities like the 1930s "famine' and WW2.
>
>So I guess the Stalinist economists weren't all bad or idiots.

????

To take a country that is a major, major agricultural exporter in 
1913 and eliminate its agricultural surplus?

To be "essentially self-sufficient" is the same as "not making 
anything anyone else would like to have."

-- 

Yours,

Brad DeLong