the soviet decline...

Samuelson on Hayek, A Comment on Comments

while Hayek argued that centrally planned socialism would be inefficient, an argument PAS agrees with, Hayek no more forecast the moment of the Soviet collapse than did PAS or the CIA or pretty much anybody other than a French sociologist named Revel in 1976. Also, the severe economic decline in the Soviet bloc largely came after the political collapse of the bloc. It is not at all clear such a collapse would have happened without the political collapse, if the Soviet leaders in 1989 had cracked down on the independence demonstraters in Lithuania, the people fleeing across the Hungarian border into Austria, and of course supported the Honecker regime in East Germany in preventing the Berlin Wall from falling. After all, the upshot of the Chinese crushing the demonstrations in Tienanman Square was continued economic growth with a gradual transition to its current peculiar mixed economy that has grown very rapidly. And for all the carrying on many make about the Soviet economy, while it may have been inaccurate to describe it in 1989 as "thriving," and it was falling behind the US in growth, technical innovation, and quality of goods, it was functioning, and the population was not starving or homeless or without clothing or education or medical care, although it was politically repressed. But it had provided the industrial expansion that allowed it to build a military capacity that defeated Hitler's military at Stalingrad and Kursk. In short, this dumping all over PAS for these statements is fairly ridiculous, whatever one thinks of Samuelson's ultimate or broader influence on economics as the godfather of its mainstream neoclassical form in the last half of the 20th century.