Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…Britain is the only country that fights Hitler all the way from 1939 to 1945. Whereas Stalin only fights Hitler after he himself is invaded and in fact collaborates with him to dissect Poland. After the war, Russia expands beyond any ambition that a czar might have had. Whereas the British Empire is about to collapse and loses all its territories. What explains the differing outcomes of these two countries post World War II? And why did the post war objectives of Stalin succeed much more? You mean like retaining an empire versus losing an empire? They're fundamentally different kinds of empires. Russia is a classic continental empire. What it owns is contiguous. Britain's empire was all about trade and having enough coaling stations around the world. That was initially what it was all about. You have coaling stations everywhere and then you want to get the trade through. And then what the British did is they trained barristers all over the world, barristers are lawyers. That lays the basis, not on purpose, of having international law where people who are eventually going to be running these independent countries have a legal training to use international law to their own kind of benefit. But anyway, Britain has this non-contiguous empire and after the war, it does not have the ability to hang on to them because of nationalism. Nationalism starts in the Napoleonic Wars. That's what Napoleon leverages to create the mass of his armies because French people feel nationalism and it's incredibly powerful. And nationalism has been spreading its way around the world ever since. Once you have nationalism, have fun hanging on to a non-contiguous empire because the locals are going to fight and resist. There won't be commercial advantages because it'll be too expensive to hang on. Britain, in most cases, did not fight to hang on to its empire. It left and negotiated its way out. Whereas France did the fight in Vietnam, which it lost, and the fight in Algeria, which it lost. The British didn't do that. Russia is a different event. It's all contiguous and wherever that red army is, it can hang on to it. And so yeah, it hangs on to Eastern Europe forever at a great cost. But if you look over time, initially Stalin rebuilt and does quite well. But then in the 60s, 70s, all of a sudden their growth rates are not like Western growth rates. Yeah, they're still growing, but the difference is growing and the compounding effects of this are enormous. If you fast forward to now I think Russia's entire economy now is less than Mexico. There's nothing wrong with Mexico, but the Russians have this idea that they have this huge, they don't. The compounding is a very important point because Tyler Cowen has an example of this in one of his books: that if U.S. economic growth rates had been 1% lower every year from 1890 to the 20th century, the U.S. per capita GDP would be lower than that of Mexico's.…

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