Dwarkesh Patel: commitment

Transcript context

…Yes, they do. But they still have the mechanisms of economic control and they have a massive black market. You’ve got to remember that communism doesn't have legal markets for the most part. It has restricted legal markets, again grudgingly. Household plots… But for the most part, it has a lot of illegal market activity, including in the state sector. The state sector gets an order to produce certain numbers of large quantitative output for the military-industrial sector, but it only gets allocated 25% of its ball bearings. It has to assign its supply department on the black market to go out and find the other ball bearings that it's not assigned from central planning. You get a massive black market in the system, not just at the level of little people in the village, but at the top level of the military-industrial complex to make the system work. So when market behavior is grudgingly accepted, what that does is it brings market behavior out of the shadows into a legal or quasi-legal realm. You're not inventing market behavior from scratch. You're surfacing it in some ways. So party officials and industrial officials have market behavior in their firms to grease the system and to meet their output quotas. I agree with your general point that how any nation gets wealthy is not by the government but because of the thrift and entrepreneurialism and hard work of individuals. But that's also true in Western capitalist countries. In those countries, we also have a lot of stupid policies… Yes, as we sit here and speak.…

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