Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, well, it’s interesting. I was reading this long chronology that was put together sort of like early Putin. So before they really shut down all the information. It was just a chronology of the Cold War, big fat book. Just like someone like me to read a book like that. So I’m going date after date after date after date. It’s written by people who are really angry about how the Cold War turned out. One of the takeaways from the compilers of this thing is they kept criticizing. They showed how much for every year Russia was making in oil revenues. It was huge. But in their analysis it was, “And they saved none of it”, right? There was no sense of investing in something. There’s something called consumption. There’s another thing called investment. Going around and buying a bunch of Western grain is consumption. There’s none of this being put in anything that’s going to yield anything. So that was a big criticism from the authors of this book. To the question you’re asking, “No, they just milked it while they were there.” Final question, this is not so much a question as an observation. I don’t know if you have a reaction to this. Just look at Russia’s history through the 20th century: tsarism, communism, collectivization, to more than 10% of your population dying from World War II, then back to Stalin, and then more communism, and then the economy collapses again, and then Putin. Especially if you look at the satellite states, they had all of this happen to them and worse because now they’re getting invaded. Whereas you have other countries. Japan and Germany also had tragic histories, but then they recovered. Maybe it’s just the tragedy of Russia. Yeah, you’re lucky you’re not Russian.…

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