Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, exactly. No, it is tragic. It is tragic. It started out as a difficult address, pre-Industrial Revolution, that required certain things to survive. They were more ruthless than their neighbors. They did survive. I mean, in a previous lecture, I discussed how they wiped out entire princely states and Khanates and things, they just wiped them out. Then you’re using their elites because it’s a rough neighborhood. The problem is if you aren’t on the winning side, you’re going to be on the losing side, right? But since the Industrial Revolution, where you can do compounded economic growth that comes from commerce and trade and industry and things, that’s the real way to get powerful because power becomes a function of your wealth. That involves having legal systems, institutions, and stability. Russia has found it very difficult getting with that program. It has to do with, I think, this very difficult historical legacy of who rises to power, and also all the missing things. They didn’t have the Renaissance, they didn’t have the Reformation, these fundamental movements that were very influential in the West. So there’s a lot of negative space of things that didn’t happen. There’s all the awful stuff that you saw that did happen, but then they’re missing things. So it’s very difficult. Then people like Putin can set the clock way back because he’s killed so many Ukrainians. What he’s done will take a generation at minimum to get to anywhere where people are going to be thinking about… People will be talking about reparations from Russia for quite a while and they’re poor, they’re not going to want to do that. I should have thought to end on a more optimistic note, but...…

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