Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yes, if I could go safely, it would be interesting to see, for sure. But obviously, I’m not setting foot in Russia anytime soon. The story, for those who don’t know it, is that Stalin said, “I want the world’s biggest steel mill,” and at the time, it was Gary, Indiana. So they just got the numbers on Gary, Indiana, and increased them by, I don’t know, 10 percent, and started working on this huge steel mill in this place called Magnitogorsk, which means magnetic mountain, which is in the Urals out in the middle of nowhere and called magnetic mountain because it’s an incredibly rich load of iron ore. In a pretty short time, they built this giant steel-mill complex, which still exists, and the city has grown up around it. I imagine that a lot of what made it interesting in 1933 is probably gone now. But I did go to Volgograd once, which got a few things in common with Magnitogorsk, I guess, the former Stalingrad. I don’t know Russia well, but some part of me feels that the Soviet Union and America had more in common in the 1930s than they ever had before or have had since. Does that make sense to you at all? What is that something? Yes, I think it does. I’ve actually got one of my characters in the book — he talks about this a little bit because, in both cases, there’s one part of the country — in the United States, it’s basically everything from Chicago to the Atlantic — which is densely populated and urbanized and lots of industry. In the Soviet Union, obviously, that’s the western part of the country. Then there’s this huge hinterland which is mostly empty. It’s got indigenous people. It’s got a history of those people being poorly treated by the cosmopolitan, industrialized dominant culture, and it’s a vast open resource-extraction zone to feed the industrial beast. So, it’s got that in common. I do think that there are some ways in which those two countries understood each other at the time. I think there was some of that thinking when Americans would come and visit and try to get involved in building the Soviet Union.…

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