Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, yeah. It’s interesting on the development thing. The communists have insisted on heavy industry. That’s the thing that they want. Forget about the consumer goods. If you look at the countries that really have made it, like Japan and the Meiji Restoration, they’re doing a lot of light industry and consumer goods. Then they move into heavy, but they’ve already got people on bicycles and they’ve got textiles and other things up and running. That would also apply to Taiwan and Korea. They do, by all means, get heavy industry. But that’s not the starter program. The starter program is basic standard of living. Again I’m not an economist, but it turns out if you just look at who’s rich and who’s not, that seems to me a more workable thing. There’s also the fact that the centralized regime is building things according to the 30s plan. And even after post-war reconstruction, they’re still calling back on these plans from the 30s that call for heavy industry for a bygone era. In the 70s, 80s, we had our rust belt collapse of manufacturing. People complain about this as, “Look, the US has this hollowed-out manufacturing base.” But it’s much better to have industries which are left behind so that the whole economy as a whole can be more dynamic and move on than the Soviet Union where the entire thing became a rust belt because they couldn’t move on. It’s more exciting than that. Again, I’m not an economist, but apparently they missed the plastics revolution. I mean think about our own lives. Now we’re finding we have too many plastics, but plastics are an incredible material and they’re just missing that. I remember in Russia trying to figure out where to get sour cream and was being laughed at by Russians because I was so stupid in the store that I couldn’t find it. Well, we have little plastic tubs with the sour cream. Back in the late 80s, when I was there, you had to bring your glass jar with you so you could hand it over the counter so someone could take a filthy ladle and fill up your jar. I mean, this is part of not having plastics. And then they totally missed the computer revolution. This plays into Ronald Reagan winning the military race. We’re putting these chips and things into our ballistic missiles and they can’t do that. And that’s a problem.…

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