Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…They had enough freedom. The freedom you need is the freedom to be able to hold your own property, to know the wealth that you accumulate you’ll be able to keep, and that deals you make will be, in some way, reasonably adjudicated when there’s a dispute. Taiwan and South Korea both had that. China has an entirely separate court system. It has an arbitrary wealth removal system, to put it nicely. It has a very brutal, tyrannical government that runs in a very disjointed way. If you’re a member of the Party, you have one form of court system. If you are not, you have a different, and that has led to massive internal corruption. I don’t just mean in the usual sense, but corruption in the sense that it’s very difficult to predict the ownership of assets in large scale. That’s really difficult. It just makes investment for the long term difficult. You saw the arrest of Jack Ma being evidence of that. That was one of those moments where the wealthy got too big for their boots and were challenging the Party, and the Party will always come first. If we think about Russia, for a long time, maybe forever, Russia has not been close to a free country. If you had to try to explain, in its most fundamental and conceptual terms as possible, why that is true, how do you understand Russian history? Why has it gone so badly so many times? I’ve read a fair amount of Russian history, but I’m afraid I just simply can’t explain it, but it consistently goes wrong. I ask myself whether it’s to do with the scale of the country, whether it’s to do with the fact that the levels of education or the levels of connection between urban and rural areas is so great. I don’t know, but your wife left the Soviet Union, when was it, 20, 30 years ago?…

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