Dissolution of the Soviet Union

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The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, language acquisition, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Sinatra Doctrine, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Transnistria

The Soviet Union had been formed in December 1922 by four Soviet socialist republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation, which included the future republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. When the Transcaucasian Federation was abolished in 1936, it was up to the three remaining founding members of the Union to decide the question of its future existence—so went Shakhrai’s argument.26 According to Kebich, the statement on the dissolution of the Soviet Union was added to the document at the initiative of Burbulis after the whole text had already been approved by the principals. Burbulis allegedly told a surprised Yeltsin that the document lacked an article. “We should begin by denouncing the union treaty of 1922,” argued Burbulis. “Only then will our accords be absolutely correct from the legal viewpoint.”

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Yeltsin began by telling Gorbachev that he had tried to sell Kravchuk on any conceivable union treaty, starting with a four- or five-year agreement and ending with Ukraine’s associate membership in a Slavic union. Since Kravchuk had remained obdurate, the Commonwealth of Independent States was the only possible solution under the circumstances, argued Yeltsin. The main issue on Gorbachev’s mind, however, was not the creation of the Commonwealth but the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “The three of you got together, but who gave you any such authorization?” said Gorbachev, according to the account that he gave a group of advisers later that day. “The State Council gave no instructions; the Supreme Soviet gave no instructions.” Yeltsin protested and threatened to leave.

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Also, as in the case of other European empires, it was the question of extending citizenship rights, particularly voting rights, to residents of the Soviet republics that made the continuation of the empire in its existing form all but impossible.9 Despite Gorbachev’s best efforts to prove otherwise, electoral democracy turned out to be incompatible with the continuing existence of the Soviet state. It is often overlooked that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was an outcome of electoral politics. The Soviet colossus fell less than three years after the introduction of semi-free elections in the former realm of the Romanovs for the first time since 1917, the year of the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg. The fall of the Soviet Union took place as a direct outcome of the Ukrainian referendum of December 1, 1991, in which more than 90 percent of those taking part voted for independence.

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

While the process was begun by Eisenhower, inspired by Kennedy, and pushed by Johnson, most of the major diplomatic lifting was actually done by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, who either negotiated or brought into force almost all the instruments that make up the interlocking network of treaties and arrangements we refer to as the nonproliferation regime. In the 1990s, President Clinton added the Agreed Framework with North Korea that froze that nation’s nascent nuclear program; won Senate ratification of George Bush’s START II treaty and chemical weapons ban; helped denuclearize Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; won the permanent extension of the NPT in 1995; negotiated and signed the long-sought Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which is still awaiting entry into force; and implemented the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programs to secure and eliminate Russian nuclear weapons and materials.

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The senior civilians in the defense department weighed in. Powell calls them “a refuge of Reagan-era hard-liners, who stomped all over it, from Paul Wolfowitz on down.” Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney rejected Powell’s proposal. But Powell was not done. In 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President George H. W. Bush wanted new ideas on nuclear disarmament. Within days, Powell’s staff developed plans to get rid not just of nuclear artillery but all short-range nuclear weapons, such as the Army’s Lance missiles and the Navy’s nuclear torpedoes and depth charges. “The chiefs, now responding to a radically changed world, signed on, as did Paul Wolfowitz and his hard-liners,” says Powell, with some delight, “Cheney was ready to move with the winds of change.”63 On September 27, 1991, President George H.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

These keenly resented disappointments, and not merely the gravitational pull of the country’s allegedly authoritarian DNA, explain why ‘Putin came to office determined not to force-feed democracy to Russia.’20 UPENDING THE WESTERN NARRATIVE Putin’s Munich 2007 speech was his Declaration of Independence from the self-flattering historical storyline written by the Cold War victors. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, on 25 December 1991, was not experienced as a deliverance by the Russian people. It was not a shared triumph, but a humiliating debacle celebrated only by mortal foes. By acknowledging without euphemism that liberalism’s victory over communism represented Moscow’s definitive loss of the Cold War, Putin was publicly rejecting the official Western interpretation of 1989–91.

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He also comparted ‘bourgeois liberalization’ to ‘spiritual pollution’.5 In other words, he justified the 4 June crackdown by citing the Party’s moral duty to crush a mass movement of students and workers who hoped to drag China into the Age of Imitation.6 This violent repression, precisely in 1989, of a movement aimed at imitating Western-style freedoms raises the question: Why didn’t the Tiananmen events lead more Western commentators to doubt that the end of Eastern European and eventually Soviet communism had in fact established liberal democracy as the only viable model for political reform? One reason is that, coincidentally, June 1989 also witnessed Solidarity’s victory in the first free elections in Poland. This small triumph of the Polish opposition kick-started a process that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. The dramatic cascade of events unfolding on Europe’s eastern frontier contributed significantly to the impression that, while it was a tragedy and a political setback, Tiananmen was of negligible importance to world history. Political repression in China was generally viewed not as a sign of strength but as a symptom of the leadership’s weakness and insecurity.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitably be historically ephemeral and inconsequential. Chantal Akerman’s film D’Est (From the East), made in 1992 and early 1993, carries a heightened self-consciousness about the circumstances of this weighty historical moment. Shot mainly in Poland and Russia in the year and a half following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it discloses a world in suspension, on the edge of an undetermined future, yet still weighed down by long-standing patterns and habits. Using very long takes, it is an extended portrayal of certain textures of everyday life, sometimes suggesting a Sartrean seriality. In her essay on D’Est, Akerman famously declared that she felt the need to make the film “while there’s still time” (“tant qu’il en est encore temps”).11 In one sense, she meant that she had to finish the project before it was too late, before cultural and economic forces transformed the subject of her work into something different, even unrecognizable.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Each side of the Iron Curtain developed its own unique sets of economies, and for decades there was little crossover between the two. American consumers drove Chevys, drank Budweiser, and smoked Marlboros. Their Soviet counterparts drove Ladas, drank Zhigulevskoye, and smoked Belomorkanals. When the Cold War ended, however, the rules that had held for centuries started to change rapidly. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism became the triumphant economic model. In the “end of history” euphoria, the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western democracies rolled back many of the financial and legal guardrails that tethered businesses to the government. They simultaneously set out to build the infrastructure for a global economy based on free-market capitalism.

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As foreign investors flocked to these free-market hubs, China’s exports skyrocketed and its economy began to grow. China turned its back on economic communism some ten years ahead of the Soviet bloc, and the word communist ceased to have any meaning tied to its actual ideological origins. But while Moscow’s economic reforms were soon followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Beijing managed to open the Chinese economy without weakening the Communist Party’s grip on political power. The story of China’s ascent over the last forty years is by now common knowledge, but that does not make it any less remarkable. The country sustained an average annual growth rate of 9.5 percent for a full forty years, a hot streak that the World Bank characterized as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.”

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

The most important goal for all movements in Estonia was the same: to get freedom back. In the end, the restoration of independence went through this scenario of ending occupation, restoring independence, without achieving the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dissolution of the Soviet Union came afterwards following the logic created by Yeltsin, because Yeltsin wanted to have a free and independent Russia and that was really the engine which really brought the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Andrus Öövel was asked to manage the security at live events organised by the newly formed Popular Front. Our task was to guarantee that everybody who came to the meetings could go back home similarly well like he came.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Mao Tse-tung’s misguided attempt to force rapid industrialization and extract food supplies from the countryside led to widespread famine and the deaths of more than 40 million people from starvation. The wars in Korea in the 1950s, across Central America in the 1980s, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past two decades all undermined health, not to mention development more broadly. Two other major disruptions occurred in the 1990s. First, the dissolution of the Soviet Union created economic and social upheavals that undermined health systems in many countries for several years, and progress on health receded before beginning to recover a decade later. Second, the HIV/AIDS pandemic exploded around the world in the 1980s, wreaking havoc in many countries, with extraordinary devastation across central, eastern, and southern Africa.

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Unnoticed by all but a few on that same day, faraway South-West Africa—soon to be renamed Namibia—ushered in Africa’s shift toward democracy by electing its first National Assembly and gaining its independence from South African rule. Apartheid was about to collapse as well. The demise of Communism, the end of the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union together created a decisive moment in world history: global power structures, economic relationships, and powerful ideas about governance and economics all changed substantially.1 These tectonic shifts enhanced the global conditions for development, creating new opportunities for major transformation and affecting developing countries in ways that are continuing to play out today.

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

But the negotiation of the first IPCC accord continued for another two and a half years before it was finalized at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the largest gathering of world leaders in history. (Reilly led the U.S. delegation; George H. W. Bush, after some equivocation, attended.) At any point Bush could have demanded a binding treaty, and likely compelled one: the United States, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not only dominated the world order economically and militarily, but was responsible annually for more than one-third of humanity’s carbon emissions. Bush’s chief scientist, D. Allan Bromley, after his week with Reilly in Noordwijk, grew increasingly supportive of major climate policy, pushing Bush to reconsider carbon taxes and cap-and-trade plans; others in the administration joked that Reilly had brainwashed him.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Perry’s career underlying his expertise about nuclear issues includes his analyses of Soviet nuclear capabilities in Cuba for President Kennedy each day during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; serving as U.S. secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997; negotiating nuclear and other issues with North Korea, the Soviet Union / Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq; negotiating the dismantling of the former Soviet nuclear facilities in Ukraine and Kazakhstan after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; and much else. One can identify four sets of scenarios culminating in the detonation of nuclear bombs by governments (first three scenarios) or by non-governmental terrorist groups (fourth scenario). The scenario most often discussed has been a planned surprise attack by one nation with a nuclear arsenal on another nation with a nuclear arsenal.

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While preparing for the 2001 World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda did seek to acquire a nuclear weapon for use against the U.S. Perhaps terrorists could steal uranium or a bomb without the help of the bomb-producing country, if security at the bomb storage site were inadequate. For instance, at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 600 kilograms of former-Soviet bomb-quality uranium remained in the Soviet republic that became newly independent Kazakhstan. The uranium was stored in a warehouse secured by little more than a barbed-wire fence and could easily have been stolen. But more likely, terrorists might obtain bomb material by an “inside job,” i.e., with the help of bomb storage personnel or leaders of Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Yevgeny Primakov was displaced as prime minister in 1999 by Vladimir Putin. While my friends and I had danced on the rubble of the Berlin Wall, a brooding Putin had watched his world crumbling from 130 miles away, at his KGB office in Dresden, a city in what was still East Germany. Later he would describe the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the ‘greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century’. It was Primakov who championed the term multipolarity in what at the time seemed like a vain bid to dampen America’s oceanic post-Cold War triumphalism. Putin picked up the concept and made it his own. As the world’s one indispensable power, Americans never warmed to the idea of multipolarity.

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

In his 1994 shareholder letter, Buffett showed he had taken Graham’s lesson to heart: We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%. . . . But, surprise—none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in Ben Graham’s investment principles. MISCELLANEOUS MENTATION ON 100-BAGGERS 1 45 I often hear sweeping pronouncements made about the stock market and where it’s going from pundits and investors everywhere, as I’m sure you do too.

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

As far as most people knew, those overflights had been made only by U-2s, beginning in 1956. But in fact, U-2 aerial reconnaissance was a continuation of a secret effort that had been going on since the early 1950s. Not until the last ten years has the true story begun to surface. As R. Cargill Hall, a noted air force historian, writes, “Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union fragmentary accounts have appeared. Too frequently, however, they have turned on misperceptions and questionable interpretations. Armed with a few interviews and still fewer archival records from the Cold War, authors have provided Oliver Stone–like conspiracies.” When Hall's “The Truth About Overflights” appeared in MHQ in 1997, it was the first authoritative discussion of the subject.

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Between 1951 and 1956, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill periodically and on a case-by-case basis authorized these military overflights of the U.S.S.R. and other “denied territory.” The risks were great, but so were the intelligence payoffs. Even today many of the men who took part in the missions (and who were sworn to secrecy) are reluctant to talk about them. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, fragmentary accounts have appeared. Too frequently, however, they have turned on misperceptions and questionable interpretations. Armed with a few interviews and still fewer archival records from the Cold War, authors have provided Oliver Stone–like conspiracies. Some have alleged that the missions were the sole responsibility of the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, General Curtis LeMay—who, they charge, sought through overflights to blackmail the Soviet Union or provoke it into starting World War III.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

Although Dana’s original manuscript has been edited and restructured, many of the examples you will find in this book are from her first draft in 1993. They may seem a bit dated to you, but in editing her work I chose to keep them because their teachings are as relevant now as they were then. The early 1990s were the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and great shifts in other socialist countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement was newly signed. Iraq’s army invaded Kuwait and then retreated, burning oil fields on the way out. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, and South Africa’s apartheid laws were repealed. Labor leader Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland, and poet Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

So let us return to VDNX and Sears today, after this “great change.” By the mid-1990s, the USSR was no more, and north of Moscow, in a city once again in a country called Russia, VDNX was transformed through that peculiarly post-Soviet mix of perestroika, privatism, and gangster capitalism. As one observer commented soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the “exhibitions pavilions, built as palaces for the people, have been transformed into communal apartments of commerce: VDNX is now a bizarre shopping mall. Many of the most opulent pavilions have become congested labyrinths of tiny stalls that sell a jumble of consumer goods.” By the turn of the millennium, the Space Exploration Pavilion was full of used cars, although there were a few satellite and rocket models hanging from the roof above them.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

The attempt by the U.S. anti-China forces to evolve us will not change.”49 Moreover, Jiang argued that “the United States is trying to construct a unipolar world . . . and dominate international affairs” and that, instead of declining, “for a long time, the United States will maintain significant advantages in politics, economics, science and technology, and military affairs.”50 The continuity of these views across two of China’s most important foreign policy speeches was remarkable. Then, in a speech to the Central Military Commission roughly ten years after Tiananmen, Jiang emphasized that these themes had not diminished in salience. “After undergoing drastic changes in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the end of bipolarity in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” he remarked, “setbacks in the development of worldwide socialism caused us to face unprecedented pressure.”51 In particular, “hostile international forces have threatened to bury communism in the world, arguing that China will follow the footsteps of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries and will soon collapse.

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Once the United States was involved, China reversed course and sought to weaken EAS relative to APT.117 “Under such circumstances,” Wu Xinbo noted, “China expects APT to be the main venue for the building of an East Asian community.”118 For example, China fought to remove the term “East Asian community” from the declaration signed at the first EAS summit, though it continued to support the phrase in APT.119 As an acknowledgment of this small tactical victory, the first East Asia Summit declaration stated that “the East Asian region had already advanced in its efforts to realize an East Asian community through the ASEAN+3 process.”120 Security Benefits China also used its position within ASEAN-related forums to (1) weaken US influence in Asia; and (2) reassure its neighbors. First, China sought to promote norms, like its “New Security Concept” that would undermine US alliances after the trifecta. Wu Baiyi, deputy director of research at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, wrote that work on the concept began after “the dissolution of the Soviet Union,” when “policy planners and academics began working quietly to amend the country’s security strategy.” They finally debuted the concept in 1996 unofficially in Track II dialogues.121 As Chu Shulong argued, key aspects of the concept “denounce the alliance approach” and, at a conference held in Beijing by scholars to discuss it and summarized officially in the Party daily Renmin Ribao, participants “identified ‘four nos’ at the center of the concept: no hegemonism, no power politics, no arms race, and no military alliance.”122 Another Renmin Ribao article said the concept stood against Cold War thinking, including alliances, economic sanctions, and arms races.123 In March 1997, China formally introduced the concept at ASEAN when it hosted and chaired the ARF intersessional working group on CBMs in Beijing; there, it “lambasted bilateral alliances, particularly the US-Japanese alliance, as destabilizing and representative of old-style, Cold War thinking” and put forward several motions that targeted the US military.124 Then, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen put forward the concept at the 4th ASEAN Regional Forum in July 1997 and several other gatherings.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

And because Netafim’s technology became so indispensable, a number of foreign governments that historically had been hostile to Israel began to open diplomatic channels. Netafim is active in former Soviet bloc Muslim states like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, which led to warmer relations with Israel’s government after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2004, then trade minister Ehud Olmert tagged along on a Netafim trip to South Africa in the hope of forming new strategic alliances there. The trip resulted in $30 million in contracts for Netafim, plus a memorandum of understanding between the two governments on agriculture and arid lands development.

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%. But, surprise-none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in Ben Graham's investment principles. Nor did they render unsound the negotiated purchases of fine businesses at sensible prices.

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

We don’t have any doubt about this.”26 Their approach echoes the work of the sociologist Max Weber, who attributed Europe’s economic success after the renaissance to the moral values imbued by Protestantism; hard work and accumulation became legitimate moral goals. More recently, economists have tried to discover why some Eastern European countries have made a successful transition to capitalism following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while others have not. After testing a litany of potential explanations, they concluded, in the words of the journalist David Brooks, “Finally, and most important, there is the level of values. A nation’s economy is nestled in its moral ecology. Economic performance is tied to history, culture and psychology.”27 This analysis creates a problem for those who try to describe economics in purely mathematical terms.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

“Financial globalisation has survived the financial excesses and lives on,” announced Will Hutton in 1991, even if “London’s place at the centre of things could all too easily fade in the decade to come” (Hutton, 1991: xi). Uncertainty was understandable, given the anticipation of the Single European Market in 1992, the formulation of the Maastricht Treaty, the replacement of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister by John Major, and the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union. Understanding how to protect the city’s fragile position on this unfamiliar and turbulent world stage was to become the number one priority, not least for the purposeful members of the London Planning Advisory Committee. 3 The 1991 London: World City report and its message about London London: World City, with its HMSO livery, was the first government-published report that recognised that London was developing an important set of international roles as a world city (LPAC, 1991).

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

In the late 1980s, massive independence protests swept across the Caucasus and the Baltic states, and soon the USSR’s constituent republics began to secede. On August 18, 1991, military and government hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup collapsed within days, but the match continued to burn. In December 1991, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation as president. Television audiences across the former USSR watched as Boris Yeltsin lowered the hammer-and-sickle flag from atop the Kremlin for the last time and raised the tricolor flag as president of a newly independent Russian state. During all this upheaval, former KGB spymasters—now out of a job—were raiding the agency’s file cabinets.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

And nations fought bitter, unimaginably costly wars, culminating in the great ideological war that began in 1939 and claimed tens of millions of lives. That war, in turn, led to the development of weapons that threatened the very survival of humanity, and, it could be argued, did not truly end until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The path to prosperity was a long and brutal one. But, at the end of that road there was prosperity – for much of the world’s population at least. A century ago, when the world was already more than a century into the industrial revolution, many of its benefits had yet to reach my great-grandfather, who toiled in poverty as a blacksmith in southern Virginia.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

It was under Pinochet that SQM had been privatised, due to the influence of a group of Chilean economists nicknamed ‘the Chicago boys’, after the Chicago school of free market economics where many of them had studied. Like the Russian oligarchs who grew rich with the privatisations of the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ponce Lerou had also ended up with control by buying up shares that had originally belonged to the workers. It seemed bitterly unfair to people that one of the main people set to cash in on the lithium boom was Ponce Lerou, the yerno (son-in-law). But he had no intention of stepping aside.

The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

But one of the major drivers of democratization in places like Latvia was the European Union’s extraordinarily successful program of political conditionality for accession. Put simply, the policy that only democracies could join the European Union enticed bordering states to become democracies. In Latvia, there was already a strong drive for democracy right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The European Union’s insistence on maintaining and consolidating democracy ensured that Latvian politicians never took their eye off the prize; they knew that any backsliding away from democracy would jeopardize their application to tap into the immense benefits of being formally part of Europe.

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, young professional

Shortly before the fall of the Wall, Edzard Reuter, the CEO of the Daimler Group at the time, bought fifteen thousand acres to the southwest of Potsdamer Platz from the West Berlin Senate. The sale, which was made at a time when hardly anyone believed in an imminent end to the divided state of Germany, let alone in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was a bold—a prophetic—investment. Indeed, it was driven more by a political vision than by commercial interests. Edzard Reuter, who was the son of West Berlin’s legendary first mayor, Ernst Reuter, wanted to build not only a new Daimler headquarters here but a whole new urban area, which would—at some distant point in the future—be connected to East Berlin.

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, epigenetics, meta-analysis, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, social contagion, traumatic brain injury

The shutdown only lasted twenty-four hours. The next morning, social and news media was up and running again, but not until the flashpoint of potential democratic demonstration had passed and the election had been won by Nazarbayev’s hand-picked successor, Tokayev. The thirty years that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that period that had changed the ‘white grave’ into Nur Sultan, had had the opposite effect on Krasnogorsk. The politics of the country had been fundamental in creating for the people of Krasnogorsk the circumstances that would lead to the town’s downfall. In the 1960s, approximately 6,500 people lived in Krasnogorsk.

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

McCain, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, or SASC, as it was commonly known in DC. A number of Pentagon officials and lawmakers wondered why the US needed to keep building and deploying the nuclear-powered behemoths. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US Navy emerged as the uncontested king of the seas. Why the need for an expensive aircraft carrier? Many powerful members of the House and the Senate saw the current Nimitz-class carriers designed during the Vietnam era as floating anachronisms and money sponges. A long line of polished, dedicated, and decorated admirals knew what it felt like to be dressed down by Senator McCain during an SASC hearing, his finger pointing, his voice rising, his ire building, like a prosecutor, interrogating, accusing, and damning.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

If you are honest you are a fool.{646} To the extent that such attitudes are widespread in any given country, the consequences are economic as well as social. Despite all the countries which have seen their economic growth rates rise sharply when they went from government-controlled economies to free market economies, Russia saw its output and its standard of living fall precipitously after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the conversion of state-owned property into property owned by former communist leaders turned capitalists. Rampant corruption can negate the benefits of markets, as it negates the benefits of a rich endowment of natural resources or a highly educated population. While a market economy operates better in a country where honesty is more widespread, it is also true that free markets tend to punish dishonesty.

…

In countries where there are no brand names, or where there is only one producer created or authorized by the government, the quality of the product or service tends to be lower. During the days of the Soviet Union, that country’s only airline, Aeroflot, became notorious for bad service and rudeness to passengers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a new privately financed airline began to have great success, in part because its passengers appreciated being treated like human beings for a change. The management of the new airline declared that its employment policy was that it would not hire anyone who had ever worked for Aeroflot.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

All of three most durable empires were in early antiquity: Mesopotamian Elam (lasting 10 centuries) and Egypt’s New and Old Kingdoms (each lasting five centuries) reached their adulthood phases before 1000 BCE (Elam around 1600 BC, the two Egyptian kingdoms at, respectively, 2800 and 1500 BCE). And the two aggressive totalitarian empires of the 20th century had a relatively short duration. The Soviet empire lasted almost exactly 74 years, from the Bolshevik revolution of November 7, 1917 to the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. And the Third Reich—intended by Hitler, as he claimed at a Nuremberg rally in September 1934, to determine the German form of life “for the next thousand years”—lasted just 12 years and three months when we count from January 30, 1933 when Hitler became Reichskanzler to May 8, 1945 when Germany signed the definitive act of surrender in Berlin (Kershaw 2012).

…

And while the last open-hearth furnaces were shut down in Japan in 1980 and have been absent from the Western mills for a generation, the outdated process has lingered in the post-Soviet Ukraine, whose open-hearth furnaces still produced nearly half of all steel in the year 2000 and nearly 23% even in 2015 (WSA 2017). The growth and decline of warhead numbers in the two nuclear superpowers shows two different patterns (Norris and Kristensen 2006). The Soviet/Russian trajectory forms a nearly perfect and pointed normal curve with a peak total of 40,000 warheads in 1986. Thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this was followed by an almost instant retreat to levels agreed upon by bilateral treaties. In contrast, the initial US growth during the 1950s was much faster than in the Soviet Union (reaching a peak of 32,040 warheads in 1967) and it was followed by stepwise reductions resulting in a highly asymmetrical distribution (figure 6.13).

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

The nature of economic success is different in an information-based economy than in an industrial or agricultural economy, where iron and land are king. BREADLINES AND BROADBAND Rarely do countries and societies have the opportunity to make a simple, binary choice about whether they are going to be open or closed. But that is exactly what happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reestablished independence of Estonia and Belarus. The two countries are separated by just a few hundred kilometers west of Russia, but their trajectories could not be more different. Estonia is “The Little Country That Could,” the title of a book by the first prime minister of Estonia, Mart Laar, which explained the country’s rise from ruin at the end of Soviet occupation in 1991 to become one of the most innovative societies in the world today.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

These nationwide economic plans were first rolled out from 1929 to 1933 under Stalin and ended, with one seven-year exception (1959–1965) under Khrushchev, with the twelfth plan (1986–1990), which oversaw Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policies of uskorenie (acceleration) and perestroika (rebuilding). The thirteenth five-year plan was cut short by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gossnab, in contrast, was responsible for implementing Gosplan’s plans by procuring and supplying producer goods to factories and enterprises and by monitoring the schedules for the production plans. Gossnab thus fulfilled the market role of allocating goods to producers and bridged the three levels of the command economy—national, regional, and local planning and production.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Over the next three years, life expectancy rose by 3.2 years for men and by 1.3 years for women, driven by rapid decreases in mortality from alcohol-related causes (suicides, accidents, and heart disease). The policy was enormously unpopular and reduced government revenues, and it was officially terminated in 1988, though it took some time to unwind. Of course, the policy then got swept up in larger historical events, particularly the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. The improvements in life expectancy rapidly reversed themselves, and life expectancy fell between 1987 and 1994 by 7.3 years for men and by 3.3 years for women, with some rebound thereafter.23 By the early years of the twenty-first century, life expectancy for both men and women was close to where we might have expected it to be based on the (unfortunate) trends through the 1960s and 1970s, as if there never had been an alcohol campaign and as if the Soviet Union had never collapsed.

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev

The term refers to the deliberately created famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, which cost many millions of lives. *7 The Soviet acronym for “collective farm.” *8 Gorbachev’s perestroika: The “restructuring” begun in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev (1933–), the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of state until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. *9 The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) is best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about the harsh experiences of German soldiers during World War I. His works were banned and publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933. *10 German for “police,” but the term was also applied to Russian collaborators

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

When Gorbachev called Dobrynin home in 1986 to be the powerful head of the international department of the Communist Party Central Committee, Reagan asked, “Is he really a Communist?” The answer was decisively yes, even though he did seem too nice and cosmopolitan. As urbane as he was, as much as he enjoyed the cultural and intellectual riches of Western life, he remained a dedicated Communist to the end. He later deemed the dissolution of the Soviet Union an avoidable tragedy caused by the misguided ambitions of incompetent leaders, presumably those along with him on that flight to Reykjavik. Dobrynin was heading there as an adviser to Gorbachev, much as an NSC staff member would advise the U.S. president. His real contribution would stem from his intimate understanding of America and virtually all the Americans who counted in government.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The men (and one woman) were shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union. For Poles, the Katyn massacre came to stand for Soviet repression generally. After the Second World War, Poland was a communist regime and a Soviet satellite, so Katyn could not be discussed. Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify what had happened. Soviet documents left no doubt that the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation had been struggling to address the legacy of Stalinist terror.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

“If I need inspiration,” he joked, “I would go to a Russian court, because what a Russian judge would do would give me inspiration.” There was one more source of anger as well: anger at himself. When Navalny was growing up, the Russian parliament had challenged Yeltsin’s policies of liberalization in the early 1990s, right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A tense standoff ensued. The parliament attempted to impeach Yeltsin, and Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the parliament. Things came to a head that October when Yeltsin responded to demonstrations with military force. More than a hundred people were killed and hundreds more wounded in street battles that went on for nearly two weeks.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Behind the Iron Curtain and in religious autocracies, the early internet was a place to explore ideas that couldn’t be expressed in the national press. The elimination of the government-controlled middleman, the radio or TV broadcaster, meant protesters could express themselves freely. The failed coup of August 1991 that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union is a great example. Protestors were able to signal across the fledgling internet that there was a coup underway, even as the unsuccessful rebels shut down CNN and other mass media.42 More broadly, the constant criss-crossing of data – in which ideas might spread from Edinburgh to Évian, Mumbai to Manhattan – helped build a uniquely international culture online.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

They didn't have much of a history of initiative or enterprise or even hard work. So the Russians soon found that they needed to do some serious work on establishing the civil institutions a society needs for a market economy and a democracy to take hold and ultimately thrive. In the heady days of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people talked about a new Russia rising within the decade. As the 1990s dragged on, and as the economic and political problems of Russia mounted, the reality sank in that the difficult transition would take longer. But Russians are beginning to understand they lost out badly by their inaction in the early 1990s, by their failure to understand the importance of the rule of law and a sound court system.

Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, haute couture, It's morning again in America, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine, The Chicago School

He reaches into his pocket and draws out his Mont Blanc ballpoint, a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present from his wife, Edwina. The sudden movement alarms the three security officials in the room. “They did everything but draw AK-47s,” laughs Caudill. “Gorbachev says to them, ‘Nyet, nyet!’”3 “We were about to go live on Russian television and around the world with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the conveyance of power to Boris Yeltsin,” recalled Johnson. “And I am standing one person away from Gorbachev within, say, forty-five seconds to a minute before air time. He takes this green Soviet-made pen out to just test it.... And it didn’t work.... And I just reached in my pocket and I said, ‘Mr.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Beijing’s recent relapse toward censorship shows that its leadership class considers clinging to power more important than consent of the governed—China is staging a “Great Leap Backward” in which “dissent is not permissible,” The Atlantic said in 2016. China will grow much stronger if it becomes a democracy rather than stays mired in its current amalgam model of economic freedom without political freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, said in 2016 that the next step for Russia should be switching to democracy, “not in the future but right now.” We’d like to think Gorbachev made this statement for moral reasons. Maybe he was looking at economic data. THE GUNS OF AUGUST THAT sounded in 1914 matched the autocracies of Germany, Bulgaria, and the old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires against the democracies of the United Kingdom, French Third Republic, Canada, United States, Australia, Italy, and Japan, with monarchist Russia and Serbia as wild cards.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Petersburg nearly ran out of dairy products for children. In November 1991, Gorbachev asked one of his aides to send British prime minister John Major, at that time head of the G7 group of industrial nations, a three-word message—“Dear John, Help!”6 It was just a month later that Gorbachev went on television to announce the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A NEW RUSSIA: “NO ONE’S AT THE CONTROLS” From January 1, 1992, Russia was an independent state, a huge one, traversing eleven time zones. The centrally planned socialist economy of the Soviet Union, where virtually every action in the entire economy was the result of bureaucratic decisions, had disintegrated, leaving economic chaos and uncertainty.

…

What would be the nature of Russia’s relations with the newly independent states, many of which had been khanates in the centuries before their conquest by the Russian Empire but had never really existed as modern nation-states? For the Russians, it was about power and position and restoring their country as a great power. They had hardly expected the Soviet Union to fall apart. Many Russians had come to regret this loss and regarded the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a nation (if not as a communist state) as a humiliation, as something that had been foisted upon them by malevolent forces from outside, specifically in the view of some, the United States. Immediately after the breakup, they began to describe these newly established countries as belonging to a newly conceived region, the “Near Abroad,” over which they wanted to reassert control.

Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Many economists consider the major factor in the Bush recession to be the cutback in military procurement-orders placed with factories, which have not only accounted for a healthy segment of the output of goods and services but have had a substantial multiplier effect, creating jobs in companies that produce consumer goods for the relatively high-paid workers in companies that are profitable thanks to the taxpayer subsidy. “The impact is bigger than you can see by just looking at the numbers,” conservative economist Herbert Stein of the American Enterprise Institute notes. “The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union” has undermined the device instituted to maintain the economy after World War II, Times economics correspondent Louis Uchitelle reports, and “leading military companies” like General Electric are in trouble, as is high-tech industry generally.17 The old pretexts are gone, and it is no longer so simple to hail the virtues of free market capitalism while feeding at the public trough.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

To say that there is no good blueprint for dealing with modern authoritarianism would be a severe understatement. Lost in their own strategizing, Western leaders are pining for something that has guaranteed effectiveness. Many of them look back to the most impressive and most unambiguous triumph of democracy in the last few decades: the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly—and who can blame them for seeking to bolster their own self-confidence?—they tend to exaggerate their own role in precipitating its demise. As a result, many of the Western strategies tried back then, like smuggling in photocopiers and fax machines, facilitating the flow of samizdat, and supporting radio broadcasts by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, are given much more credit than they deserve.

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

The new church, like the monstrous Peter the Great statue across the river, is the product of Moscow’s mayor Luzkhov and Zurab Tsereteli, who was responsible for decorating the interior. Boris Yeltsin himself laid the foundation stone. And the gold leaf, applied by the bucketful to the domes, was paid for by the oligarchs who, with indecent speed, made themselves enormously wealthy during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The building of the original nineteenth-century basilica marked one important assertion of Russia’s identity; its destruction was an attempt radically to redefine that identity; and its rebuilding is yet a third watershed in the power struggles shaping modern Russia. Tsar Alexander I commissioned Karl Vitberg in 1817 to design a cathedral of a scale and grandeur to reflect Russia’s rank as a mighty and expansive state.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Europe and Asia are the two most significant regions in global trade, and their trade with each other comprises a greater trade volume than any other pair of regions. As infrastructural linkages and trade agreements expand, Eurasian trade is accelerating and far outstripping either region’s trade with North America. The biggest geopolitical phenomena of the past three decades have come in rapid succession: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the consolidation of the European Union, the rise of China, the US shale energy revolution, and now the emergence of an Asian system. Global order is about the distribution of power and how that power is governed. The anchor of global order isn’t necessarily a single country or set of values, as was the case with the currently waning Western liberal international order.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

In the United States many of the cuts are occurring in defense. The military-industrial complex, which played a critical role in maintaining the economic prosperity of the country for more than half a century, is now being downsized in the aftermath of the Cold War. The dismantling has occurred suddenly, largely in response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the 1980s the Pentagon budget was still growing by 5 percent a year, reaching a high of $371 billion in 1986. During the Reagan years, the number of Americans working in defense industries or employed directly in the armed forces totaled 6.7 million, or 5.6 percent of the labor force.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

In 1970, when fears of overpopulation were at their peak, Earth Day was held in the midst of national turmoil over the Vietnam War. In 1983, during heightened Cold War tensions, more than 300,000 people protested in London’s Hyde Park against nuclear weapons. And in the early 1990s, climate change emerged as the new apocalyptic threat at the end of the Cold War. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people in the West no longer had an external enemy against which to direct their negative energy and define themselves. “Being the sole winner in a conflict means concentrating on oneself all the criticism that could earlier be deflected onto others,” observed Pascal Bruckner in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.61 In the wake of the 2016 elections in Britain and the United States, where voters rejected, in one way or another, the established global order, climate alarmism grew more extreme.

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

But the nationalists who voted for Yeltsin saw Russian institutions as an instrument for enhancing Russian identity, providing support for Russian culture, and cutting financial support for the Union republics, which they claimed were bleeding the Russian economy white. But no one advocated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1991, by creating an alliance with leaders of other republics, Yeltsin forced the embattled Gorbachev to agree to a reform of the Union that would benefit Russia and other well-to-do republics. The new Union treaty negotiated by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan in July 1991 gave the preponderance of economic and political power to the republican leaders, first and foremost to the leader of Russia.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

In November 1992, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, HBO hosted a premiere of Stalin at a theater in Moscow. The screening was attended by the film’s cast, HBO executives, and a collection of Russian dignitaries. The movie, which starred Robert Duvall and featured the cinematography of American New Wave legend Vilmos Zsigmond, had been shot during the tumultuous dissolution of the Soviet Union. “We filmed in all those recesses of the Kremlin,” says former HBO executive and Stalin producer Ilene Kahn Power. “It will never be done again. It would be like the Russians coming and filming in the Lincoln Bedroom.” When the production had finished shooting, Kahn Power and her team held the wrap party at one of Stalin’s former homes in the city.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Since Peter the Great moved Russia’s capital to St. Petersburg in the early eighteenth century, every Russian contact with the West has exposed it as materially inferior, awakening both its national consciousness and its masochistic soul.1 The decade of “hot tub and vodka” diplomacy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union numbed Russia’s leaders to their strategic predicament: Because Russia remains so big, neither the United States nor Europe nor China wants it to be strong. In their gilded chambers today, however, the Kremlin’s most recent ruling clique is suffering from the resulting imperial hangover, profoundly angry at the once-mighty empire’s diminished standing.2 Russia’s diplomatic position is purely residual: If it neglected to show up (or fell out of its chair) at major negotiations on the Arab-Israeli conflict or the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the outcomes would be no different—America, Europe, and China are far more influential arbiters.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

By midnight all the checkpoints had been forced to open and one of the greatest parties of the century was under way, closely followed by one of its biggest shopping sprees. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War was essentially over, though it was not until the failed Moscow coup of August 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union that the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus, along with the three big Caucasian republics and the five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, became independent states. Few had seen it coming.* For some it was ‘the end of history’, the definitive victory of the liberal capitalist model.108 For others it was the ‘triumph of the West’, the political achievement of three charismatic leaders: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher.109 A third view gave the credit to nationalism.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Conclusion A World of P­ eople without a ­People If we ask what men most owe to the moral practices of ­t hose who are called cap­i­tal­ists the answer is: their very lives. —­f riedrich a. hayek, 1989 T wo years a­ fter the fall of the Berlin Wall and one month short of the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, George H. W. Bush granted a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Wilhelm Röpke’s correspondent and the defender of racial segregation in the U.S. South, William F. Buckley. Buckley had “raised the level of po­liti­cal debate in this country,” Bush claimed. Without irony, he followed by granting a medal to a civil rights leader.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Wisner had had a long career at the State Department, serving as ambassador four times, including five years in Egypt at the end of the Cold War. As the protests picked up, Obama accepted a recommendation from Hillary to send Wisner to Cairo as a special envoy. He was someone whom Mubarak trusted, a reminder of a better time when our countries were in lockstep during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Wisner’s difficult task was to counsel Mubarak to initiate a transition in Egypt. The last words I heard Obama say to him as he set out on his mission were straightforward: “Be bold.” Wisner succeeded in securing Mubarak’s promise not to seek another term as president, but that wasn’t enough for the people in the streets, or for Obama.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

This right-wing version of Gorbachev, whom we might call “alt-Gorbachev,” would still have embraced glasnost and perestroika in 1985; but he would have repudiated the former in 1989 and 1990, once it became clear that a continued commitment to democracy would lead to the destruction of the Communist Party’s power and then to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Thus, alt-Gorbachev would have opted in 1990 and 1991 for capitalist development within an authoritarian political framework, much as Deng was then doing in China. The Soviet democratic dissidents would have been crushed, as the Chinese ones were in Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union would have remained intact.

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, Columbian Exchange, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Jones Act, planetary scale, Right to Buy, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty

Many social scientists trace the beginnings of the new slavery to the end of World War II or even later, to the economic liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s. Some place the blame on “globalization,” that ill-defined catchall term with its popular connotation of newness. They point to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its related economic dislocations as the origin of the sex trade involving Eastern European women, or to the opening up of the economies of the developing world over the past thirty years, which has led to the proliferation of sweatshops to make products for the developed world. One cannot deny that such situations have indeed promoted and accelerated the traffic and exploitation of humans.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

It had originally been built for Stalin's putative successor as Soviet prime minister, Georgi Malenkov, who was quickly pushed aside by the more forceful Khrushchev. After Malenkov's disgrace, the estate was taken away from him and turned into a government guest house. Novo- Ogaryevo would achieve greater fame decades later as the presidential retreat of Mikhail Gorbachev and the site of negotiations that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Presidium members were seated in front of the first secretary along the long, polished oak table. The eighteen attendees included Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, and Rodion Malinovsky, the defense minister. Aides hovered in the background, to be summoned and dismissed as needed.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In his 1994 annual letter to shareholders, he wrote: We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or Treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8 percent and 17.4 percent. But, surprise—none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in Ben Graham’s investment principles. Nor did they render unsound the negotiated purchases of fine businesses at sensible prices.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In the UK, Alston was specifically asked to examine the impact of the government’s social service cuts since 2010 on the country’s most vulnerable populations. He visited the North East of England as well as other deprived regions. And what he found there was brutal—a crisis reminiscent of that of Russia in the 1990s, when the whole country had fallen off a cliff and spiraled into poverty after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The budgetary retreat from the UK’s postwar welfare system had had the same effect on the country’s most vulnerable regions and populations as the USSR’s wholesale collapse and ten years of shock therapy. Indeed, the policies of the post–Great Recession British and post-Soviet Russian governments were similar, as were their goals: cut government spending to the bare minimum, restore fiscal discipline, and hopefully, eventually, at some point, boost the country’s economic competitiveness.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

In 2014, the State Fragility Index of the Center for Systemic Peace assigned the world’s worst scores to the Central African Republic, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Somalia. With the single exception of Myanmar, the seventeen next most fragile countries are also located in Africa or the Middle East. Although the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s as well as ongoing events in Ukraine demonstrate that even industrialized middle-income countries are by no means immune to disintegrative pressures, contemporary developed countries—and, indeed, many developing ones—are highly unlikely to go down the same path.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov was dismissed as the chief of the Soviet general staff in the summer of 1984 for saying publicly that Soviet industry was falling badly behind American industry, which meant that Soviet weaponry would soon be inferior to American weaponry.54 Soviet leaders recognized the gravity of the situation and tried to fix the problem. But their economic and political reforms went awry, touching off a crisis of nationalism, which not only allowed the United States to win the Cold War but shortly thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This discussion of the importance of wealth for building military power might suggest that the distribution of latent power among states should roughly reflect the distribution of military power, and therefore it should be feasible to equate the two kinds of power. My argument that great powers aim to maximize their share of world power might reinforce that notion, since it seems to imply that states will translate their wealth into military power at roughly the same rate.

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

It was dissolved on July 1. He pressed the outgoing members for commitments that they would not join NATO or the EC, but this plea also failed.24 Soon after, top members of his government, including Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Defense Minister Dimtry Yazov, determined to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, decided to take radical action. Yazov, who had virulently opposed East Germany’s absorption into NATO, told Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, on July 31, that “NATO was the threat” which now concerned Russia.25 On August 19, he and his fellow conspirators detained Gorbachev and took power.

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

The governor refused, so Maceo pledged to continue the war. The meeting between Maceo and the Spanish governor is well-traveled territory in Cuban history. Known as the Protest of Baraguá, it has come to represent the principle of no surrender. More than a century later, in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, billboards across the island announced that Cuba itself was an “eternal Baraguá.” As Eastern Europe surrendered to capitalism, the signs implied, Cuba would continue the fight. The billboards did not mention that despite his noble and fiery intentions, Maceo had no choice but to lay down his weapons soon after that defiant protest.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Russia's economic policymakers are confronted with a daunting dilemma: a faster rise in the ruble exchange 328 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. RUSSIA'S SHARP ELBOWS rate will foster the spread of Dutch disease, but foreign-asset purchases to slow the rising foreign-exchange value of the ruble may uncork inflation, depending on the mechanism used. Either would undo much of the economic progress Russia has made since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Dutch disease symptoms are already evident. As oil and gas exports surged, the value of the ruble rose and the value of Russian noncommodity exports lagged. Between 1998 and 2006, the value of the ruble relative to the currencies of Russia's trading partners doubled, after adjusting for their relative inflation rates.

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

There are two further French accounts: Françoise Thom, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (1989), and Alain Besançon, Présent soviétique et passé russe (1980). More conventional accounts are John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (1995), and, by a veteran of sovietology, Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (1996). Another view is Ben Fowkes, The Dissolution of the Soviet Union (1997). Ronald G. Suny, The Soviet Experiment (1998), is important for the nationality dimension. Charles Maier, Dissolution (1998), shows how the end of East Germany was planned from Moscow. Jens Hacker, Deutsche Irrtümer, Schönfärber und Helfershelfer der SED-Diktatur im Westen (1992), and Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur (1998), show how it had to be done in the teeth of considerable unenthusiasm from West Germany.

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Thank you very much.”46 As Gorbachev finished his televised address, his military aides carrying the suitcases with the nuclear codes stole quietly away, looking for their new boss in another part of the Kremlin. Gorbachev went alone to the Walnut Room, where members of the Soviet Politburo had often met, for a drink with five of his closest aides. Then, before midnight, he went home, as ex-president of a former country.47 THE DISSOLUTION OF the Soviet Union removed the last vestige of the Cold War as an international system. For two generations it had dominated international affairs, and the ideological struggle that preceded it and on which it fed had lasted even longer. As in most great changes in world politics, the end was sudden but the antecedents were long.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

”37 FOUR YEARS after Edward Lansdale’s death, following the lightning-fast American victory in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” That same year, the Cold War, the conflict to which Lansdale had devoted much of his life, came to an unexpected end with the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Four years after that, in 1995, President Bill Clinton restored diplomatic relations with Hanoi. By then, Le Duan, the hard-liner who had displaced Ho Chi Minh and guided North Vietnam to victory, was long dead; he had predeceased Lansdale in 1986. His successors had pulled Vietnamese troops out of Cambodia and adopted a market-based economic policy known as Doi Moi that was unveiled just months before Lansdale’s death.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

In 1990 French president François Mitterrand favored a conciliatory vision of embracing the former Soviet bloc in a common European security policy that would supersede NATO as well as the Warsaw pact.1 But neither Helmut Kohl nor George Bush wanted anything to do with that. The West had won. It would set the terms for Europe’s reunification. The fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 left Russia shrunken and isolated. Not since the dark days of Lenin’s ruinous peace of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 had Russia been so humbled. Under Yeltsin, Moscow’s relations with the West were friendly. But Russia’s economy was a shipwreck. In the words of George Soros, Russia was “a centrally planned economy with the centre knocked out.”2 In the so-called transitional recession, inflation soared and Russia’s real GDP fell by 40 percent between 1989 and 1995.

In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

The gigantic trading network of old Russia and the former Soviet Union has been tossed for a loop, the new nationalism has thrown up thousands of new obstacles, and the consequences are being felt everywhere: in the Lithuanian border town that lives off exports to Russia, in the vacant tourist hotels of Moscow and Kiev, in the port of Odessa where shipping revenues have gone down by two thirds since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the dozens of bankrupt ships lying here off the coast, waiting. I wander into the Literature Museum. Beside Babel's lone spectacles – in a panic, he left them lying on his nightstand when he was arrested on 15 May, 1939 – I actually find a few old copies of Moryak. They date from 1921, they are printed on the back of packaging material used to ship tea, and they include Paustovsky's first stories.

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Hutchings American Diplomacy p. 292 Back to text 233. GHWBPL NSC Barry Lowenkron Files – NATO Files, NATO: NAC/NACC Ministerials – December 1991 Brussels, Cable from US Mission NATO to Sec State – NATO: NACC Ministerial Summary Report 20.12.1991 pp. 1–3 + NACC Ministerial Declaration – Soviet Union ends as Meeting Ends 4pp. ‘Dissolution of the Soviet Union Announced at Nato Meeting’ 1.1.1992 NATO. Friedman ‘Yeltsin Says Russia Seeks to Join NATO’. For the ‘North Atlantic Cooperation Council Statement on Dialogue, Partnership and Cooperation’, Press Communiqué M-NACC-1(91)111 NAC 20.12.1991 NATO Back to text 234. Plokhy The Last Empire pp. 295–316; Reynolds One World Divisible p. 575 Back to text 235.

Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

When he'd established the country's central-planned economy, Stalin had made a deliberate effort to spread out production sites, so that each segment of the vast empire would depend for vital commodities upon every other, but he'd overlooked the discordant fact that if the entire economy went to pot, then needing something you couldn't get from one source meant that you had to get it from another, and with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, smuggling, which had been well controlled under Communist rule, had become a genuine industry of its own. And with wares also came ideas, hard enough to stop, and impossible to tax. The only thing lacking was a welcoming committee, but that wouldn't have done. The corruption of the border guards went both ways.