|Peter Boettke|
As far as I can remember, this is the first video of me ever giving a talk -- back in 1993. I was spending that year as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and had just returned from a visit to the Russian Academy of Sciences and my book Why Perestroika Failed had just been published.
I had no idea the video still existed and stumbled upon this morning looking for something else. The talk begins roughly at the 3:30 minute mark. How do you think my analysis has held up over the past 18 years?
Experience suggests that privately created property rights, piratization, necessarily preceded and supercede state created property rights, privatization.
Posted by: James A Donald | July 04, 2011 at 04:41 PM
I find it amusing when Chinese students take so much pride in China’s gradual approach to market reforms. It seems that the existing arguments against a shock therapy in the “shock therapy”-gradualism dichotomy, entitle them to go as far as claiming that China, as opposed to Eastern Europe, has successfully transitioned to a capitalist economy.
Posted by: Olga Nicoara | July 05, 2011 at 12:54 AM
A lot of your points in that video are excellent! Also, it's obvious that you were immersed in thinking about the situation at the time: you knew all the articles being written at that time and had informed opinion about them all. I don't agree with your rent-seeking description about the Soviet economy, but I don't think I have any disagreements about what you said in this talk. (Re: my disagreement on rent-seeking, my article which was to be published in Critical Review is now in the online-first section of CES http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ces/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ces201117a.html in case you're curious)
Posted by: liberty | July 06, 2011 at 04:14 PM