Western analysts were unprepared for the Soviet collapse because they accepted a host of false assumptions about the Soviet economy. A positive attitude toward central planning was considered a sign of sophistication, instead of the symptom of economic sophistry that the Soviet collapse once and for all proved it to be.
Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.
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Other Independent Review articles by Paul Craig Roberts
Winter 2020/21 What Is Supply-Side Economics? Four Decades Later Wikipedia and Academic Economists Still Don’t Know
Fall 2009 Letter to the Editor
Spring 2004 My Time with Karl Marx
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